ACE OF WANDS "You remember King Arthur's sword?" "Excalibur." I say excitedly. "Yes. This is our Excalibur." My father dropped the bat on the ground with a loud PLUNK, enough to make my willowy nine year old self to jump back. My dad looked at me and gave his strange, single, smileless laugh. Huh. "Instead of a stone, you keep it by the door. If I'm not here, you're the man of the house, and this is what you use if someone is trying to get in and take something." "The true Excalibur wasn't the one from the stone, dad. Arthur couldn't get the true Excalibur until he became a man and the Lady of the Lake --" "Shut it." ---- I'm sixteen, making eyes at the girl across the table from me instead of reading [i]Fences[/i]. I was one of three white students in the school, and after Precious and 47, Black Lit was getting kind of repetitive. The only fun the teacher lets me get away with is that when it's my turn to speak, I can recite the lines in a voice not too unlike Chef from South Park. There weren't many things I liked at that age, so mindless fun was more-or-less the thing tethering me to normalcy, keeping me from dropping out for as long as I did. Mr. Ameen calls my name, and I'm plucked from Planet Eyefucking and back onto Earth, where I am in Remedial English reading fucking Fences. It takes me a few seconds to find the lines. "You're gonna have to use it. You wanna draw that bat back on me . . . You're gonna have to use it." Before the other reader can continue, the bell rings, and the chaos of dismissal starts anew. At the time, I hadn't thought much of it. I hopped back in my spacecraft, and set course once more for Planet Eyefucking. I never learned how the play ended, because I skipped the remaining classes that marking period to have sex. Which is a shame, because Fences isn't half bad. ---- I am nineteen. My father comes clean about a long affair two days before Christmas Eve, and my mother throws him out of the house without stabbing him again. A month later, my parents are in the ugliest part of their divorce. After running from notaries and living at three different addresses, my father returns home for his things and his handed notarized papers by his only son. I return upstairs while my parents begin to argue for one of the last times to begin bringing trash bags of my father's books down to the vestibule to keep him at the entrance of the house. They are heavy, unread tomes. I have to step lightly to avoid the corners of the books tearing the bag's black skin open. By the time I can get downstairs, their argument has turned into shouting, mostly on my mother's side. My mother is insulted by some remark he made, and wants him to wait in his car. He refuses, stating it is his house too. My mother retorts that he hadn't put a dime on its payment. This continues back and forth, as it had countless times by then, and I return upstairs to bring more books down silently. My parents never got along very well, infatuation or not, and these arguments were not a rare thing. I return downstairs with the second bag, and my father is beginning to raise his voice. I step towards the door and look outside at his car. He never held a job as long as I had known him, and now he had an SUV. I idly wondered if it was his mistress's. I look back, and the argument has escalated further in those few seconds. My mother's face is red. She tells him, in uncertain terms, that he has to get out of her house or she will call the police. He tells her it would take too long for them to get here to stop him. Without a thought process, without deciding on an action or questioning it in my head, I feel myself lift the bat and charge towards him. As per usual, I didn't have any good lines, nothing to write down in any actual books. I shouted for him to get out as loud as I could. He dropped the books he had been holding, and pressed himself back into the wall, the way you can see all of a person's chins begin to fold. His eyes were bigger than I had ever seen them. All those things happened in a split second, but the silence afterwards felt like an eternity. The hands that had been holding books were now raised slightly. Eyes that had once looked down on me with a fatherly glint were now bloodshot and wide with fear. I was the man of the house now, and he was in my house. My father waited in his car, and I brought his bags outside while my mom cried upstairs. On the last bag, my father came out of the car and waited on the doorstep with a sorry look in his eyes. He looked like he had something important to say, some apology that would make up for years in and out of jail, for the past month of torment, and for inciting that kind of anger in me. Outside, looking in from the January snow, I almost felt bad for him. I opened the door and handed him his final bag, and waited for what he had to say. That silence was quicker. "You know, son, it wasn't right --" No. Just another lecture. He had robbed me of a decent childhood, and now he was trying to rob me of my moment of freedom. "Don't you ever darken my fucking doorstep again." I closed the door, locked it, and took a few steps back before turning around. He suddenly looked less pitiful. I turned off the light, and he vanished into the rest of the night. Oh well. At least I managed to think of a good one-liner that time.