Time of Quiet

by M.E. Walker

"You two," my father said to my sister and me, "had a quiet childhood."

We looked at each other in shock. In youth we had screamed down the street smacking one another with plastic swords; we clocked the quantity of venom in the grin of each teacher who called us "social butterflies"; we argued at a crazed pitch and then reconciled late at night by way of karaoke.

But then I recalled my father's childhood. Its long hot days in church, its hard beer bottles that emptied into weapons.

And I knew in my bones the kind of quiet he meant.

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M.E. Walker is a queer writer, performer, and educator based out of Texas. His work has previously been published in The Expositor and Cathexis Northwest Press. He can be reached at mewalker199@gmail.com, and is participating in the heat death of Twitter over @texasnotranger.