The tall grass grew brown in the summertime. Or perhaps more accurately, it was golden-brown. Armies of stiffened blades swayed and hissed in a wind that rolled unfettered across the hard, flat lands of the far northern state.

My father had a new wife, and she was gentle with me. She tried her best to connect with me, but I’m not sure I knew how—so accustomed was I to the more chaotic forms of motherly love. My mother’s love was a surf zone, violent pulling and tugging that at times left you breathless with affection, drowned in a thrashing and clumsy attempt to convince you not to leave this time. A curious mixture of good intentions and bad results that often made for strange children.

I was one such strange child. I was afraid of everything.

Back home, every bump and bruise had been cause to stop everything and fall into triage mode. My mother over-medicalized everything. I didn’t have a sore throat—I had strep. I couldn’t just have an angry red scrape—I had to have cellulitis. This was viral. That was bacterial. Say, ah! Oh, dear—now that’s not good, is it? The world was an unclean and scary place when I arrived at a pale yellow house flanked by golden grass all around. The tall grass waved and danced, holding on to just enough spring to remain supple and compliant, flexible in a way I hadn’t the slightest idea how to mimic. Nor had I the desire.

My father would tell me to go outside to play. I wouldn’t. Gentle of temper, at least with me, he tried insisting. Kids are supposed to play outside, after all. I wouldn’t. Instead, I’d go on a buck-toothed, high-pitched rant about all the things that were waiting to kill me out there.

“I’ll get bit by a rattlesnake,” I’d say. “Gored by a deer. Stung by a yellow jacket or swarmed by fire ants. You remember that time when I was a baby, and I was sitting, unbeknownst to little old me, on top of a nest of fire ants. They climbed all over me, thick enough you couldn’t see a single inch of skin. Momma had to run over and grab a can of gasoline to pour over top of me to get ‘em off. I almost died.”

Little blue copies of my mother’s eyes grew wide and bug-like, staring up at my dad.

He didn’t laugh.

“That didn’t happen,” he said, shaking his head. “Now go outside.”

I didn’t. For the first bit of summer, he let it slide.

On days when I wouldn’t ride into town with my father, taking long straight country roads to Grand Forks Air Force Base—where I’d stare unblinkingly with my neck cocked at an unnatural angle and my tongue hanging out, hoping to convince the gate guard that my father had a child’s dead body in the back seat—I would stay back with my new stepmother.

I was suspicious of her. Needlessly. Offensively. Every time she’d make something to eat for me or my stepbrother, I’d watch her like a hawk.

“Did you wash your hands?” I’d ask.

Good-naturedly, she’d say she had. She even chuckled at the beginning. I’d watch her cook, too, careful to keep an eye on her supposedly clean hands for any signs of trickery. I was convinced, for some reason that made perfect sense in my addled nine-year-old brain, that she was going to poison me.

She’d try to get me outside as well, though with less fervor and exasperation than the talks from my father would devolve into. She’d tell me about the fun things she and her siblings used to do in the tall grass. They’d go “prairie dogging,” which is to say that a pack of marginally organized children would run about annoying prairie dogs until they disappeared into a maze of underground holes.

I had no intent to go prairie dogging. They were out there, and out there had too many dangerous things: spores and germs and bugs and Lord knows what else. The grasshoppers had wings here, for Pete’s sake. No, thank you. Hard pass. Over my dead and still somewhat malnourished little body.

My father locked me out the next day.

You can imagine how that went over. Panicked and enraged, I hammered little fists against the door. I pulled and wrenched on a handle that wouldn’t give a degree of rotation. Then I saw the blinds of a nearby window move just enough to see my father’s eye. He closed the blinds and went deeper into the house. The door stayed locked.

I paced an anxious circle around the pale house, looking for a way in.

The windows were closed tight. I jogged around back to the small concrete patio and harassed the handle. Nothing. Still locked. I traipsed back toward the front, eyes sliding against the other side of the house. Still nothing. It was a castle with siding, its bridges all drawn up. Only, there was no moat full of alligators. There was only the tall grass and whatever monsters lurked within.

I retreated from the hissing fields and ended up sitting on the small front porch, angry and contemplating the cruelty of my father’s act. Didn’t he know how dangerous it was, locking a small child out on his own like this? Probably didn’t care. What if someone kidnapped me? How would that make him feel?

