Aunt Sophie told me about that time in the basement when you waited for grandma in blackness with a metal pipe, next to twelve empty brandy bottles.
We weren't permitted to ask important questions: Why did you paint only Asian women? How many did you love? How many Japanese did you kill with that pistol in your top drawer?
Maybe the war would explain why you left your family when my mother was a child. Maybe it would explain why you came back, worked that foreman job at Tow-Motor, drank yourself stupid, never painted again.
I know more about you now than when you were alive. What does this mean for my life as a father, a husband, an artist?
Only clues remain: my mother, absent from your funeral, and me in your basement, drunk, playing pool in the dark, trying to understand the angles.
Brad Bisio was born in Cleveland, Ohio, but now lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and five-year-old daughter. He received his BA in English with an emphasis in creative writing from Humboldt State University. Currently, he is working on his poetry manuscript, Mind Chatter and a novel entitled, Still No One, but Returning Different. He published the first chapter of the novel in Toyon, and won the Advisor's Award for the highest ranked piece of fiction. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Toyon, Penumbra and The Pittsburgh Free Press.
