Sins of a Father [Cam]

Cat Stirling-Izar


Nothing prepared me to see family everywhere I went, but that painful reality was repeatedly banged into my head in an almost migraine-producing crash day after day after day.

I expected to see my Stirling siblings, and even then I scanned the crowd for little Carmen’s head bopping around wherever I went. But they could never follow me into a bar. Getting out, getting sleazed and drinking something stronger than the cheap hooch we pawn off on those Good Wholesome Family Men was a release from my unending duties as caretaker and guardian. Some nights in that hole in the wall were spent smashing glasses of liquor in some punk asshole’s face, as great a stress burner as any candle wick. Other nights were slower, perched at the far end of the bar, ordering a few rounds, spinning a record I’d like to hear over the usual taste in “music” supplied inside, and slipping out without speaking a word past the bartender.

Who I did not expect to see were any of the intricately tangled clump of wet hair that was Izar palooza. No amount of conditioner undid their knots and the few loose ends that fell to the sides frayed out across every branch of the district and what I assumed was many other districts as well. I found myself woven right in, my own loose end, and since then could not seem to run far enough away to not bump into another. And if they weren’t in my immediate field of vision, one of them probably played across a T.V. screen in some form of recap. They were everywhere.

Including in the shitty bar I deigned my safe haven.

Vasco sat a few stools over from me, no one between us, drinking a whiskey and talking to himself. For someone who wanted to run our District, he didn’t seem all there. Dreamy. Clouded. “At least this is strong, yeah?” I stood corrected; he was at least somewhat based in reality. I sat staring down into my drink, a blurred reflection of hair and skin swimming to the sounds of what stank of banjo. I stared for as long as I could, before the watered down gimlet settled and the vein along my forehead pulsed, and I waved over the bartender. “What he’s having. Two. Double.” I nodded at Vasca, I cursed at myself, and I looked him square in the eye. “I’m not voting for you. I don’t care that you’re my half second cousin or my step-uncle once removed or whatever the hell it is.” The man behind bar slid two glasses towards us. I picked mine up. “Cheers!”

Cat Stirling-FuckIzars

Pleasant as the day winter leaves, Vasco was full of shit. That first warm day after a brittle cold was always a sham, enough warmth to get my hopes up even though I knew tomorrow would be cold and miserable again. The real spring came later, after another freeze-over, and the real Vasco later yet.

He met my cheers and we tossed our drinks back in unison, but before mine burnt the back of my throat his voice cut through my ears. I barely had time for my own bullshit; there was no amount of money he could pay me to make time for his. My sisters and I did not need him, and my brothers didn’t either even though he didn’t seem concerned with them. To leave them out after literally just mentioning family was a sign he was deep in his political agenda, unaware of the actual issues, hyper-focused on recruiting votes.

I turned to the bartender. “Two more, on him.” Smiling back toward the jackass I was stranded with on drunk entitlement island, I laughed. “You think you’re gonna win me over with booze and kindness? Let me tell you something about me, buddy, I’m not your family just because we’re related. Family is earned.” My smile left and I looked at him with resentment pooling in my eyes. “It takes blood, but not the kind in my veins.” The bartender slid us two more, and I scooped Vasco’s and took them both back to back. A heavy breath as I chilled my esophagus, and I looked at him once more.

“It takes blood spilt.”

I didn’t care to listen to the drollings of an old pompous ass. I didn’t even listen to his speech for mayor. In fact, when I found out he was running, my first reaction was “fuck that” followed by several dramatically huffy breaths. My feelings on the matter hadn’t changed much, and if they had at all it was not the kind of change that Vasco wanted. Not that Vasco had any inkling of what changes I wanted to see. Not that he had any inkling of who I even was. He saw me the way all older men saw me: angry, volatile, in need of taming. (Usually a ‘hot tamale’ or ‘sexy youngin’ were thrown in the mix, but I didn’t think he was that fucked up.) A bonfire raging in a rainstorm, something that shouldn’t be but was, something to be put out.

He would not stamp me out with his patient words and caution. No man would.

“What is it that you want here?” What did I want? I wanted an easy life, or at least as easy as it came in district eleven. Not for me. For the rascals back home, setting fires in our dusty basement and slinging jars of pee at the walls of old pricks who looked down on us for being. For breathing. The bartender read my expression and poured me another. I threw my head back and gulped.

“I want what you want, old fart,” and I could feel my words slow themselves midway through, a spinning top rolling in my head, and that last drink was probably overkill. So, reasonably, I held up two fingers to the man who basically became our personal liquor pourer in the time that we’d been talking. He obliged with a cautious face, and the bonfire grew amidst the weather. “I don’t…” I stopped and placed my hand on my chest, the wrong fire tickling my throat. “I don’t want to worry about them.” A belch roared straight into his face, and I tapped my chest again to calm it. Acid reflux could eat me. “About my family.”