It makes you wonder if it's real. If such hours are truly existent, such gestures unfeigned. It seems unfair that such beauty can exist, that fortune could really be so nurturing. It makes you want to destroy ugliness, to ravage the rancid ones beyond the screen door. It's hard even to step off the porch, when you know the sun's brighter inside, and the snow a lighter pallid.
Innocence is only novel in retrospect, and it's naive to assume the world knows this. Or that she has cognizance of my wonder. I'm no innocent son. Ask my dog, ask the one's back east, inquire my dad and take in his revealing sighs. I wish it wasn't so hard to love a man that can't make right; that she wasn't such an unctuous sycophant; that she wasn't so pleasant at dawn. It gives me sickness, dissuades my hunger.
But people mean well and goodness does exist: the requisite condition for this is believing it. If mother's can still render altruistic affection after my atrocities, then children deserve Handi Snacks and Kool-Aid from used syrup bottles. It's ok for the mutt to swallow wholly the fat of the steak. But she'll never know how regal and succulent a finely seared piece can be. And the other she will never understand my doubts, as I'll never have a true conviction.
So I just keep writing and hoping, hoping she won't smarten up too soon, or worse, deny she's sensed it. The point in hiding out is to wait to be found; in eating, to pass what was just put in; in being kind so you're not remembered as unpleasant. You grin and roll down the frozen food aisle so you seem as kind as they assume themselves, and Jesus, and the Pope, and a cop, and the rabbit.

Run Rabbit Run, cause my den's a caving in.

Rice Ferguson