I traced the gravel driveway with wide eyes and imagined a rusty van screaming down the hard pack, sending a plume of dust into the air as its tires slid to a halt. Two men with masks would pop out the side, while one stayed in the driver’s seat to make a quick getaway. They’d grab me and drag me back to the van, wrestling my little thrashing limbs inside. I shuddered. Add it to the list.

How bad would he feel if that actually happened? How stupid would he look then, locking me out to go play? What a silly way to lose a perfectly good son. I glared out into the tall grass, knees curled up to my bony chest, skinny arms crossed and stacked atop scrawny legs. I sat there for a long while. Eventually, I grew bored.

I paced some more circles around the yellow-sided house, these ones slower and more curious. I stopped looking for ways to breach the airtight fortress and, instead, began to just look at things. I saw places where individual pale planks were trying to pull away from their stacked companions, the beginning of a rebellion against the house’s edifice. I saw gaping maws of wire-covered vents for who knows what, yawning mouths only partially prepared to keep the largest of critters out. There was a cantilevered basement door, which I gave a wide berth—having not the slightest idea or interest in what kind of thing could lurk within. I was bored, I wasn’t crazy.

Eventually, I grew bored with the laps, too.

I sat back on the concrete steps and reexamined the tall grass, just beyond the mowed space, making a low, neat perimeter around the house. I stood up and walked out close to the perimeter. I’d take a deep breath, but each time I’d work myself up enough for my first foray out into the stuff—with all the intensity and melodrama of a non-swimmer preparing himself to dive down deep into dark water—I’d see something move. Then I’d lose my nerve, running and screaming back to the concrete steps, where I assumed the door was still locked.

Then, one time, I made it out into the tall grass. It wasn’t far, and it wasn’t long, but I breached the skin of the golden-brown barrier and plunged into its depths at a dead sprint, fists knuckled for the briefest of moments. Then I was running back to the steps, breathing like a steam engine and looking over my narrow shoulder at the organized band of rattlesnakes that, having taken notice of my reckless act, were giving pursuit—or the flights of grasshoppers and yellow jackets who had formed a temporary alliance and were swarming my way at that moment to drop platoons of deadly fire ants upon me. Only this time there’d be no life-saving gasoline and—

And nothing happened.

I worked up the nerve to venture out again—this time a little longer and a little farther. I ran hard, hands stiff but open, brushing against golden-brown stalks that seemed to lean into me, laughing in the North Dakota breeze. They didn’t seem to be hissing anymore. It sounded more like a thousand—no, a million—collective sighs. A part of me sighed along with them.

And I felt the weight of a world turned too heavy slough off of too-narrow shoulders for a time. It was a temporary relief, to be sure, but it was real, and it was kind. I could breathe, and I could run. I could laugh, and I could play. And the world felt childlike for a handful of merciful weeks.

I ran tall and fast out deep into the tall grass for I don’t know how many days that summer. But I know they were too few for my liking. I know that the summer grew short faster than I would’ve liked and, before I knew it, I was back in Kentucky and winter was setting in. The cold, ugly kind that climbs deep into your bones without any promise of things like white winters. And the world grew heavy again.

Sometimes life is like that, though. Not all the world can be blanketed in tall grass. But a locked door can be a way out on occasion.

Happy Father’s Day, you old goat. And thank you for caring about me.

I was being swallowed up by a place that was supposed to be familiar. I watched as dilapidated buildings slid over my windshield like crooked teeth in a mouth full of hate. Shotgun houses—with siding that curled and porch awnings that pitched and slanted like the grins of idiots—watched me make my way down the lane in my little rental car. Ditches that I’d always thought of as too deep for such a narrow street flanked me on either side.

Memories of swimming and splashing in them with the other poor kids bubbled up from the deeper parts of my mind. Summer rains would flood the storm drains with water like chocolate milk and we’d try not to get sucked into the culverts. We’d emerge from the muddy water, into the overcast heat, peppered with leeches whose anesthetic mouths kept us clueless while they planted razored kisses all over our sunburned bodies.

