When you're a kid all you know is that your dad puts on his suit or overalls and vanishes from your life until nightfall. Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he'd been engaged in a low wattage war someplace.

Craig Davidson
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Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he'd been engaged in a low wattage war someplace. My dad has been a very hard working man all his life. He was a hard worker who had a very hard life. I used to watch him through the window as he worked from sunrise to sunset. One day I asked him why he worked so hard and always seemed so tired.

He said that all day long the devils were fighting him, but he didn't dare give up or stop working. The devil was a big, evil man with a red face that looked like a boiled beet and a yellow, pointy beard like an old man's. The red devil would try to grab him by the throat and force him to stop working, but my dad would fight for his work and then run into the swamp to hide in the bushes. When he came back after hiding in the swamp, the devil was gone. I watched my dad through the window throughout his life.

I saw him grow older and weaker until one day I saw him without his overalls. He was sitting in an armchair in front of me, looking like an old man with gray hair and gray skin like dried mud. "You should go sleep," I said to my dad coldly. "It's time for you to rest." "Why don't you come with me?" he asked me suddenly.

"Come with me to my workshop where we'll both go sleep together." "What kind of workshop?" I asked suspiciously. "Is it dangerous?" He laughed at me suddenly, showing rotten teeth inside his gray beard, his voice almost disappearing in the mud of his face so that I could scarcely hear it over the sound of raindrops pattering on the roof outside our house's window. "No," he said. "There's nothing dangerous about it." After that day I never went into that workshop again while my parents were still alive, even though I could smell smoke coming from below it often while I was sleeping at night near our house.

My father didn't die until many years after they died, but when he did he told me that it had rained while they were asleep in their beds upstairs in their workshop under the eaves of our house, but they never woke up because they slept too soundly because of all their work earlier in their lives which had sapped their strength away from them during sleeptime which was

Source: Cataract City

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  1. I figured a woman can't be understood the way a man can. Women have purposes men can't even imagine.
  2. When you're a kid all you know is that your dad puts on his suit or overalls and vanishes from your life until nightfall. Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he'd been engaged in a low wattage war someplace.
  3. So you're lost, uh? Happens a lot out here. You walk around for days, seeing things, losing your bearings, crying out for God, But He can't hear you. You can scream and scream but nobody'll ever hear you.
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