“Wait till your father gets home! Just you wait!” Mrs. Gandhi was so angry
with her eldest son she could hardly speak. Her voice skipped up two octaves up and with eyes flashing she continued. “Smoking cigarettes in the train station all day and not going to school! Have you no respect! Have you no shame? And drinking! Oh what will become you my son, when you have nothing! And nothing is all you shall have without an education!”
“I am so angry with you Harilal I can hardly speak at all!!!” Wait till your father The
Mahatma gets home! He will beat you severely, which is what you so deserve!!!
“My dad beat me,” thought young Harilal Gandhi,  “like that’s going to happen.”

by-Doug Mathewson

*Sadly Harilal, oldest of Mahatma Gandhi’s four sons did not follow a life of political activism as his parents and three younger brothers did. His alcoholism and depression led to his arrest on numerous occasions for public drunkenness,  promoting prostitution, embezzlement, and fraud.

Not a woman’s way, not like that. My deer rife, and her half-pint.
Both still on seat.
Way out there by herself. Pills you’d figure or a blade in the tub.
But not like this. First shot you’d think would’ve spooked her.
Her being alone and taking out the back window like it did.
Must of made a hell of a noise.

But she never would back off, that was probably half her problem.
Other half ran deeper. Old and dark, dark as night. Ran that way all her life.
Troopers found her upstate, out there by the lake.
Her pickup hidden by the trees.

Gotta say, always worried, her being my little sis and all.
Guess I can stop my worrying about her, use what I got left
for her kids.

by-Doug Mathewson

Deep within the Mall’s  Barnes & Noble Box, in the corner dubbed Starbuck’s, panning through the droning monologue you think is conversation, I caught your phrase “could never sleep with him, not with teeth like those.” By the time I could conjure up a vampire joke, our conversation has moved on.

by-Doug Mathewson