Dragonball Z Episode 5 Review: "Gohan's Rage"

Dragonball Z Episode 5 Review: “Gohan’s Rage”

  How many other episodes of this show could have been titled “Gohan’s Rage?” First one that comes to mind is, of course, the episode where Gohan finally goes SS2 against Cell (and yeah, I know, most people do SSJ2, but fuck that, this is the dub, there’s no “Saiyajin”). There’s also “Gohan Returns,” the 100^th episode of the series, where Gohan goes back to check in his father during his final battle with Frieza. Maybe the episode not long after where Gohan fights with Vegeta on Earth during the last moments of Goku/Frieza, but that’s just a filler sparring match.

But don’t get me wrong; this episode deserves the title.

  I didn’t rate this episode 5 out of 5 for nothing, because though most people don’t really care about it, this is among the most consequential episodes in the entire show. Think about all of the major events in this thing: Gohan’s hidden powers are shown in battle for the first time, Raditz is killed, Goku—our unstoppable, infallible hero—gives his life to help kill his own homicidal brother, Piccolo is their killer, Vegeta and Nappa are introduced to us for the first time, and—of course—Goku is first taken to train in the Other World, something he will do time and time again as circumstances require, or at least allow him to.

  It’s almost, dare I say, Shakespearian how these events in the episode play out. Save for Piccolo, this is an intra-family battle. Goku, Raditz, Gohan, these are all blood-related characters! And Piccolo is Goku’s greatest enemy. The levels of layered irony in play here are staggering—Gohan is about to be killed by Raditz (“You are the first Saiyan to ever damage me like this, my nephew. I will give you a death that is worthy of a Saiyan.”) after the former severely damages the latter with a single headbutt to the solar plexus to save his father, but said father manages to grab Raditz from behind in a full Nelson, giving Piccolo—the arch-nemesis of Goku who has sworn to kill him since his own birth—the opportunity to kill them both in one attack, the one meant for Goku since its inception. And all of this to save the Earth, to save Gohan, the two things that Piccolo would just as soon kill as ever save. But how else could he defeat Raditz, the brother of his worst enemy?

  And think about this: when King Piccolo was dealt his death blow by Goku—who, might I add, burst through his stomach to kill him, similarly to Gohan’s rage headbutt and Piccolo’s Special Beam Cannon against Raditz—he spit out the egg that would become Piccolo Jr., the one sworn to avenge his father and take over the Earth once again. So Piccolo saves the Earth by killing his enemy (“how noble for you, and how convenient for me”), who he recognizes will, and must, come back to help battle the other Saiyans when they arrive one year later. He kills Goku, which had always been his life’s mission, to make him stronger when he returns, which is the last thing in the world he should want, because Goku killed his father. Furthermore, Piccolo himself becomes something of a surrogate father for Gohan during the year between the Raditz arc and the rest of the Saiyan arc, and Gohan’s the son of his enemy!

  THAT is how much the Saiyan arc upended everything that had been set into place at the end of Dragonball. Everything is now topsy-turvy, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. I never thought about how genius these circumstances were until I started writing these essays, but holy shit, this first arc is brilliant in terms of how it completely redefines the circumstances of Goku’s and Piccolo’s relation to each other. From the King Piccolo arc to the end of the Raditz arc—or maybe the end of the Saiyan arc as a whole—you could legitimately write out a strong five-act play.

  But this ain’t Shakespeare, this is DBZ. And we know the main difference is that no one stays dead in this damn show, so even before Goku’s body is taken to the Other World, Piccolo, with a knowing smirk, acknowledges he’ll be revived with the dragon balls, and he wants this to happen. I wonder, is this the moment where he switched sides? Yeah, he’s still talking about taking over the world after he takes Gohan to train for a year, but that could just be his own denial of his changed feelings. There’s a filler flashback towards the end of the Frieza saga where Piccolo says something like, “How could I hate someone who would make such an honorable sacrifice?” It’s likely that Piccolo was still leaning evil after Goku and Raditz were killed. But I also think, at the very least, Piccolo came to deeply respect Goku as more than just a warrior, but as a person, when he staked him and his brother through the gut that day on the battlefield. Goku didn’t even hesitate, he knew what needed to be done, he would have done it dragon balls or not, and in that moment of deep self-sacrifice he helped recalibrate Piccolo’s entire moral compass. It’s a beautiful moment.

  But of course, we haven’t even covered the next major looming conflict. Piccolo blabs that Goku will be revived with the dragon balls, trying to mock Raditz in his last seconds of life, and Raditz gets in one last blow—the transmitter in his scouter relayed that message one year across space to Vegeta and Nappa, who are now on the warpath, but not for Raditz, the disgrace who couldn’t even hold his own against his little brother. No, they’re after the dragon balls. Interestingly, we see that Nappa is willing to use them to wish Raditz back, in fact, he assumes that’s what they’re going to do with them. But Vegeta ain’t having it, he’s got no use for Raditz. No, what he needs is immortality, so he and Nappa can become Super Saiyans (first mention of this in the entire show!) and, though this isn’t directly stated yet, shake off Frieza’s chains of tyranny that had been holding them captive since the destruction of Planet Vegeta and almost the entire Saiyan race.

  So, this is the last time we ever see Raditz, except for at least one flashback I can remember much later in the series. What little we know about him was that he was the weakest of the trio of evil Saiyans, he didn’t really have the respect of the other two (they don’t seem surprised at ALL that he died), he had a piss-poor sense of honor (begged for his life, wanted to murder his own brother and nephew, was totally shocked that Goku would be willing to sacrifice his own life to end his), and ultimately existed more as a catalyst for the rest of the Saiyan/Namek/Frieza sagas than as a character of any considerable emotional import. Hell, Nappa’s more sympathetic than Raditz, and that’s the guy who single-handedly chews through most of the Z-team by himself. So it’s no surprise that Raditz is such a forgettable villain, despite being hugely important.

  Still, these first five episodes were a damn fine start, and in a way, I wish the rest of the series had the sense of pacing these episodes have. Sure, they could be pared down to about three, if you remove most of the first episode and a good chunk of the second, as well as some unnecessary Chi-Chi scenes through all of them, but they watch very well. I didn’t expect this to be one of the finest episodes of the series when I sat down to watch it, but damned if it wasn’t.

5/5

Stray Observations:

--And so begins the brief, storied life of redhead Vegeta. Only thing that’s missing is an Irish accent, and I wouldn’t have been remotely surprised if the Ocean dub or initial Funi dub had given him one.

--Gotta love the spirals they draw for Gohan’s eyes when Raditz backhands him. In the middle of this gravely serious confrontation, they still add that Looney Tunes-style flourish.

--Raditz doesn’t do the dying speech as good as Vegeta does much later on Namek, but hey, Vegeta’s got much better material to work with.

--I didn’t even mention Roshi, Krillin, and Bulma in the review. They showed up after the fighting was over, and didn’t do much outside of mourning Goku’s death.

--Oh, and Ox-King shows up too, in a scene with Chi-Chi. Meh.

--Gohan’s power level as he prepares to attack Raditz: 1,370. Raditz, having a max power of 12-1500, had every right to be shitting his underoos a little.

--And finally, the Raditz line that can be used during any DBZ saga at some points: “I should have killed you!”

Dragonball Z Episode 4 Review: "Piccolo's Plan"

  We talked in the review of last episode about Piccolo’s intelligence, and we get to see a little more of it here. Piccolo knows, by around the mid-point of the episode when Raditz has blown off one of his arms (Raditz: “Oh, has anyone seen my arm?! You can’t miss it; it’s green!”), that he and Goku aren’t getting anywhere in their fight with Raditz. The guy is just too damn squirrely and instinctively a warrior, not to mention he’s way out of their league power-wise. So Piccolo concocts a strategy that involves an attack he was saving up for Goku. The problem with said attack is that it takes five minutes (thankfully, not in Frieza time) to charge up, so while he does so, Goku’s gonna have to last on his own.

  It may sound like Piccolo’s kind of throwing Goku to the proverbial wolf with that plan, but keep in mind what a tough motherfucker he really is: Raditz took out one of his arms with an energy beam, and he doesn’t take even a second to holler out in pain like just about anyone else in the show might do. Instead, he puts his mind to work, knowing that he’s not much use in the fight with only one arm. Hell, even with two arms, he wasn’t putting in a dent. All Goku, the nigh-invincible warrior, has to do is last for five minutes, and considering he’s taken some pretty severe lickings in his long history of fighting, it’s not too much of a stretch for him to make that work.

  And for a little while, he does. Sure, he doesn’t deal out any damage, but he keeps his brother on the defensive, demonstrating that he can concentrate his power into a single location, namely his hands, to shoot an energy beam. The problem of course, is that Raditz can do that too, and after nearly effortlessly blocking Goku’s beam, he retaliates with one of his own, just like Mercenary Tao did all those years ago. ‘Cept, at least Goku managed to shred some of Tao’s clothing. It’s not often that someone in DBZ scores a direct hit with a beam that sends their opponent plummeting out of the air, so it’s satisfying how successful Raditz’s move turns out to be.

  They do a good job in general here of making Raditz seem like a legitimate threat, as opposed to the punchline people generally see him as in the broader context of the show. I mean, sure, his power level of ~1,200 is easy to scoff at by the time Frieza gets introduced, but nobody on Earth had ever seen a power like Raditz’s up to that point in the show. Even the terrifying King Piccolo, who struck fear into the heart of Master Roshi, is a pitiful excuse for a threat when measured against Raditz. The fact that Goku’s bro becomes so negligible so quickly is not so much a testament to Raditz’s failure as a villain, it’s more to the show’s failure to keep its power-scaling from going absolutely bonkers.

  Speaking of power levels, Piccolo’s rises to around 1,330 as he’s finishing charging up the Special Beam Cannon. Raditz does something DBZ villains rarely do by chiding himself for underestimating his opponents. But he’s also a Saiyan, so he can’t stop himself from goading Piccolo into firing his beam… which he then dodges at the expense of only one of his shoulder armor-blade things (I used to really love those back when I was a kid. I was sort of disappointed when Vegeta switched to the more minimalistic armor starting just before the fight with Frieza).

