I.

I can’t remember when my mother stopped loving my father, but I do remember when she kicked him out and he moved into the house across the street. It was a two story Victorian – arches in all the doors front and back, symmetrically sound with both windows keeping watch over a precise garden with hedges to line the trim front wall. The first day I remember sitting on all the furniture my mother hadn’t torn up as the movers took them from the lawn of her house through the symmetry of his house.

Now the reason she kicked him is a different story entirely, but I do remember the inciting incident. My father became fed up from my mother’s affection for cigarillos. So he took every carton of the vile things, piled them into to our front yard and lit a bonfire. He began dancing around it in effigy, pouring lighter fluid that he’d found in the unused BBQ pit in the backyard. Of course, my mother, screaming about how insane he was, tried to douse the thing with the water hose only to find that my father had cut it up. Clever really, but it earned his sentence and he moved into the house across the street the next day. Smoke still crept out of a heap in the yard as the movers took his belongings across the street.

Now my father isn’t crazy. Let’s get this clear right off the bat. Despite Mother’s contestations to the contrary, Father is quite within the limits of his sanity. The same goes for Mother, who is crazy by default, as Father says, but I think they are the product of their strange and twisted love for each other. Of course, their common ground is me, but they hardly ever use me as a battlefield, in fact, in public they are quite doting and they dress quite well.