Fiction
DadBy Hugh Fraser
I walk out of Grand Central without looking back. Dad is on his train and I am free to bathe in the sunshine of Park Avenue without his malign presence tugging at my sleeve. The old fool is getting worse. Why doesn’t he just carry a basket of rocks and hurl them at peoples’ heads instead of trying to glue himself to perfect strangers with his slimy webs of insulting banter? Life is hard enough for a waiter or a paper seller without some old fart spewing riddles at them, trying to “get a rise out of them” as he puts it. Someone should tell him that people would rather they’d never seen him, they’d rather he was dead, or annoying somebody else. He thinks it gives him some kind of personality, a lovable eccentricity, a quirky kind of old-folksy charm, when it just