  Piccolo is stunned. This makes Raditz apparently faster than the speed of light. I don’t know if Piccolo is measuring the speed of light correctly, because lord knows our heroes don’t have much time or care for book smarts, but fuck it, Piccolo’s a smart fellow, I’ll just take his word for it. Raditz has a scorched shoulder, but otherwise he’s no worse for wear… and then dear, dear brother grabs him by the tail, exploiting the weakness used against him several times in the original DB.

  Now we get to see the recurring issue of Goku’s character through the first third or so of this show, and that is his unwavering empathy in the face of sociopathic villainy. Raditz has given him no respite up to this point, yet with just a little bit of pleading and lying, is able to get Goku to loosen his grip on his tail. What Raditz does here is disgraceful, and something that separates him from his boss Vegeta, who for all his faults would never beg his opponent for mercy. Not even when he was taking the worst beating of his life against Frieza, even when his pain and shame reduced him to tears, did he ever try to bargain. Vegeta would have probably killed Raditz on the spot for the way he begged Goku to spare him.

  But, this also reflects poorly on Goku’s judgment, when he allows it to work. Goku sparing people who have aligned themselves against him has resulted in new allies such as Tien, Piccolo, and eventually Vegeta, but has also caused him a lot of grief against less scrupulous opponents like General White, Mercenary Tao, and eventually Frieza. He has his own sort of honor, but it is much less bloodthirsty. He loves to fight, but not to torment or kill, and the next villains of this show do that on a scale even King Piccolo or the Red Ribbon Army couldn’t hope to match. He’s too damn soft, and that’s a sticking part of his character arc throughout these first 100 episodes.

  So who better to save Goku from his own brother, than his own son? Goku, predictably, is once again being beaten by Raditz immediately after letting him go, leaving a frustrated Piccolo to continue charging his second attack though he knows Raditz can just dodge it again. But his screams of agony as his ribs are crushed alert Gohan, whose own latent Saiyan instincts seem to overcome him. This is the first of many, many times we get to see Gohan take on a brief burst of power that stuns his opponent long enough for something else to intervene. Even as Chi-Chi beams proudly at Gohan’s 100 on his math test, he’s about to cripple his own uncle on the battlefield in the next episode. But the shot that caps off the episode is his explosion from Raditz’s space pod, a look of blank rage on his face.

(4/5)

Stray Observations:

--Speaking of Raditz’s space pod, how the hell was he supposed to take Goku with him if there’s only one pod to use? Maybe he has some kind of space Capsule Corp technology that allows him to carry a spare in his pocket—but then, does his armor have pockets? I think Vegeta’s does, but that’s Vegeta.

--I guess I didn’t remember Goku could fly from the very beginning of the series. He must’ve learned it somewhere at the end of Dragon Ball, so what the fuck is he doing flying around on Nimbus still? Conserving energy, one would assume.

--There’s a shot where Piccolo bleeds red. Mistake or was the green blood just censorship?

--“Why so blue, green man?!”

Dragonball Z Episode 3 Review: "Unlikely Alliance"

  And so starts Piccolo’s journey into becoming one of the good guys. It’s kind of like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the first two Terminator movies. He was a pretty good villain, but he made one hell of an entertaining hero when the second one came around. Likewise, Piccolo was a good final villain for Dragonball, but Z was where he was truly able to shine as a member of the Z Fighters. Even though Krillin doesn’t trust him, Roshi’s psyched as hell—the two most powerful fighters on Earth teaming up to take on this new threat makes it possible that the planet won’t be destroyed after all. It’s weird that Roshi’s the excited one, though, because he was scared as hell back in DB when the King Piccolo arc started.

  The alliance is, of course, borne purely of pragmatism. Goku and Piccolo both tried to go it alone against Raditz, and both didn’t even scratch him. All Raditz got out of both encounters was a few singed leg hairs and a nephew trapped in his space pod. So if they combined their powers, Piccolo reasons, they might have a slim chance. Goku doesn’t really trust Piccolo, but understands that this is the best chance he’s got to get back his son. It’s a classic trope of a villain teaming up with the heroes to face a greater evil that has come from seemingly nowhere, and this is one of the cases where the villain actually switches sides permanently. Piccolo’s insistence that he’s still going to try and take over the world is hollow and feels almost out of place when future events are taken into consideration.

  It’s damn lucky for the two of them that Gohan was wearing a hat with a dragon ball stitched on top when Raditz kidnapped him, and that the hat didn’t fly off during the flight back to the space pod. Goku takes the dragon radar and tracks them down with it, the idea having come from Bulma—ever the brains of the outfit. People don’t give Bulma enough credit sometimes; there are so many instances in this show where the characters would be totally fucked without her technology, in particular the dragon radar, which is the only reason any of them were ever able to pursue and acquire the seven magic balls. But, I digress.

  Piccolo is an intelligent bastard, something we’ll see time and time again throughout the series. When Goku brings up the idea of doing a sneak attack on Raditz—an understandable strategy, considering where direct attacks got them—Piccolo tells him it’s a no-go because of the device on Raditz’s face that allows him to sense power levels. The scouter is and has always been a barely-effective crutch for the villains of DBZ. Sure, they can tell you something strong is coming, but they have a piss-poor effectiveness rate when it comes to truly gauging the strength of an opponent. By the time Frieza confronts the Z Warriors face-to-face, the scouters have been proven ineffective and are discarded, with one brief exception, for the rest of the show. After all, most everyone—including many of the villains—can sense power levels without the help of a machine by then.

  Raditz is almost kinda cute with Gohan in this episode. I say “almost” and “kinda” because the larger subtext of “I will kill you if your father fucks up” never leaves their scenes together. Raditz chunks Gohan unceremoniously into his space pod, where he then finds out the crying, defenseless boy has a power level of… 710? The thought is so absurd to Raditz, he immediately faults the scouter itself, declaring it broken. After all, Raditz’s power level is generally measured as somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500, and he’s a powerful adult Saiyan. There’s just no way that…

  Uh-oh. Raditz picks up another large power level, this time far in the distant sky, and just as he’s about to write it off as another scouter malfunction, Goku and Piccolo land. The power level was both of theirs combined. Raditz looks back at his space pod in horror, unable to imagine that Gohan’s earlier power reading was accurate after all. It brings to mind the exchange between Goku and Captain Ginyu much later in the series, where Ginyu watches in absolute slack-jawed disbelief as Goku’s power level increases farther and farther, surpassing his own and entering the stratosphere.

  Goku and Piccolo gain small increases in power when they take off their weighted clothing, but Raditz is undaunted, claiming he’s still “ten times stronger” than the both of them, a claim that is hyperbolic (not like the time chamber) but steeped in some truth. By the end of their brief skirmish, as the narrator starts speaking, it’s clear to the audience that Raditz is still going to be a major, major struggle for Goku and Piccolo to overcome, out-speeding them both at the same time, smirk not leaving his face. Goku and Piccolo may have been big shit at the end of the last series, the two greatest powers on the planet Earth, but as is common in this show, something has come completely out of nowhere to prove that there are plateaus they haven’t even begun to imagine, let alone reach. It will take a combination of trickery and sheer luck for the two of them to overcome Raditz, and he’s just the first of a long fucking set of stairs.

  This is another one of those points where I have to wonder what people were thinking when this first aired. With Raditz being the brother of Goku and being introduced as such an important and powerful character, it would seem like he might turn out to have way more importance than he actually does. Arguably, Raditz’s main role in the show is just to be the catalyst for every future event leading up to the Frieza saga, as well as the guy who pretty much dumps all the information on Goku that he needs to truly understand who he is, where he comes from, and what he will eventually have to do on Namek.

(Rank: 3/5)

Stray Observations

--“Please, brother, show some… pride.” There’s something sad about the way Raditz delivers that line, as if he truly is disappointed, not just amused, that his brother turned out to be such a softie. It makes sense, considering there aren’t exactly a wealth of Saiyans left, and with no female Saiyans around, there will never be other pure-bloods again.

--So, the truck that Raditz is hanging out near is a Chevy, left behind by the farmer (God rest his soul). Did someone pay for that product placement? Shit if I know.

--Man, I cringe at the thought of what a disaster the Raditz fight might have been if Goku had brought along Krillin and Roshi instead of Piccolo. I guess Roshi could have pumped up and done his best Kamehameha if Raditz let him live long enough.

--Turns out the last meal of Raditz’s life is going to be a bear and some weird-looking piece of fruit, it looks like an apple straight out of Yellow Submarine or something.

--Is it mandatory or something that every episode cut to Chi-Chi cleaning around the house and commenting on how smart Gohan is? Did they pay the Japanese voice actress for episodes she wasn’t originally in and then just go, “fuck it, make her say some lines, let’s get some of our money’s worth”?

Dragonball Z Episode 2 Review: "Reunions"

  And here we go.

  Dragonball had its share of fights where Goku was clearly on the losing side. It didn’t happen very often, and when it did, Goku at least was able to put in some kind of an effort. Even when he was outmatched, he didn’t feel hopelessly outmatched. It was just a matter of getting some rest (Tambourine) or climbing a tower to retrieve the Sacred Water (Mercenary Tao) or looking for some actual magical water that would make his power level rise (King Piccolo). Goku was always strong enough to win fights and resourceful enough to come back stronger after losing them. It’s what made him the undisputed hero of the first series.

  So for Raditz to take him out of commission with one good knee to the gut is shocking, and it’s just one shock among many others this episode has to offer, provided you’re coming in blind from the original show. Raditz touches down on Roshi’s Island with, as Team Four Star put it, an “expositional onslaught:” Goku is a space alien, he was sent to earth to destroy it as a baby, he lost his memories when he hit his head as a child (Roshi was the one to supply this nugget of info), and Raditz is his brother from the very same alien species called the Saiyans, who now number only four in total after their planet was destroyed by a “comet.”

  The whole “brother” angle is never really explored in the show. Raditz could just as easily have been a random Saiyan and the events of the show wouldn’t have changed much. It just adds a little more drama to the whole situation, and it also serves to illustrate the sheer ruthlessness of Saiyans. Raditz, brother of Goku and uncle of Gohan, is willing to beat the former and kidnap the latter to get what he wants, which is the destruction of Earth and the forced loyalty of “Kakarot.” Raditz manages to come across as simultaneously alien and yet similar to Goku, in both his looks and his thirst for battle.

