and the shadows took him
A Novel
From Part One
Their father never took them to restaurants, because he thought it a waste of money when they could open up a can of beans, sprinkle on Tabasco sauce, stuff their bellies, and it would all shit out the same way anyway. When the kids cried and whined to go to McDonald's for cheeseburgers, he stood over them and growled like a bear that they only wanted to go there because it was so expensive. They wanted life to be like The Brady Bunch, but they were poor Mexicans, not rich movie stars, and they better eat whatever the hell he put on the table, whatever it was, even if it was food they hated.
Like steak.
For them, steak was a cheap strip of meat that their mom fried in lard until it was hard and charred and tasted like burnt wood.
And if the kids didn't want to eat the meat -- if they pushed it around their plate with a rolled-up tortilla, as if that strip of steak were the very thing in life that they found distasteful -- they saw the shadow of their father's hand rise up the white wall of the kitchen. "Don't make me do it," he'd say. On his fist's fingers, his hittin ... read full excerpt from: and the shadows took him: A Novel ebook
