Dads in Shorts

by Michael Don

It happened the same day I saw two different dads in shorts dropping off  their respective kids at daycare. The car thermometer read 33 degrees and I felt chilled even in my winter coat, hat and gloves. The wind was bitter. Needless to say, the dads in shorts were notable. I also remember it was that day because when I got home from dropping off my kid, there was a dog urinating in my yard in the same spot where from my office window I had watched a different dog urinate just the day before. It was that day I wondered what was so appealing about my yard, and specifically that spot by the evergreen, as a place for dogs to urinate. After the dog finished urinating, not right after the dog finished urinating, but soon after, someone knocked on our door to let me know our fence had collapsed. “Collapsed?” I said, surprised but not shocked. It was an old fence and the wind had been howling. “Yeah, it toppled over. I thought I should let you know.” I thanked the neighbor who looked familiar but whom I’d never met and went around to the side yard to find a section of the fence lying flat in the garden bed smashing the yellow daffodils that had bloomed the week before on a 70-degree day. Finally, I remember it being that day because that night I had a very profound thought that of course was not the least bit profound. Existing in this world will only make sense if you give up on the idea of things either making sense or not making sense, I thought. And then I wrote down the thought and congratulated myself for having had it. The next morning, the day after that day, was warmer and less windy and truly unremarkable. But the day before the unremarkable day, was the day I had seen a glistening metallic vine growing out of the neighbor’s cable box and wrap around their house, and I stared at it for a while trying to determine if I was witnessing something beautiful.

Michael Don is the author of the story collection Partners and Strangers (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2019) and coeditor of Kikwetu: A Journal of East African Literature. His stories and essays have appeared in journals such as Washington Square Review, Baltimore Review, The Southampton Review, and World Literature Today. He teaches at George Mason University.