  Let’s back up a bit. In this episode we are (re-)introduced to Krillin, Roshi, and Bulma, and we get to see what they’ve been up to these last five years. Roshi is still his pervy self, Krillin’s still dweeby as hell, and Bulma’s still struggling with her on-again, off-again thing with Yamcha. Not much else to talk about there. Krillin is the one who will be put through a wall by Raditz’s tail (yet another shocker—it’s just like Goku used to have!) later in the episode, and that’s a decent snapshot of his character: willing to try and stand up to the towering monsters this show has to offer, but likely to wind up with his head through a wall (or airplane, or mountain…). Krillin tried his damndest to keep up the pace with Goku during DB and was never able to, like many of the other characters in this show and the last.

  So, of course, the trio (and Roshi’s turtle, can’t forget him) get introduced to Gohan, they’re amazed that Goku has a son, they see he also has a tail, big freak out about that too, yada yada. They’re caught up soon enough, at least before Raditz makes his appearance. Gohan’s hat, complete with four-star dragon ball, is noted. Goku tells the gang he’s been collecting the dragon balls for shits and giggles as he and Krillin toss stones across the ocean. Roshi sees that Goku’s powers have not diminished in the five-year peace period he’s enjoyed with Chi-Chi and his newborn son (who Chi-Chi won’t even allow to train). Good for him his powers haven’t decreased, because he senses the terrible power of Raditz a moment before he touches down.

  Through all of the new information Raditz has to offer Goku, all the latter wants is to be left alone, to continue living in peace on the world he saved multiple times. One wonders if this isn’t something Goku was thinking of when he made the decision not to return to Earth at the end of the Cell saga. Raditz decides Goku needs a little more persuasion, and Gohan—helplessly nested in the equally helpless Bulma’s arms—is just perfect for the job. Goku charges Raditz, and this is probably the point a lot of fans of the original series thought, “here we go—Goku’s gonna show Raditz how much he underestimated him, just like legions of villains did before him.” But the fight is over in seconds; Raditz is like nothing else Goku has ever faced before, the smirk doesn’t even leave his face as he cripples Goku with a single strike to the gut.

  So there’s the hook, and boy is it a fucking urgent one, for an episode that was so slow up to this point. Almost every other time Goku’s been defeated, his opponent assumed he was finished for good, which is why he was able to come back stronger than before. But Goku’s on a timetable now. Raditz has given him one day to kill 100 humans and stack them like cordwood right on Roshi’s island, or he will… “dispatch” his own nephew. The planet’s going to be conquered (like Goku was supposed to do) one way or another, so Goku can either join or die, and from everything we’ve seen so far, that’s not a bluff in the least. Humans are but roaches to Raditz, and his own brother an afterthought.

  Yes, one of the many things Raditz reveals to “Kakarot:” he hadn’t even thought about Goku until he, Nappa, and Vegeta found themselves a planet that turned out to be a four-person job. Raditz is a warrior, but also a “planet-broker,” and so are his allies. They go from planet to planet, killing the inhabitants and selling the emptied worlds to the highest bidders. Roshi points out (or maybe it was Krillin, I forget) that if what he says is true, that makes him a pirate, and Raditz easily shrugs that off. I’m sure people who were in the same exact situation as the poor farmer was last episode have called him way, way worse before he killed them.

  (3/5)

  Stray Observations:

--One of my notes as I was watching the episode: “Krillin and Roshi are useless pieces of shit.” I stand by that. Roshi does nothing whatsoever, and Krillin tries to shoo Raditz away like the bug, despite it being established that Raditz’s power is way high at this point in the series. Dumb bald fucker pretty much deserved being put through Roshi’s house.

--I don’t know why Raditz is so surprised Goku didn’t get the job done. Sending babies to foreign planets, even Saiyan babies, seems like a good way to get them killed by the local wildlife, or have their “programming” undone. Seems like it would happen pretty often. Meh, whatever.

--Gohan totally wants to be an orthopedist when he grows up. That’s totally not just Chi-Chi talking. Then again, I wanted to be a stand-up comedian, a game show host, a lawyer or a judge when I was little.

--Raditz is voiced by the same guy who does Super Buu, which just throws me for a loop every time. Like, why isn’t Raditz turning people into chocolate right now?

--“Why did I think he could ever change?!” –Bulma, referring to Yamcha. Maybe if Yamcha was a little more, erm, space alien and homicidal, you’d be into him?

--“Breaking up is hard to do.” –Roshi. “I wouldn’t know.” –Krillin. Oh, give it time, man. Give it time.

Dragonball Z Episode 1 Review: "The New Threat"

  The first shot of Dragonball Z is of a large mountain. Pretty apt, I’d say. I wonder how many episodes before somebody gets thrown through it, or a stray energy beam strikes it?

  The narrator explains that it has been five years since King Piccolo’s very brief reign as, well, King. The world has recovered since that time, the healing process has begun, but now, the narrator intones, a new evil is about to arrive, bringing the short time of peace crashing to a halt. I can’t remember everything about the King Piccolo arc in the original Dragonball, but I would imagine having the world’s ruler replaced briefly by some horrible green monster man who, one day out of the year, would destroy a random city seems like a pretty damn history-changing event. And now, here comes (more) aliens. The human race never, ever catches a break in Dragonball Z.

  As the first villain of the series, Raditz—joke he may become not too long afterwards—has the job of setting a tone for the entire Saiyan arc, and by extension everything that follows. The farmer (carrying a “pea shooter”) is his first confrontation, and he treats it as an amusing, cute little distraction, barely even regarding him as he voices his frustration that the Earth is still populated. He uses the device we will soon become familiar with as the scouter to gauge the human’s power level: 5. Smirking, he makes a step toward the farmer, who—already terrified at having seen this large, armor-clad man float out of a spaceship—fires a shot. Raditz catches the bullet with his bare hand and flicks it right back at the farmer, probably at a faster speed than the gun ejected it. And that gives us our first on-screen death in this series.

  The casual, dismissive arrogance with which Raditz disposes of the poor farmer brings to mind most of the villains later in the series. If there’s anything that ties the antagonists of Z together, it’s cockiness. They all have a really bad habit of believing they’re invincible, and when they can dispatch terrified humans with the flick of a wrist it’s no wonder. Overwhelming power, and the use of it to get what one wants, is the common thread here. The characters of this show are not simply humans trying to outwit other humans with cunning or with some other indirect means; everything in DBZ is ultimately settled with sheer force, the clashing of titanic powers in increasingly desperate struggles for dominance. Or, to put it in less pretentious terms, a bunch of motherfuckers hitting each other with fists and lasers.

  This episode has two parallel plots happening. There’s the stuff with Raditz—we will get to his scene with Piccolo later—and there’s the introduction of Gohan, and to an extent, Goku and Chi-Chi. Goku’s first ever action of the series is to pick up an entire tree and bring it home for firewood, as his wife asks him sarcastically if he thinks it’s enough. Chi-Chi has a pretty well-deserved reputation for being a one-note character in this show; she’s fretful over Gohan’s studies, and that’s mostly it. So it’s neat to see she has some sense of humor. Goku, meanwhile, is extremely easygoing. I suppose if one can rip trees out of the ground, they don’t have much else to worry about, but Goku actually does have a worry this episode: Gohan’s near-death experiences.

  Gohan, the child of Goku and Chi-Chi and an entirely new character to Z, wanders around the wilderness tearfully, whining for “Daddy.” It’s a pretty ironic thing to see, considering the ordeal he’s put through starting a few episodes from now. He winds up crossing paths with a saber-toothed cat, and loses his hat to it. In our first hint that Gohan is abnormal, he chases the cat (who seems pretty frightened of this kid chasing him through the forest, since he should be able to fuck him up proper) and falls off a cliff, grabbing a branch with his tail while crying in terror. So, veterans of this show or the one preceding it will recognize the tail right away, it’s the same sort that Goku had as a kid, the one which allowed him to transform into a giant ape at the full moon.

  Honestly, I had forgotten how slow this first episode was. Dragonball Z is notorious for its filler, but I always remembered the first few episodes of the show as being faster than this. Raditz’s confrontation with Goku doesn’t even happen this episode, and all of the Goku and Gohan stuff is just the former trying to save his son as he careens toward a waterfall, floating on a log. We get to see Goku flying around on Nimbus for the first time this series, which makes me wonder when we’re going to get to see Goku flying around on his own for the first time. I’ll point it out on the first episode it happens in, of course.

  Anyway, there’s nothing really noteworthy about Goku and Gohan’s brief adventure in the woods. It’s just a way to establish their pretty simple characters. Near the end of the episode we meet Piccolo for the first time, and this is where it probably got pretty confusing for people who started this show without seeing DB first. Piccolo is clearly not of this world, and he’s able to sense Raditz coming before he actually arrives. I don’t remember if Piccolo was already capable of sensing energy and I’m too lazy to look it up. This is our first instance of a character freaking out about someone’s huge power level, an occurrence so common in this series one could make a drinking game of it.

  Raditz and Piccolo share some “pleasantries” in the form of veiled threats and questions, then Piccolo fires a huge energy wave at Raditz. In the first of many, many times through DBZ, a character who has just been directly hit with an energy wave emerges from the smoke totally unscathed and smirking. “You actually managed to singe some of my leg hairs,” Raditz says to Piccolo before he starts to prepare his own attack. In the Ocean dub, which I’ll refer to occasionally as we make our way through these first 60~ episodes, he calls the attack “keep your eye on the birdie,” whereas in the Funimation dub, it’s a “Double Sunday.” As stupid as the former is, I prefer it to the nonsensical latter. There’s a sinister sort of innocence to “keep your eye on the birdie” which contrasts to its purpose. The attack probably would have killed Piccolo, or at least severely wounded him, had Raditz not sensed another, even greater power somewhere else on the planet.

  I suppose it’s that foolish pride that caused Raditz to make the fatal mistake of not killing Piccolo when he had the chance. He could easily have finished him off in a minute and still gone off to look for “Kakarot” immediately after, but he must’ve figured he’d get around to it after recruiting Kakarot. Speaking of “Kakarot,” it becomes obvious to us as viewers by the end of the episode—if it wasn’t already—that the “Kakarot” Raditz is looking for is actually Goku, as a couple of flashback pictures show us a baby Goku, tail and all, being loaded up into a similar capsule that Raditz himself arrived in.

