Father used his fists a lot Though never on the kids On the walls and the furniture and the doors and the mailbox and the fence and the neighbors and random people on the street and strangers in the bar and a few times the poor dog and one time on mother He was the childhood’s villain To defeat him one had to become a hero and becoming a hero took time And today after all this time the villain of childhood was dead He died at the hands of some other character, a neutral one A cop who told him to drop to the ground and father didn’t so he got shot That was it The end of his saga Utterly unsatisfactory anticlimactic disappointing just bad There was no final showdown between hero and villain because those things only happen in childhood and childhood had ended a long time…