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Matthew J. Moffett

Feral Dads

Before heading to bed, Virginia Meyers walks down to the barn to make sure it’s locked up and finds it infested with dads. Dads with beer bellies in grease-stained t-shirts. Skinny dads with tattooed forearms and baggy jeans. Dads with bald spots, leather work boots, gnawing on cheeseburgers and pizza crusts. As she surveys them with her flashlight their eyes shine like raccoons’. There must be thirty or more, but none of them is her own dad, who left when she was six. How their daughters must miss them, she thinks, heaving the door shut and locking it. Tomorrow, she’ll come back with traps.

an empty liquor bottle moonlight spills on the barn floor

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About the Author

Matthew Moffett teaches writing and literature at a community college in rural Michigan. He likes to write at the boundary between characters’ inner experiences and outward reality. Recent work has also appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, and bones.