  Anyone who watched (or perhaps read) all of DB wondering just where the hell a guy like Goku came from gets their answer here, and I can’t help but wonder what the contemporary reaction to that revelation was. How many people were disappointed that Goku turned out to be a space alien the entire time, and how many of them already had a suspicion? For a goofy show like DB was to lend itself so suddenly to the realm of science-fiction must’ve been jarring, but I think this episode handles it pretty well, in that it introduces a new, frighteningly strong (for the time) villain, gives him a strong motivation involving the lead character, and showcases the contempt for innocent life that all other main DBZ villains after him would also have. “This guy could be a problem,” Piccolo says after Raditz spares his life by leaving, and I feel like that could easily work as a subtitle for this whole series.

  (2/5)

  Other Observations:

--Gohan chases a butterfly around in this episode, calling it “Mr. Butterfly.” First off, how rude of him to assume the butterfly’s gender, and second, is that like a foreshadowing for “Mr. Piccolo?”

--Speaking of Gohan, is anyone else struck by how smart he seems in this episode? He’s pretty good at expressing himself for a kid who’s just shy of five. I guess he really is Momma’s little scholar.

--Drinking game: every time Gohan says “daddy,” take a drink. If he’s crying as he says it, take two.

Seventh Sanctum Writing Challenge #2: The Ants

“The story must have a giant at the end.”

I woke up to the sound of a scream. Seconds later, I felt the unmistakable sensation of earth moving beneath my body. Sitting up, I looked around and noticed that one of the two other sleeping bags—the one that had my daughter in it—was empty. My wife was already getting out of her sleeping bag, screaming out the last word I would ever hear her say:

“HAILEY!”

We named her after Eminem’s daughter, because the club my wife and I met in was playing an Eminem song when we first started speaking to each other. If it had been a boy, we would have named the baby Marshall. Neither of us particularly liked Eminem, but the song we were introduced during was special to us.

If you asked me to name it, I wouldn’t remember.

“Raina, wait a minute!” I exclaimed as my wife started to move away from our fire. “What are you doing?!”

Raina didn’t answer. She broke into a run, parting the surrounding forest of grass by force. I leapt into a standing position, nearly falling into the dimming fire we’d made from a couple of shards of rock, some twigs and a goddamn miracle. It had been a while since any of us were granted a chance to see each other’s faces when the sun was down. The horrors of the world seemed to be so much smaller, even though we knew, but none of us would admit, how dreadfully enormous they were.

I ran after Reina, but my leg had been injured from an incident a few nights ago and I could only limp and scream Raina’s name as she screamed our child’s name and didn’t slow her pace. So I did what I could, I tracked her by the sound of her voice. I felt for rumbling, willing myself to feel something except for the beating of my heart and the fear in my stomach just below it. The organs of my torso seemed to be in conspiracy against me, trying to make me suffer a heart attack before I could perform the miracle we would need to get us out of this.

We knew these things were able to attract humans by using a sweet scent and a cooing, warm, vaguely human voice. Back when we had been traveling with another family, all of us saw firsthand one of their to napping children get up, sniff the air, and start walking in a direction that led us to one of the monsters. So we tried what we could, we improvised some earmuffs every night by using a little mud—if there was none available, we tried to wet the dirt with our spit—and we hoped our child would just sleep on through instead of waking to the temptation of the nice-smelling air and taking the ear covers off to hear the cooing sounds.

The wrench in the whole system was Reina. She refused to tell our daughter what might happen to her if she hears or smells anything funny. She didn’t want our child to grow up scared of the world, or to not be able to fall asleep for fear of the monsters outside the grass walls. I tried to reason with her. Living in fear was still living, until we could make our way to, if not some form of civilization, a surefire way to keep out of the view of the monsters. Besides, we didn’t even know how much Hailey knew. We put mud on her ears every night, and while she didn’t complain to us, I could see in her eyes how little significance the ritual bore in her little mind. She was just a baby, for God’s sakes, a pale little blond of 6. I knew her 7^th birthday would be next week by the small slashes I made on the backs of my arms.

The screams stopped. No screams from Reina, and nothing up to that point from farther away, nothing to indicate that Hailey might still be saved. But I kept running as fast as I could, except now I was feeling around in front of me with both hands while trying my best to hear for any sounds of breathing, or struggling, anything that would alert me to something nearby. I would even take one of the monsters—at least then I would know that my family was probably dead and that I could soon join them. As much as waking up to find ourselves in this horrific mockery of our world was traumatic, having my family with me made the whole ordeal tolerable.

I heard a sound off to my left, something like the sound of a sob or a choking noise. My heart started to sink. All the nonsense I tried to tell myself about it being better to know than to not know had just turned into exactly that—total nonsense. Total horseshit. At least when I didn’t know, I had hope that things might turn out in my direction. I found the source of the sobbing sound, and could tell by the timbre that it was Reina. She was on her knees, curled up into a ball on the ground, the smell of her congealed sweat over the course of several days striking me in the nose as I felt for her shoulder to grip. I didn’t know why she was crying, but the worst recesses of my soul told me I actually knew exactly why.

“She’s gone, Leland,” Reina said, the sound of her whisper loud as a boom of thunder, as if she had petitioned God Himself to play her voice to me from the heavens above. I didn’t know why she believed that, but I also knew it didn’t matter. I had been preparing for this moment, and it felt exactly how I thought it might feel if I didn’t prepare at all. Nothing could have made this go down any smoother. My mouth opened, and nothing came out. Not even a breath. There were foul-tasting words on the surface of my tongue that I wasn’t sure I could say. I wanted the silence to break, but I was afraid of what might break it if it wasn’t me who did it.

“She’s gone. I can’t find her.”

As Reina sniffled, my mind reconvened its contents so quickly I flinched. Reina was guessing. She was falling into a despair she nearly dragged me into as well. I felt angry, happy, sad, and worst of them all, I felt the time that was slipping through my hands while I was busy feeling emotions with the mental breakdown that called itself my child’s mother.

I gripped Reina’s shoulder a little tighter. Just enough to get her attention. “Get up. We have to look for our daughter.”

“You’re hurting me,” sniffled Reina.

“We have to look for our daughter,” I repeated, a little more loudly, a little more quickly.

“She’s gone, Leland.”

I tried to be patient. “We don’t know that yet. Don’t just give up.”

“She’s dead… and it’s because of me…”

“Sweetheart.” I bent down to talk more directly to her. I didn’t like the way Reina was talking. Not only was she giving up on Hailey, she was giving up on herself. When she did that, she was giving up all of us. The whole damn world, as far as I was concerned. “Sweetheart, this isn’t on you. This isn’t on any of us. I know there’s a chance that Hailey might be…” I tried to stifle a sob, but it came out with the word “dead.”

“I know she might be dead, but we’ve got to keep looking. What if she isn’t, and we just leave her alone out there?”

I felt Reina shift around a bit, but she didn’t say anything.

“What if she is, and we spend the rest of our lives listening for noises, wondering if that’s the daughter that died already? We owe it not just to her, but to ourselves, to know. Know, or die trying.”

“What kind of life is this, Leland?”

I felt Reina brush my hand off her shoulder. She stood up. Some confidence was returning to her voice. “This isn’t a life for our girl. Running every day, scraping the leftover fruit off of cherry pits, rooting through bushes, listening. Not even talking. That’s the worst part, Leland. We can’t even talk anymore. We listen for the cooing, or for the voices of real people, or for grass moving. We do it from morning ‘til night, and when we get to bed I can’t stop hearing the same screams play in my head and there’s nothing I can do or say or think about to get them to stop and when I do sleep I dream of blood and grass and all the fucking grass…”

Reina’s voice broke up until she was crying and gasping. I embraced her. “I didn’t realize how much it mattered for us to speak to each other,” I said. “I thought just being together was enough.”

“It is!” Reina exclaimed through her patchy voice. “It was. But I… we never even talked about why this was happening. It was just boom, one morning it started…”

That was true enough. We woke up in our house surrounded on all sides by thick, tall grass when one of the monsters burst through a wall and sent us careening for the front door. We ran away from so many monsters those first few days, we barely had time to catch our breath, never mind speak to each other. We didn’t grab anything from our house, and we’ve been wearing the same clothes on our backs for so long, they’ve torn and frayed all along the edges and place in-between. Eventually, we were going to have to start going around naked, and that thought was no comfort since the air was already starting to get a pronounced wintery bite to it.

“We need to look for our daughter,” I said firmly. Reina stopped crying and cleared her throat. I wasn’t sure if that meant a yes or a no, so I told her again, and after that time I heard a meek “yes,” which I presumed was the best I was going to be getting for the time being.

It occurred to me right when we started searching that I had no idea how much time we’d been asleep before this particular incident got going. It felt like we’d slept for a while, because I felt wide awake, but the only way I’d know for sure was to let the adrenaline subside, and at that moment it was the only think keeping me from complete despair, or madness, or whatever that creeping feeling was that occasionally rubbed lazy circles on the shores of my consciousness. I noticed the sentences in my head, the ones that I saw written out in green LCD, were starting to run on longer and longer, until they were the size of paragraphs. I had an inner monologue that couldn’t help itself but to babble like a madman in fear and desperation.

Reina was tired. I knew she was tired. She was the one between the three of us who shared her food. The child needed it first, of course, and I took second because Reina and I agreed early on in these last couple of months—the rare conversation we did have—that I would need to protect the family not necessarily from the monsters, but from other people who might want to harm them for some reason. How were we to know, after all, what was going on in the hearts of others who were suffering like us? In the same way everyone deals with grief differently, everyone deals with horror and survival differently. Some crazed thrill-seeker without the weapons to back it up could happen to be traveling in the same patch of super-grass as us one day, and decide that a murder or a rape would be in his best interests.

It’s not like I was some body-builder. But I was the best my family had.

