FACING ANOTHER DAY
These days when you wake up old and alone and don’t want to face another day you pull the covers over your head, just like when you were a kid and woke up to the voice of your mother telling you to get out of bed and go to school because she had to go to work. There was no father in the house. And you’d pull the covers over your head, it was cozy under there as rain thundered on the roof and gully winds roared down from the hills and shook the window panes.
Riding your bike to school down Steeple Road was a breeze, freewheeling most of the way, freedom that ended in the classroom when you didn’t know the answer to an impossible algebra problem the teacher had written on the blackboard. Who the fuck’d know that, you muttered under your breath but not under enough because the teacher heard it and ordered you to the front of the classroom to be over-bending and receive six sharp slashes on the behind with a birch rod, the only thought preventing tears of pain from filling your eyes was the resolve to one day when the opportunity arose to barricade this son of a bitch in the classroom and set fire to it.
Riding back home up Steeple Road was a hard breathing ordeal on a bike before gears, relieved only by a stop at the Comix Shop halfway up and laying down seventy-five cents for the latest Phantom, Dick Tracy, Dan Dare and Mandrake the Magician.
An assorted collection to be read in lieu of homework which is why to this day you still couldn’t solve that algebra problem.
You had a bedroom full of comics. Some you still have, now you’re old and still pulling the covers over your head.
Header photo effect by Outosego