The Family Fang

by Kevin Wilson

If it got worse, the tips of her fingers turning black, she’d simply add more tape. She would cover her entire body in tape, like a cocoon, and when things had calmed down, she would emerge, something new and capable and better than what had preceded it.

She loved the answering machine as if it were a living thing, the way it protected her from the bad decisions she was entirely capable of making.

When they talked after that, everything seemed filtered by the understanding that one of them had made it across the ocean, her feet solidly placed on an undiscovered country, while the other had been lost at sea.

Though it was only talk, nothing yet having been accomplished, she felt better, stronger, faster. And she was not drunk.

“They didn’t mean to,” he replied. “But they did,” she said.

He was not sure, if asked, how he would place himself in the painting. Was he the boy? The tiger? One of the children who watched the struggle unfold? Sometimes he imagined that he was the barbed wire, an instrument used to cut open whatever resisted its touch. Other times, he imagined that he was already inside the tiger’s belly and the boy was fighting to retrieve him. His mother

She had no idea what came next, and she had no illusions that she would ever reach it.

least this way, I’m part of it. They have some affection for me. If not, I’m just this guy in their house.” “That’s not how people are supposed to feel about their children.”

“You two left us to pursue inferior forms of art. You disappointed us. You nearly ruined what we’d made. So we moved on without you. And now, we’ve made something better than anything we’ve done before, and you two are not a part of it.”

“We are a part of it,” Buster said. “We’re your son and daughter.” “That doesn’t mean anything,” Caleb said.

to cause chaos no matter whom it hurt.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” she asked him. “Whatever it is,” he answered, “I think you’ll be terrified when it happens. Don’t let that stop you.”