Reina and I called for Hailey’s name, to no avail. Every time I stopped expecting to hear a response, I remembered how suddenly disaster visited us, and how it could be taken away with the same speed. Even Biblical plagues—which this felt so much like—had their time before they were removed from the earth. What if this was all to test some wayward follower of a higher power, some rogue agent of God who needed just a little bit of convincing to do the will of his maker, and instead of simply localizing his punishment to the one foolish, straying man, God decided to show him a world of twisted, Godless agony, roamed by massive insectoid creatures and the frightened men and woman who shielded their children in vain before being consumed?

Another run-on. I was getting worried about my mind. What good would I be as a father to Hailey if I let my own mind wander off? If I couldn’t even look after the thoughts confined to my head, I didn’t deserve to be the caretaker for the sweetest girl on the planet. Little Hailey. I don’t believe I’m saying this as a father, but as a person, when I say that she is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on this planet, and was so from the second I laid my eyes on her. Even covered in blood, red-faced and shrieking its way into a big, open, unfamiliar world, there was an angelic quality about her that just captivated me.

Reina was right. She was too good for the world that was here for her now.

The grass itched my feet. It itched them incessantly. I had lost my shoes several weeks ago in the process of throwing them at one of the horrible stalking beasts, and even as we were running, Reina chastised me on how stupid that was. I couldn’t help but to agree. There were a whole litany of things I could probably step on in a strange new world like this. If there were bug monsters, why not poisonous spines sticking out of the ground. I even considered going back and getting them. I have no idea what I would have wanted with shoes that were probably in the stomach of a giant insect, but I felt naked without them.

I bumped into Reina. She had stopped again. I rolled my eyes, thinking this might just be another one of her mini-breakdowns, until I heard it too. The unmistakable sound of a coo. One of the beasts was nearby. The rumbling was low at first. Reina and I got closer to each other, afraid to lose each other’s touch. No matter how many times this happened, day or night, we never got used to it. And I reckoned we never would.

Grass parted near us. I could hear it coming from the right. We turned together, both apparently thinking the same thing at the same time—“I want to see it even though I can’t and it won’t matter.” Instinctively, Reina started to back up, and I reluctantly went with her, but I knew when push came to shove I wouldn’t be running. This was going to be the moment of terrible knowledge. Is our daughter alive or not?

When I felt a leg brush up against my arm, I pounced, lunging elbow first at the horrible creature, hoping it wasn’t trying to approach me backwards. Were that the case, I might have felt the sharp stab of the creature’s stinger penetrating my skin, its thin, reedy, metallic weapon of choice pumping enough venom into my body to eat my insides as I was still alive, rendering me paralyzed and subject to the monster’s whims. An image flashed in my mind of my daughter impaled through the stomach and out the other side by the monster’s stinger, and I fought back tears as I lunged again, my elbow having missed the creature the first time.

It was possible to kill these things. I had done so once before. The truth was, these things were like enormous ants. The average human being would be just a little shorter than one that stood on its legs upright. Beyond their bite and their sting, they were relatively fragile if one could either get them in the eye or penetrate their exoskeleton with something like an elbow or the heel of their foot. It took a lot of strength applied to one of a handful of spots to really defend oneself against the giant ants, and even with the daylight on my side, my chances would have been slim. Here, they were practically impossible.

Reina did her best to help me. She started by feeling along the ground, sifting through the grass to find a piece of rock buried beneath, something she could either use herself or hand me. A strong blow to the head with a rock tended to completely turn the tide of a battle with one of these things around. When that failed, she tried to simply get to the side of the creature, feel for it, and once she felt it shift to one side or the other, she would do her best to tell me whether it was to my left or right so I could get a better chance of aiming at it. These things liked to shift and back away and do things in a general defensive posture, seemingly aware that their stingers and their teeth were only going to get them so far.

Except this time, Reina didn’t do that. She started crying again. I wanted to kick the living shit out of her. I was within seconds of being mauled by a giant ant, and she was taking this as her opportunity to have another one of her little emotional breakdown sessions. I knew it was hard. I knew we confronted death almost every single day we existed in this new world, with these drooling, mindless monsters who couldn’t be bargained with, who couldn’t feel anything except the pure, distilled instinct to feed and breed, but we were supposed to be the better creatures. We were supposed to be smarter. Yet we were allowing our advanced emotions get in the way of our advanced rationing.

“Leland,” she called to me, “I found her dress.”

I stopped.

Song Review: Allan Sherman, "Hello Mudduh, Hello Faddah"

   I mean, were people back in the ‘60s out of their minds, or…?

   The other day, I came across this video of a guy named Allan Sherman singing a song on some old black-and-white variety show, might’ve been his show, but it was posted by a YouTube channel called “Allan Sherman’s Nutty Parody Channel.” This guy was apparently a huge influence on “Weird” Al Yankovic, and with the lyrical content of the song in question, I guess I can see the resemblance. Key difference is, Yankovic’s songs are usually a direct parody of something, either in lyrical content or musically. But this, well, this is like someone getting halfway there and then skidding the rest of the way down the highway, fucked up on some of that good dope.

   The premise of this song is, there’s a kid at a camp called Granada. Lord knows when I first heard “Granada” in the lyrics, I thought about the War in Grenada, even though that hadn’t even happened yet. The melody is taken from this opera piece called “Dance of the Hours” by Amilcare Ponchielli. That song is supposedly about the eternal struggle between good and evil. I’d argue that, whatever the subject of the song is, it’s got greater depth than this song’s subject, which is a kid writing a letter to his parents about camp:

“Hello mudduh, hello faddah
Here I am at Camp Granada
Camp is very entertaining
and they say we’ll have some fun when it stops raining”

   That’s the punchline of the verse, right there. Camp is not fun because of, uh, rain. Hardy-har. What, was this record given out free with the purchase of a hamburger? Allan Sherman said he wrote this song based off of the experiences his own son had at summer camp. The kid in question wound up getting kicked out of the camp, which would have been a shitload of a lot funnier to hear about than the stuff in this song. And as for the “mudduh, faddah” shit, that’s because Sherman’s Jewish, apparently. I guess it’s an accent thing.

The song continues with:

“I went hiking with Joe Spivey
He developed poison ivy
You remember Leonard Skinner
He got Ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner”

   I actually had to look up ptomaine poisoning because of this song, so never let it be said that novelty pop music never taught anybody anything. Ptomaine is an obsolete medical term describing the alkaloids that were thought to be formed in the carcasses of decayed animals. Now that we know that food poisoning is caused by bacteria and not “ptomaine,” the phrase has fallen out of use. The point is, this Leonard kid was apparently fed rotten food, and that’s a comforting fucking thing to hear in a novelty song for kids, isn’t it? Yuck it up, Junior, the kid’s shitting his guts out and may be pushing up daisies inside of a week!

   Like, okay, poison ivy is one thing. That happens, sometimes you can’t really avoid it, and I doubt it’s ever fatal unless some kind of allergy is involved. But that other kid was straight up fed an animal carcass some counselor peeled off a nearby highway! Leonard probably thought the maggots were fucking macaroni! If you’re a parent and you get a letter from your kid with this shit in it, you don’t write a song based off of an old opera number, you call the goddamned cops THEN you start writing the song! By the way, “Leonard Skinner,” that sounds a lot like “Lynyrd Skynyrd.” My mother once told me that the band Lynyrd Skynyrd named themselves after a P.E. coach they had who was named Leonard Skinner, and I’m too lazy to bother looking up that name to see if my mom just got her stories mixed up.

“All the counsellors hate the waiters
And the lake has alligators
And the head coach wants no sissies
So he reads to us from something called Ulysses”

   James Joyce’s Ulysses is a novel about a guy wandering around in Dublin for a day, running errands and shit. I haven’t read it, I’ve heard it’s vulgar (for the time) but also really good. However, if I were going to read kids a James Joyce novel, I’d be more inclined to pick the confusing shit-spew “Finnegans Wake,” just to keep them on their toes. That novel’s probably the literary equivalent of food poisoning. Anyway, alligators, the lake the kids are presumably supposed to swim in has fucking alligators in it, and this is apparently a punchline to a comedy bit as opposed to a cause for alarm. Is this Florida? Did Leonard Skinner get “ptomaine poisoning” from eating a poorly-cooked alligator tail?

   For a song that’s supposed to be comedic, there sure are a lot of… no jokes whatsoever in here. I mean, I get it, it’s funny because the kid’s probably exaggerating, but seriously, the parents in this song read this shit and thought, “ha! Let’s get out the Ponchielli 78s and tear out a pop hit about this!” Either this kid is the biggest liar in the tri-state area, or these are the worst parents in the same tri-state area. Either way, some group of assholes in the tri-state area just got outdone. Check and mate, Allan.

   Finally, “waiters?” Did summer camps back in the 60s take place at five-star restaurants? What happened to the old, hairy bastard behind the lunch counter tossing sloppy joes to and fro, willy nilly? I guess that dude didn’t get hired on ‘til later, but these are apparently actual waiters, according to a cursory Google search. I can’t wrap my head around that, having never been to summer camp myself (well, okay, besides Bible camp, but I refuse to count that shit). I always pictured summer camp food to be something slung by cafeteria chefs. Maybe it depends on what kind of camp you can afford to go to. Some of them might even have massages while you eat.

“Now I don't want this should scare ya'
But my bunkmate has Malaria
You remember Jeffery Hardy
They're about to organize a searching party”

   Holy shit, the body count at this place is really starting to rack up. Is this Camp Crystal Lake, what the fuck is going on? Every time this kid starts a sentence with the phrase “you remember…”, it ends with someone dead. The parents need to check the return address on this letter and make sure it isn’t being sent from the mortuary they accidentally delivered the kid to. I’ve never seen so many dead kids in a song that’s supposed to be funny.

   Let’s start off with the malaria thing. It isn’t a contagious disease, but the fact is this kid shouldn’t be at a summer camp, he should probably be in ICU. Did he have the malaria when he got to the camp, or did he get it from something AT the camp? I think we’re supposed to infer the latter, but somehow I don’t think a camp that poisons its kids and lets them get lost in the fucking woods is going to have the highest of admission standards. Then again, maybe my brain is trying to shut down at the idea of somebody finding a novelty song about some kid contracting malaria at summer camp just hi-larious. “Christmas Shoes” is less morose than this shit.

