Free Entry 1, Week 10

I stared at the manhole, anxiously waiting. Knowing they would pop out at any moment. They lived right in front of my house, at night I could hear them skittering around the shit-infested waters like cockroaches tap-dancing across a linoleum floor. Age five, I sit on my trampoline…staring. Bikes and people trample their home, and I know any moment they’ll spring up and ka-ra-te those people into channel 101…the static channel obliterated by our antenna. The large, violet, Tyrannosaurus told me they would. Every day, at 12:30 pm, he drilled that notion into my brain. He did not like un-punctuality. If I missed the day’s lesson, he’d lick me with his tail. Ten good swats across the back, transforming into my father who danced with his belt like drunken snake charmer. The belt was really a gypsy, buckles and bolts clinking together in rhythm-it was hypnotic. Bangles jingled insane harmony, chiming of the Pocahontas and pedophile John Smith that government Disney melted into the brains of children. Dreams, wishes, and love were all fucking lies at that age. Just ask the Falcons about 1998, when they bomb-shelled ATL’s heart and put the dirty-bird to shame, as if its filth wasn’t already bad enough. I had to burn my fan-jersey, watch it rise up in smoke and suffocate the second-star-to-the right: a ladybug trapped tightly in fisted fingers.