Growing up on a farm was never easy, and I suppose living on it now sure isn’t much easier. My Father, he used to breed racehorses out on the third field, the pretty girls came and rode them. I watched them out my bedroom window – even from a distance the sun used to bounce off their blonde hairs and hit my curious eyes and the wall behind me.
A while ago my Father found out I’d be stealing dope from the tin under his bed, bud by bud by bud went unnoticed until he saw the little finger marks in the dust. My Mother knew because I had the same red eyes my Father used to get. They both used to argue and I used to sit at my bedroom window.
But that was back when they used to talk, before he found out my Mother was screwing with one of his star jockeys. He went down to the stables one night and got fucked on ketamine, then he took the gun he used to put down the horses with and put down the jockey. That night? I sat on the yellow roof of our house and smoked my Father’s weed as I watched him get carried away by the Police. The moths danced around the bright cherry ash.
My Mother was never really the same after that. She never visited him in jail, t’was as if he was never here. At dinner once I asked her why she did it, all she said was: “Do you know we have twenty one stairs in that stair case of ours? I used to count them every time your Father threw me down them, and I counted them every time I came home in the dark from fucking around at 3 o’clock in the morning.”
And since that night…even 5 years on, I still prefer the view from the yellow roof rather than the bedroom window below.