   Also, a kid is missing. A kid has straight fucking disappeared. They’re gonna probably find an alligator holding the kid’s leg in its mouth like a joint in a few days, if they find any trace of him. I’m sure a kid disappearing at a summer camp has happened before, in fact, I bet it happens all the time. But when it happens at the same camp that features alligators, food poisoning, and goddamned malaria, it’s not a tragedy, it’s gross negligence. Are the counselors too busy routinely getting into fights with the waiters to make sure all the kids are safe in their bunks? Let’s hope Jeffrey’s surname turns out to be accurate, because he’s going to need all the hardiness he can get to survive the next few weeks.

   Now, look, I’m not a hand-wringing moralist when it comes to child endangerment as a source of comedy. I laughed my ass off at jokes about a zipline created by goons on the Something Awful forums that was insanely dangerous and led to a bunch of ribbing from other subforums about how many kids it would probably kill. The difference is, those were jokes. They had setups, and punchlines, and weren’t just variations of “hey, remember John Skizzle? He’s dead now. I wanna go home.” Did communism just destroy the American brain during this time period or what? I guess inevitable nuclear annihilation made a few kids dying at a summer camp seem a trifle in comparison.

“Take me home, oh Muddah, Faddah
Take me home, I hate Grenada
Don't leave me out in the forest where
I might get eaten by a bear”

   Wait a minute. Is this kid not letting us in on the whole story about Jeffrey Hardy? There are alligators in the lake, why wouldn’t he just assume Jeff had been eaten by one of those unless he, in fact, saw him eaten by a bear instead? I think this little shit knows more than he’s saying he does. Maybe he’s being blackmailed by one of the counselors. Yeah, I bet Jeff’s death had nothing to do with a bear or a goddamn alligator! He probably got caught in the crossfire during a gun fight between the waiters and counselors and a counselor buried him out in the middle of nowhere, only for our protagonist to stumble across it. Either this is a coded message begging his parents for help (which, good work if it is, because holy shit) or this kid’s choosing to help the murderous counselor establish an alibi. What are they offering you, kid??

“Take me home, I promise I will
Not make noise, or mess the house with
Other boys, oh please don't make me stay
I've been here one whole day”

   Wow, fuck, talk about a “wham line,” this shit has all happened over the course of a single day? I guess that kid who had malaria must’ve brought it in with him. I guess that must be a relief to everybody, including his parents, who probably aren’t coming back for him. They must’ve had “gas station” as a back-up plan on their list of places to dump their sick kid. But wait, that means the kid who disappeared hasn’t even been gone that long! I wonder if his body has even grown cold yet under the dark, rain-engorged earth he was hastily buried in.

“Dearest Fadduh, Darling Muddah
How's my precious little bruddah
Let me come home if you miss me
I would even let Aunt Bertha hug and kiss me”

   A lot of ‘60s humor, and really, decades before and after it, was at the expense of aunts and mothers-in-law. I remember watching lots of old Looney Tunes cartoons when I was a boy that featured jokes about the ugly, booring, annoying, unpleasant mother-in-law, occasionally aunt. But the part of it I really marvel at is “Bertha.” Like, is there a name on earth that is more connoted with a fat woman than Bertha? Has there ever been a skinny woman with that name? Is it court mandated that a baby girl who’s born at a certain weight has to be named Bertha or Helga or something? Like, if you’re a woman who is named Bertha, you might as well be named “Fatty McFatterson,” even if you are thin, which I doubt.

“Wait a minute, it's stopped hailing
Guys are swimming, guys are sailing
Playing baseball, gee that's bettah
Muddah, Faddah kindly disregard this letter”

   Okay. This is the last verse of the song, and the whole punchline is, I guess, now that the summer camp is actually fun, the kid likes it. That would make sense, if the crux of the kid’s earlier argument for the shittiness of the camp rested on it being boring instead of lethal. I’m picturing this kid laying on the bottom bunk with his bunkmate laying dead on top, looking out the window and seeing kids playing in the no longer rainy weather, putting away his stationary and rushing out to greet the day… only to come back, put the letter in an envelope, and mail it even though he wants his parents to disregard the fucking thing.

   Like, seriously, kid? Why not just rewrite it? You really think your parents are gonna ignore the malaria and alligators and dead kid when they make it to the end of your letter just because you ask them to? Shit, I guess yours might, but most wouldn’t. Like, this punchline would make sense if the song was taking place during a phone call, but you don’t just write “ignore all but the end of this” at the end of your letter and send the fucking thing off anyway. That’s like writing an entire novel without using the backspace button, then sending it off to be published. Also, I hope this kid doesn’t have too much trouble hitting a homer while flashes of Leonard Skinner shitting and puking blood invade his mind every time he blinks.

   In conclusion: If we call Weird Al “Weird,” we need to call this guy “Infanticidal” Allan Sherman.

Seventh Sanctum Writing Challenge #1: Birthday Girl

“The story takes place five years in the past.
A character will prepare for a birthday.
A character is sad throughout most of the story.
During the story, a character finds a long-lost relative.
The story ends in a shop.”

   I guess I’m pretty boring. It’s 2014 and I could be enjoying the fact that I’m getting a new smartphone this year, finally replacing the old flip phone I’ve had for a couple of years. Instead I’m just kind of bummed, and I can’t explain why. People ask me all the time, “why are you so bummed all the time?” Well, some of them don’t say “bummed,” they just say “sad” or “depressed,” one person even said I looked like I was gonna go all Sandy Hook and shoot up my school. Now that’s just rude. I’ve never wanted to do something like that, in my life! But I guess I have one of those faces.

   Mom’s gonna come back from the store in a few minutes with a cake. I already figured out what present I’m getting thanks to my loud-mouthed little brother, but I don’t know what kind it’s gonna be. One year they got me one and the frosting literally looked like crap. Like, it was supposed to be all nice and ridged around the edges or whatever, and it just looked like turd. In the meantime, I’m just sitting here and spending the last few minutes of my old phone’s life using it to play Sudoku. I used to do crosswords, but they started getting really hard, and it’s boring to just keep plugging letters in until one of them isn’t red.

   I can hear my brother and all his friends being loud playing PS4 in the room right next to mine. I actually put a hole in the wall once just trying to get them to turn it down. I knocked a little too hard. I was a little pissed off that night as it was, because my friend was supposed to call me and she didn’t. I found out from her at school later that my phone just wasn’t picking up the call. Anyway, now I have to go knock on his door to ask him to turn it down, which he doesn’t anyway so most of the time I just put in some earmuffs. My parents always try to get me to listen to music, but I’ve never heard any that I like all that much. Most of it’s too loud.

   But I’m sad, like I said, and I can’t explain why. I’m gonna be 18 this year. Just two more years and I’m not gonna be a teenager anymore. That’s really scary to me. I don’t even feel like I’ve been a teenager for that long. I think the happiest birthday of my life was the one where I turned 13, because I expected it to mean a lot more than it actually did. That is, I thought things were really gonna start happening when I started to grow up. Instead my voice just got deeper and I kept bleeding once a month. Since then, these have probably been the worst five years of my life. High school’s been boring, and every day I get out of school I’m happy until I get home and realize I don’t have anything to do. I complain too much. I complain at school when I have to go places, and I complain at home when I have no place to go. I should just shut up, I guess.

   “Fuck you,” I say out loud, for no real reason. I guess just to hear how it felt on my lips. I don’t swear a lot. Mom always beat the crap out of me whenever I did it as a kid. It was stupid, because I always did it by accident. It would always be something I heard Dad say to one of his friends on the phone, and I’d go and say it to my little brother later, or I’d make the mistake of asking Mom what it meant and she’d whoop my ass and ground me for, like, a week. But the worst part, she’d go and yell at Dad for saying it in the house, and they’d have a screaming match for like an hour before Dad would just get up and leave.

   I say it again, this time biting my lip hard as I pronounced the “f.” “Fuck you.”

   Not a second later, I heard the doorknob rattle as Mom unlocked the door. My heart nearly jumped out of my mouth. Of course, she’d have to show up right now, and I’d have to not be able to hear her car pull up because of my brother and his goofball friends playing his stupid games as loud as he could.

   “Denise! Help me with the groceries!” I hear her call, and I groan. I leap off my bed and walk into the living room.

   “Come on,” she says heading back outside, dropping the groceries next to the door. That always weirds me out because there’s a family photo hanging up beside the door and I’m always afraid it’s gonna fall on the groceries. It’s the only one in the house that has Dad in it. When he lived at home, he almost always had a mustache, but in the photo he doesn’t because Mom hated it and made him shave it off before we got the photo taken, so it’s weird because I always picture him without one these days.

   “Can’t you get Tony to help you?” I ask, following her outside. “It is my birthday, after all.”

   “Tony might be recording one of those ‘let’s play’ thingies with all his friends, he gets real upset when we interrupt him, you know. Come on, it’s just a few small things.”

    And all at once, I understand, and have to fight the urge to smile. She must have just bought the phone, and she wants me to find it in the backseat. Mom never gives a crap about Tony’s stupid “let’s play” stuff. She always opens his door and tells him to do stuff while he’s recording, and he whines every single time. But then she’ll be in the video, yelling at him to help with the groceries or wash the dishes, and he won’t take it out when they argue, so a bunch of people can comment and make fun of how shrill her voice is. She doesn’t even know it, and I’m afraid of how mad she might get at Tony if I showed her.

    I open up the backseat, and just like I expected, there’s a small gift-wrapped box sitting there, with just one other bag next to it and a cake in the front seat. I turn to look at Mom, who is smiling broadly. It’s not very often that she does that, and when I see it I always feel real happy, but also like I’m about to cry. “Happy birthday,” she says, and I walk over and hug her, also something that doesn’t happen all too often. “Thank you,” I say, then I grab the box and start to undo the ribbon on the top.

   “Wait until we get in the house,” Mom says, and I stop. “Let’s bring in the cake and other stuff first. Come on.”

   I think she might be a little happier it’s my birthday than I am. We walk back into the house together, and what greets us is the sound of one of Tony’s friends screaming “fuck” at the top of his lungs and the rest of them all laughing like a bunch of hyenas, except Tony, who’s probably trying to get the guy to shut up because he just heard us walk in.

