Pops lives in a retirement community, like many a community formed in Florida since the 70's, though this one's population is of a mid-sized city's number. And thousands more flock there every year.

"Upper Income" within the gates, their poorer cousins without; pretty insular. And one can't begrudge them, really. They survived the Depression, WWII, the rise of the Corporation Man and his (and thus their) relative subsequent demise...yea, even their Boomer-ed progeny. (Who by the way, may visit with the grands but only for two weeks at a stretch. God, the audible sighs of relief!) In any event, a nice life populated by nice people who, at least think they know each other.

But then The Community's Rules Were Bent. Bent for a lovely old couple harboured within those gates, bowed by bad health and old age. Bent for a caretaker daughter, "handicapped", in the sense of apres an auto wreck, preferring her wheelchair, settlements, and certain greasy slopes that loom when one to government benefits becomes wed.

So the upshot of the elision, the bending of the rules, brought two of their daughter's acquaintance, suppliers of her magic potions, within. Suppliers she had neglected to recompense for wares freely imbibed a few months past. And brought along a bullet to be lodged in her Mom's silvered head, and 56 hammer blows with the copied coup de gras, to her Dad's. For the life insurance, you see.

You can imagine the horror, the shock this dealt to the favoured dwellers esconced within those favoured gates. And talisman like, Pops recounts the tale fetishized in his own ritualistic way.

Now you are probably asking yourself, "Gee that's ...interesting, but how does that relate to this - the fears of an aged Father and Parricide?" Well, rather like this:

Pops has a daughter, Boomer born, who just this year past suffered a nasty existential episode (the what is unimportant). What is to our purpose is that this daughter sought refuge, not with, but by proximity to those who said they loved her most, her wellspring. But one just never knows how events, these unrelated to those, that picked over echo within insulated minds.

And it was realized thus: Pops had created a narrative, a fantasy of a mesmerized daughter and her Svengali-esque lover and that Svengali-like, the lover would suddenly materialize in the now and re-establish miraculous powers over his daughter, and can it even be said aloud?, in an even more filthy way, dispatch him. And Pop's daughter realizes this - Pops regularly states such, makes flesh the fetish. Does he hear what he is saying?

Copyright 2007 R.O.H. Just a Girl

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