Roborant.

This year I'm spending Father's Day with the grown-up versions of those kids who used to throw rocks at me on the playground and tell me to go back to China. Never mind that not a single member of my family has ever even been to China, but there's just no reasoning with people like that. Although it is my thirty-first Father's Day this will be only the second I've ever acknowledged, fathers of my acquaintance being of the kind not generally celebrated. Rotters, the lot of them. But when the past offers no solace one must look to the future, as depressing as it looms from my vantage: sludge-covered, impossibly warm. I've met a lot of babies in 2010 thus far, each with a father of whom I am especially fond, so at least there's that. A silver lining, my silver ballet flats, the children are our future and all that.

When I was a kid our neighbor around the corner had an iguana that used to eat the hibiscus flowers that were so ubiquitous in my small town. My best friend used to live on Azalea Lane but I never once saw an azalea until I moved to New Orleans. Year after year my mother planted roses in our front yard that never seemed to thrive. The scent of jasmine and gardenia mingled in the heavy air as the smell of rotting seaweed wafted ashore.

These are the things that worry me in the night.