   “Who in the world...” Mom says through her teeth and walks down the hall to Tony’s room. I know which one it is, too, it’s Paul. This is gonna be good, because he’s the one that acts like a smartass and like he doesn’t care all the time, but when he’s around Mom he gets real polite and sheepish, because she’s like a foot taller than him. He used to act that way around me too—and I’m not even all that tall, but then he saw Tony backtalking me a few times and I guess he stopped being scared of me. Well, now we was in for it.

   Mom swings open Tony’s door and it’s like a record scratch, all the noise coming out of the room gets louder for a second and then stops dead. “I need all of you boys out of here right now—Tony, not a word out of you. Out, now!”

   A single file line of boys comes out of the room and heads for the door as I’m standing next to it, probably looking like an idiot with a huge cake in my hands. Paul’s the one at the end of the line, and Mom calls out to him.

   “You know how I feel about using language like that in this house, Paul,” Mom says, her arms folded, her eyes dark, piercing beads that looked like they could injure someone if they got any harder. If Paul was Tony, he would be in for hell. “One more time I hear that, you won’t be coming back here, you understand?”

   “Yeah,” Paul said, his head drooping down, his eyes darting around like he’s trying to find a hole to drop down.

   “Yeah, what?”

   “Yes, ma’am.”

   “Okay. Now, go on, get out!” She made a “shoo” motion with her hand as she did this.

The weird thing is, Mom’s not the one who’s ex-military, Dad is. But I think what it is, Dad responds a lot to that Sergeant yelling-type stuff, like in the movies, and Mom figured out that it worked on pretty much everybody else, so that’s kind of how she goes around now. I’ve heard a lot of people mutter “bitch” under their breath as she walked away from them. But the few who dared to say it right to her face would usually have to have her hauled out of their store. She even went to jail once for a night, I’m not kidding. Good thing Dad was still around at the time, so he could bail her out.

I help Mom put the groceries away and then our attention turns to the cake sitting on the dining room table. I open the box and the cake has a huge “18” written on it in blue icing. Tony walks into the room and says, “wait, I thought you were gonna be 17?”

   “Tony, don’t be a goof,” says Mom, but Tony just looks at her and shrugs. I think he really forgot I was turning 18. He doesn’t really pay much attention to the world around him. “Earth to Tony” is probably a commonly said thing in classrooms he’s in. Next time he has a birthday, I’m gonna ask him if he’s turning 17. But considering he’ll actually be 16, he might take that as a compliment, like he looks older and taller than he actually is.

   “Alright, well, we’ve got a couple boxes of candles, should be enough for this cake and the one for your graduation in a couple months,” Mom says. “You’re gonna be sick to death of cake by the time June rolls in. Oh, God, and then there’s Tony’s birthday in July. You better watch out, Denise, or you’re gonna gain some weight.”

   She pats my stomach for emphasis and I move to swat her hand away, but think better of it. I’m already a little overweight because I don’t do anything all day except go to school when I have to and go for a walk sometimes, which Mom hates because I always go in the dark. It’s the only time I can go out when it’s not blaringly hot, though. Anyway, I hate it when Mom or someone at school makes some real snarky, back-handed comment about my weight. I’d like to be thin, but I don’t really feel motivated toward it. It’s not like I’m some beautiful diva when I’m thin anyways, so screw it.

   I blow out the candles and we each grab a piece. Mom tells us we’re only having one now, and then we’re going to have actual dinner. Salmon patties and fries. Ugh. Even on my birthday, we’re having the same old stuff we have once a week. Mom only knows a handful of recipes, and she’s fine-tuned them to a point. It’s really rare, but we have guests over and they’ll always rave about what a good cook she is. It’s not that she’s good, it’s that she’s cooked the same stuff for like, 20 years, so of course she’s going to be amazing at the same dishes after the 5,000^th time! Sometimes I even stop somewhere after school and eat dinner early so that I won’t have to eat Mom’s food. Of course, I usually wind up eating some anyway, which might be part of the reason I’m getting fat.

   But finally, after dinner, I get to open my gift, which means acting surprised when I find out it’s a smartphone. But then again, maybe Tony’s pulling a trick on me. I pull the ribbon off and do my best to open the gift without screwing up the wrapping paper. Mom’s one of those people who likes to hoard old wrapping paper to use on stuff later, even though I know we can afford more and Mom never has more than a few gifts to wrap for Christmas anyway. We don’t have a big family outside of the house, it seems like most of Mom’s family is dead and Dad’s stopped coming around when he left. So it’s normally just me, Tony, Mom and the two uncles for Christmas. That means not a lot of gifts to wrap, but of course, we’re still expected to help.

   Beneath the wrapping paper is a white box with a picture of an Android phone on the front. I had spent all day wondering whether or not my new phone would be an Apple or Android, even though it honestly didn’t matter to me. I was just happy to have my first touchscreen.

   “Is something wrong? You look disappointed,” Mom says.

   “No, not at all!” I say quickly. “No, I’ve just never seen one of these, these kinds of smartphones before… I mean…”

   I open the box and get a look at the phone. It’s, well, small, black, rectangular. I don’t know, it’s a little smaller than I had expected, but I get a look at the back and see that it has a camera and that makes me happy enough to smile a bit, because it reminds me of how broken and crappy the camera on my old phone is. I love recording stuff I find interesting while I’m out for a walk. Like, if I see a bug or something I’ve never seen before, or if some people are having a really loud argument outside, I get real far away and record it. I’ll either show Tony or I’ll show my friend Rita…

   “Rita!” I exclaim suddenly. “I should put her number in here!”

   “You should call her,” Mom says. “I wonder if she even knows it’s your birthday.”

   I frown. Mom always bugs me to find more friends, saying all the time how Tony has friends over all the time but I never seem to have anybody to bring over. But I have Rita as a friend and Mom just hates her. I bring her over one time and she just hates her immediately, I don’t get it. Rita didn’t even swear or do anything wrong.

   “I’m sure she does,” I tell Mom. I go to my room to get my old phone, so I can put the other numbers I have into my new one.

   It takes me about 30 minutes to activate the new phone. It’s a hard process. I wind up having to go back in the living room and having my brother help me out. He’s already got his own smartphone because one of his buddies let him have his old one when he got the upgraded model, so he knows how to do this stuff. Of course, he had to act like a real jerk about it the whole time, like it’s just unbelievable to him that I don’t know this stuff that’s so simple to him. Anyway, I finally get it finished and retreat to my room just as Mom is looking for one of us to take out the trash, which thankfully winds up being Tony. Serves him right. I put my numbers from my old phone into the new one, and relish the feeling of throwing the old one in the trash. Once that’s all done, I call Rita.

   “Hey!” I say.

   “Uh, hey,” the voice on the other end says. I hardly recognize it at first because the sound quality on the new phone is a lot better. “Who is this?”

   I feel a small pang in my heart, but I do my best to ignore it. “Denise.”

   “Ohh,” says Rita. “Huh. I didn’t recognize the number, what’s up?”

   “I got a new phone,” I say. “Today’s my birthday.”

   “No kidding?” Rita replies. “Happy birthday. I, uh, I would have called you if I had known.”

   “I did tell you about a week ago. You must’ve forgot, we were in class.”

   “Oh, yeah. Yeah, that class sucks, I probably forgot because it’s like 8 when we have that class and I’m like, done at that hour.”

   I laugh a little, and then I hear Rita clear her throat. “Anyway, uh, I have my Dad bitching at me to do my homework cuz I’m failing Chemistry. Talk to you in class tomorrow?”

   My heart sunk some more. I was hoping to have a longer conversation with Rita. She can be really funny sometimes. She’s this goth girl who pretty much hates everything, and we seem to get along a lot better the worse of a mood I’m in during the morning. “Are you gonna be in class tomorrow?” I ask.

   “Maybe,” she says. “See ya.”

   “Bye,” I say over the click of the other phone. She doesn’t have a cell phone, so she uses a home phone that makes a really loud click when she gets off. I lay down on my bed stomach first and suddenly get this overwhelming feeling of sadness just bearing down on me. It’s over. That was my birthday. I mean, it’s four hours from midnight, but that was it, and tomorrow was Monday, and all I have to look forward to was…

   I slam my face down onto my pillow and bite down. I have this massive urge to scream or throw something. Why do the good moments seem to last so short and the others last so long? They’re like blips, like little flashes of lightning that hit and go away as fast, sometimes when you don’t expect them, so you have no time to truly enjoy them. I hear Mom say something to Tony in the living room, then I hear his footsteps approaching my room.

   Tony pokes his head into my room. “Happy birthday,” he says, and before I can lift my head off the pillow to say thanks, he’s already back in his room. I just put my head back down and close my eyes, watching the small beads of weird light that happen when you close your eyes really tightly. I listen to my breaths as they pool warmly around my chin, nowhere else to go in the scant space between my mouth and the pillow. I mouth, “fuck you,” and my eyes start to sting. I jolt up, not wanting to cry in my room. If I’m going to do it, I’m going to go outside and find somewhere secluded so no one can bother me.

   I slip my sandals on and head for the front door. “Where are you going?” Mom asks.

   “I want to go for a walk,” I say. “Get some fresh air.”

   “Did you call your friend?”

   “Yeah, she… didn’t really want to talk.”

   I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s the way I say that sentence or the look I have on my face, but Mom leaves the kitchen and wraps me in a hug. My lips tremble and I do my best to stop tears from staining my mother’s shoulder. My arms are slack at my sides.

   “You’re going to make better friends in college,” she says in my ear. “I can guarantee you that. Did you apply yet?”

   Mom wanted me to get a real head start on college, but I didn’t really care either way. I kept putting it off. “Not yet, Mom,” I say. At once, I can feel my mood start to dissipate. It’s not that I cheer up, but all the emotions I’m feeling just… disappear down a dark hole, and I’m suddenly numb. And I hate the feeling so bad, it makes the emotions almost come back, but not quite. It’s like as soon as Mom asked me about my college applications, all the boredom of thinking about the same old stuff I needed to do but didn’t want to do came crashing over the well of feelings like a steel lid.

   “You need to get on that, Denise,” Mom says. “Do it between classes or during lunch or something.”

   “Okay, I will, Mom,” I say and pull away from her. I grab the doorknob and start to turn it.

