Duality, Projected
After Angela Ball
Your history begins when your father,
freshly dropped out of community college,
watches you—then two—hold a cat.
You drop it, surely unintentional,
in the driveway of your grandfather’s
gas station (which is named after you).
It is this moment, feline screeching
in the background, that your father
decides you are a serial killer.
At age five, you cry at your gran’s
funeral, an act, which in your pre-queer awakening,
is deemed by your father unmasculine.
In middle school, it was pills on which you choked,
that made you fall asleep in class,
that were supposed to fix you.
In high school, it was absence—
a bright Texas-size void through which
you wandered, fatherless, unhoused.
You learn your father’s history begins when he lines
up his sisters and touches them like barbie
dolls unagented in his presence.
And a therapist asks if this trespass
is what your father, in his haunting guilt, projects
onto you, falsely believing your face a mirror to his own.
And when the war didn’t take you,
Neither did he, instead shifting further,
rejecting what he thinks there might be of himself in you.
Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal (they/them) is a queer, previously unhoused veteran. Winner of the Plaza Short Story Prize, their creative work can be found in Story, Fairy Tale Review, F(r)iction, South Carolina Review and elsewhere. Other work appears in The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, and additional journals. They teach creative writing at Gannon University and are the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review.