sKINNED kNEES*

These are the days in between, those not quite there days, thought the man in the hat, the wreckage for the future. When he was a boy he would shave sticks into knives, rubbed smooth with tack-paper and sand. His father denied him toys and little things, so the man in the hat made his own, fashioned out of wood and paper, nails and brads, whatever was at hand and within reach. He smoked twigs and braids of grass, anything that could be lit and kept so. He hid behind the garden and smoked until the tuck of his lungs ached and his face turned red, thinking of ways to escape the past, forget the present and dream up the future. He remembered skinning his knees or bumping his head, casualties that only little boys remember, and his father’s vacant stare, lost in his own sadness and despair. When he grew taller than the pencil marks on the doorframe, the man in the hat left home, leaving behind his father’s vacant stare, rubbed sticks, and memories of skinned knees and bumped heads, a childhood spend hiding behind the garden shed, the days in between, the not quite there days.