The Sky is Yours

by Chandler Klang Smith

The essential talent there is not intelligence, in which I outpaced him handily from my first burblings, but the ability to ask the right questions of the world. While Humphrey made the mechanistic inquiries best suited to a future grease monkey of industry—How does this work? How may it someday work for me?—I posed to our father the philosopher’s riddle, why: What’s all the fuss? Why even bother? A reasonable concern, I felt, since we already had a greater fortune than we knew what to do with.

A glittering future makes the present even shittier by comparison.

This is a story of inheritance—of what parents leave to their children, the curses and the gifts.

“Ah. So your father can either be flawed or departed, but not both?”

Is this where he’s supposed to be? Or the one place on Earth he should most avoid? All signs point to “maybe.”

I can’t live without you, she told him once—not so romantic, if you think about it. Desire without alternatives isn’t passion, it’s weakness. But Sharkey makes his living off the weakness of others.