Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 11/01/23

Hanging Kevin 

I didn’t know until an aunt told me. 
A few years after my family moved away  
out of the neighborhood when  
I was nine. 
  
Different school and different friends. 
But you remember those many cherished bicycle hours 
like an original progenitor.  
  
And they found my friend Kevin hanging in his  
mother’s walk-in closet. 
Discovered by his little sister Veronica, apparently. 
In that unassuming duplex three doors down from our place 
along Bernick Drive.   
 
After their parents divorced  
and a new stepfather moved in. 
My aunt said the new man was hard on Kevin, 
was said to be a mean drunk. 
  
I don’t know if that drinking thing was true. 
I was just a kid. 
  
But I remember my father watching me. 
As though I could be next. 
  
Hearing about hanging Kevin one night after a soccer game. 
Still in uniform, in that Rose Street basement while  
my aunt Marilyn and my father caught up.  
  
I didn’t know what to think or feel or say. 
I was just a kid. 
But the world didn’t seem to care about that. 
  
So I didn’t say anything  
and learned to stay very quiet  
for years. 
  
My father’s eyes all over me 
like a nest of angry 
hornets.

©2023 Ryan Quinn Flanagan All rights reserved.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many mounds of snow. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Cajun Mutt Press, Dumpster Fire Press, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.