[Header Photo by Mike Benna on Unsplash]
“I’m okay. My son’s on his way.”
Joyen heard his father say as he walked up behind him sitting on a bench beside the rail trail he walked every late morning before having an early lunch.
Chicken salad sandwich and fruit. Or twice baked potato soup. When it was colder he’d order decaf and off the brunch menu. Minus any bacon with a soft grunt.
“Race?” The officer was a short, very round Black woman leaning forward and trying to determine if his father was, in fact, okay.
“No race. He was normal.”
Joyen thought the officer’s vest and gun were a bit much for the type of policing she did. He couldn’t stop staring at the gun.
The three of them were still and silent for several moments.
“No. Race.” The officer was tapping her stylus on her tablet when Joyen realized what his father said.
“Dad. Was he white?”
“He was white,” his father said as if Joyen had been there the entire time.
Joyen’s eyes drifted back to the gun as his father gave more description and the officer’s stylus tapped across the screen.
Dark orange hoodie. Black sweat pants. Dirty canvas shoes. The bicycle was way too small for the person who knocked his father down.
His father said that as he was falling he heard the person yell, laughing, “Fuck you, old man!”
“Well, I think I know this person, Mr.—” The officer tapped the tablet screen to scroll up on her form. “King. Mr. King. I’m afraid that’s everything she owns. It was a woman. She has problems.”
Joyen forced himself to look away from the gun. He stepped more to his father’s side and noticed the small knot forming on his father’s temple. Turning purple.
The scrape was glistening. Bloody. A red trickle zigzagged down the wrinkles around his father’s eye.
Joyen turned back to the officer still tapping on her tablet. Over her shoulder, he saw his father’s red ball cap in the grass by the trail.
Neither the officer nor his father had mentioned it.
A crow was pecking through the grass just past the hat.
“Dad.” Joyen rested two fingers on the bone joint of his father’s slumped shoulder. “I don’t think you are okay.”
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 