AWKWARD MOMENT ///Paul Watsky

YBOR AT NIGHT

///Catherine Traina

///Paul Watsky

Early evening, most everyone having left the beach, my father and I, seated among low sand dunes, face

the ocean, silent until he blurts, I don’t want to die, and starts crying a little. He’s in his later

70s, seems healthy—actually has half a dozen further years—and, unlike Mother, doesn’t manufacture

scenes. Now at 70 myself I’m still trying on what’s best to tell one’s parent: There, there,

Dad, don’t worry your head. Proffer a religious fairy tale? Bluster and deny all the morbid

possibilities? Maybe he intuits the esophageal carcinoma, incubating from generations of dental

x-rays he’s performed, unarmored against obsolescing leaky machines. It wasn’t an especially pleasant finish:

pipes encircled by muting neoplasm, terminally fuzzed out on hospice meds. I said little there

or at our seaside preview where I gave him a hug, like

he was my child, and today realize could have thrown

in, I don’t blame you. Which mightn’t have helped but would at least be true.