My Father's Voice

On a dry summer day like this, my three young daughters all gone to their three separate homes with their three separate mothers, the silence would be unbearable in this hollow shell of a house if not for the quart of troubled water brought to a rolling boil, awaiting Ramen noodles, ever hopeful it might spill over and agitate the burner. It is easy to imagine, on such a day, my father’s voice the afternoon he left without a single word of reason, goodbye, or half-meant encouragement, while I watch a tumble-weed stumble across a Texas plain, swept by June’s indifferent wind. 12/2/2018