   “Don’t be gone longer than 15 minutes, okay?” Mom says. “It’s late and you need to get some sleep for school tomorrow. You don’t want another week like last week, do you? Where you’re going to bed as soon as you get home and sleeping all day, staying up all night?”

   “I know,” I say, and close the door behind me. I open the door again, relenting. “I’ll be back in 15.”

   “You best,” Mom replies, then I close the door and start to walk in earnest. The warm night air blankets me and I stare down at the reflections the streetlights make off the pavement as I walk toward the town square. I don’t intend to walk all the way over there. It’s just where I tend to go when I’m getting down. When Mom tells me to be back in 15, I usually walk to the second stop sign and turn around there.

   I take a long, deep sigh, and try to make myself feel the way I did earlier. That huge, crashing wave of sadness, it was really… nice? I know how weird that sounds, but I liked it. It was… something.

   “God damn it…” I say to myself. That’s another one I don’t get to use very much, imagine that. I do love my mother, but she can be way too controlling, and I can’t wait to get out of the house. I don’t know where I’ll actually go when I get out of the house, mind you, but I am going to be happier wherever it is, I think. Tony already has his whole dang future planned out, I think. He wants to try and make money doing YouTube stuff, and he also wants to go to college for programming. He stays in his room even more than me, he just stays in there with his annoying friends and that makes him not seem like such a loser to my mother, at least compared to me.

   The night is beautiful. It’s still and easy. So many things are happening when it’s day. It makes me feel like I should be doing more when I go out in the afternoon and see the rest of the world moving and writhing around, place to place, A to B. But at night, I feel… alone, yet not alone. I feel alone, but I’m not alone in my loneliness, because this is the time where everyone goes into seclusion, and that includes all the people who have nobody at all. Who have even fewer people than me. The darkness comforts me, it reassures me. I don’t see it as dangerous like Mom does, and like a lot of people do, for that matter.

   I look up and find that I got a little carried away. I don’t know how I didn’t see it earlier, but I’ve already walked past the point I normally turn around. “Damn,” I mutter, and I turn around and start to walk back…

   But it’s my birthday. And I want more than a new smartphone I can play Sudoku and read Facebook on.

   I keep walking toward the square. There’s a nice game shop, and it should still be just early enough I can get there before they close and buy myself something. I’ve saved up about 15 bucks of lunch money I haven’t spent. I had almost 50, but when I started going out to eat after class, that money whittled down fast. It sucks that I have to lie to Mom about spending all the money on food, but… I just… I need something more. I want something more. Even if it’s just, like, a trinket from an anime I like or some kind of game I’m gonna play once then never again.

   As it gets closer to the 15 minute mark, I can feel myself getting less and less sure of my idea. It is late. It’s going to take me another 15 minutes just to get to the square. Then I’m probably going to spend a bunch of time in the games store trying to find what I want to buy. I won’t even be in the store before Mom’s already pissed off and looking for me!

   I reach down and feel the bulge of the new phone in my pocket. Suppose I called her and told her something so she’d chill out? She doesn’t know my new number. I don’t remember ever telling it to her, anyway. Actually, I don’t even have the new number memorized, so I couldn’t tell her anyway.

   As I step onto the sidewalk of the square, I can feel my walking pace starting to slow down, and I speed up on purpose. If anything I ought to be running. I haven’t thought of a good excuse for why I’ve been gone so much longer than my mother said. I probably won’t come up with one before I get back. Especially if I have a thing with me that I bought with money she didn’t even know I had. Where the hell am I going to hide it? There’s a potted plant on our back porch. I suppose I could go around and sneak it in there, hope Mom’s not observant enough to find it. I’ve never rebelled against her quite like this before. It feels so much more unnatural than it should, and I wish I knew why.

The game shop is on the other side of the square from me, so I cut through to the other side, walking past the City Hall where a bunch of smelly homeless people are sort of draped next to the staircase leading up to the front entrance. I’ve never had to go in there before. When I get my driver’s license, I’ll have to go here to get it, I think. I’m not sure. That’s another one of those things Mom keeps talking to me about doing in the future, but I never get around to it. I never feel all that much like doing anything.

   “Excuse me, excuse me,” I hear from someone to my left, and I flinch hard. My heart starts to beat a little more rapidly as one of the raggedy people from the staircase ambles toward me. It looks like he has something wrong with his leg or something.

   “Miss, do you… do you…” The man’s eyes tighten up. His breath smells like smoke and rot and I fight as hard as I can to not cry or make a face of disgust. He has this thick, graying beard, and long hair but only in the back, the top of his head bald and exposed so the light from the nearby streetlamps bounces off of it.

   “Are you… Denise? Denise, is that you?”

   If I thought my heart was racing earlier, it was now sprinting. I thought I was going to faint. My mouth opened to answer, but I couldn’t decide if “yes” or “no” would be worse.

   “Denise, it’s me! Shit, you have no idea who I am, do you?” I could hear his voice quivering a bit. “I’d recognize you anywhere, Denise, you—you haven’t even changed all that much! You’re still not as tall as Lanie, but you’re taller than me, that’s for sure!”

   “D-Dad?” I say in a choked whisper.

   Dad’s arms open and he steps closer to embrace me. I back away, covering my mouth. I’m so shocked, I can’t cry, or feel happiness or surprise or anything. Dad doesn’t look anything like I remember. I study his nose and eyes for familiarity because the beard is covering up the whole bottom of his face. His skin is much darker than I remember, his eyebrows thicker, he has these horrible scars and blotches on his face. No matter how I look at him, I can’t believe this is my father. But then his voice… I can’t deny it. It was why I flinched so hard earlier. I wasn’t reacting to it out of fear but recognition. It’s a little deeper, raspier, weaker, smokier… but it’s him.

   “You’re right,” he says with a sigh, putting his arms down. “I don’t have the right. I don’t have the right. I haven’t seen you or Lanie in years, I can’t just…”

   He starts to walk away, and I’m so torn between all the things I want to do, I can only stand there. I’m afraid if I take my eyes off of him he might disappear. He turns around, and I become more afraid of that.

   “But… but how is Tony? He’s, shit, how old is he, uh… I’m sorry, I cursed, I shouldn’t do that in front of you, but wait, how old… how old are you? Let’s see, it’s, uh, it just turned March, right? God, it must be your birthday soon!”

   “Today,” I say. “It’s today.”

   “Today!” he exclaims. “I don’t have anything to give you. Hell, barely enough to feed myself—”

   “Why did you—” I start to say, but think better of it. All I want is to get away from this and find a way, any way at all, to forget it ever happened. But at the same time, I—I don’t know. Everything about me feels so much heavier. I expect to look down at my own legs and find out they’ve become stone.

   “Why did I what?” asks Dad, with a face like he knows exactly what I meant. “Leave? You’ve lived with your mother. You tell me.”

   “Mom says it was because… you had a… you were…”

   “A drug addict,” he says, “and still am. Only reason I’m not dead right now is because I’m too poor to actually OD on the shit.”

   My hands and feet tremble. I’ve always wondered if Mom was telling the truth about that or not. Well, it looks like she was.

   “Denise, if you’re worrying about me, don’t,” Dad says, and I start to feel the tears I didn’t know were there running down my face. “Don’t cry, don’t worry about me. I wish I hadn’t even—well, no, that’s not true. That’s not true at all. I love seeing you again. I miss the hell out of you and Tony. I do. Really. I just can’t deal with some shit. I can’t deal with it. I can’t. I’m… a coward, hon. A coward. That’s what I am. I ran out on you and Tony because I was sick off the drugs and your mother gave me the choice of rehab or get the hell out. I was sick. I was so… fuck… so fucking sick. Don’t blame your mother, either. She’s a good woman, she tried. I should…”

   He starts to breathe real heavily, like he’s having a heart attack, but then he puts his face in his hands and whimpers. I’m briefly aware that we’re making a scene, but it’s not like we’re fighting. I want to go over to him and hold him, or something, but he’s so dirty and I’m afraid. I step toward him anyway, and he looks up at me. I have an idea. I take my wallet out and I offer him the 15 dollars I was going to spend at the game shop.

   “No,” he says flatly. “I don’t want your money, Denise. Your money’s no good to me, and if it’s Lanie’s, I don’t want that either.”

   “Take it, come on,” I say to him. He looks he in the eyes. “I won’t. I won’t spend your money on dope.”

   “Then don’t spend it on that! Spend it on food or something, but just take it!”

   “Honey, do you know how much food money I spent on smack? Food money, shit, how much ANYTHING money I’ve spent on it?! How much? Remember that Christmas your brother really wanted an electronic dartboard and didn’t get it until New Year’s? It was because I put that money down on smack! Now, god damn it, get away from me with that money before I DO take it!”

   “What am I supposed to do?!” I cry.

   “Whatever you were going to do before we saw each other,” he says, then he walks off, not back toward the City Hall where he came from, but down the street. I want to stop him. I try to think of a way to stop him. I don’t want him to come home, but I wonder how he’d respond to me saying that I did. I try to walk after him, follow him, but my legs will barely move. Then I no longer see him.

   “What can I help you find?”

   I look up. I have been staring at the same two or three anime keychains for the past, probably 10 minutes, I’d say. “I…”

   “Is there anything I can help you find?”

   “Nothing.”

   The store clerk looks a little confused. “Well, if you’re not here to buy anything, you need—”

   “I’m buying something,” I snap, maybe a little harder than I intended because the guy flinches back, his eyes widening up like saucers. He walks away and tends to whatever it was he was doing before he walked over to me.

   The ensuing loneliness reminds me of how I feel when my feet find a cold, untouched part of the blanket when I’m laying awake at night, shifting and trying to get comfortable. Mom and her no doubt feelings of sheer rage are no longer on my mind. If she raises a hand at me, I’m going to tell her about Dad, and I might even threaten to tell Tony as well. She loves me, like Dad said, but I don’t know if I like how she loves me.

   Then I start to walk toward the door. I decide I don’t want to buy anything after all. I decide that the last thing in the world I feel like doing is carrying something home. Then I spot a board game. Monopoly. We used to play that one with Dad all the time. Maybe it’ll jar Mom’s memory. She never talks about Dad. I grab the box and place it on the counter.

   “That’ll be 20.36,” the clerk says to me. I only have 15.