For better or worse, this street was home. At least, it had been. Over the years, I’d managed to run far from it in just about every way that could matter. I’d kept off the drugs—the hard ones that bloom sores across sunken cheeks and lead to shrunken teeth like the withered smiles of jack-o-lanterns left too long in a Kentucky sun. I’d managed to stay out of jail and prison—an anomaly in my family and neighborhood. I had even, through joining the military, escaped the type of crushing poverty that sits heavily on people’s chests, making it hard to breathe. I’d felt that feeling before, but never quite understood it. The air was free, after all. It was having a dream that would cost you.

I got the call by way of a text message, the one we’re all destined to get, provided we live long enough to answer the phone: Last chance to say goodbye. She’s going down fast. I didn’t want to say goodbye, though. I didn’t want to come back to this place, return to a world that I’d managed to claw myself out of—not because I was ashamed. The time for shame over such things had long since passed in my life. It’s just that, to me, it’s always been better to look forward rather than to dwell on the past—to focus on what could still yet be instead of stirring up all the things that have already gone by.

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The first time I heard the phrase white flight was during a gen-ed course on American History. The kind but dusty old professor tossed the word out there in passing like we were all supposed to know what it meant. Then he clicked to the next slide, and he rambled on. I’d only recently begun attending college, after a decade spent in the U.S. Navy, and I sat surrounded by mostly twenty-somethings who nodded along in understanding. I didn’t understand the phrase, though. In fact, I’m confident I had never heard it up until that point. So, I raised my hand and asked the professor what it meant.

He explained to me that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, white families fled the cities to get away from black and brown folks. Then, he clicked for the next slide and rumbled along like an old locomotive cutting a familiar track. Meanwhile, I was thrown into the past, my imagination grinding its gears until I was back in the only place I recall my family ever managing to escape.

It was a single-wide in a run-down trailer park, choked with overgrown weeds and crisscrossed by underwhelming gravel thoroughfares. I remember feeling relief when we said goodbye to that tin-walled tumbleweed, mainly at the prospect of no longer having to flee it each time a tornado siren would scream down the county road. Aside from that feeling, I have only two other memories of that haggard place: when the manager of the mobile home park gave me a concussion, and that time I burned my rear end getting out of a cold bath.

You can be forgiven for not knowing that mobile homes aren’t renowned for their heat retention properties. In the wintertime, in ours, you could damn near see your breath. There was no central heat, and we didn’t have the funds for such luxuries as everyone having their own individual warm bath. On a day when it was my turn to go last, the water was already frigid by the time I got undressed. My mother brought in an ancient box heater and set it as close to the bathtub as the electrical-taped cord could manage. The thing buzzed like a crate of resentful bees from an angry distance that was both too far to be effective and too close to be safe.

I moved like white lightning—in and out of the tub in a blur—sudsing just the important parts of my skinny body before momentarily dunking beneath the chilly water. When I stepped out of the bath, only partially rinsed and chattering, I wrapped myself in a ratty towel and huddled in front of the little heater to warm back up. I inched closer to its orangey glow, jagged electrical wires putting off pitiful heat. The thing was doing its disgruntled best but still could only manage to warm small patches of my body at any given moment. So, I inched closer, rotating like a vertical, voluntary rotisserie chicken. Closer. When my rear end pressed and sizzled against the metal grill that caged the front of the heater, I yelped, and my hands teleported to my backside. As my pale ass flew entirely too close to the electrical sun, I shot into the air in the only version of white flight that I would ever know.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when we finally moved out of that place, but I do remember it feeling like a dream. Nor do I remember how many months passed between the first time I heard the term white flight and the first time a professor used the words white privilege. That felt like a dream, too, though not the good kind. I remember feeling personally attacked— watching all the struggle and effort and sacrifice it took for me to climb out of the squalor and chaos that I had been born into disappear like warm air through the drafty eaves of an old single-wide trailer. Then I remember being very, very angry. These days, it seems like a lot of other people are, too. Maybe that’s a good thing.

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I got the call by way of a text message, and I hesitated. Knowing what was fact and fiction with her had always been hard, especially toward the end. When I was growing up, I never knew if the stories she told about my childhood were real or not, and that had made things difficult then. Now, however, I think I can see what she was up to. Sometimes, when reality is too hard and too flat, a fiction can be a balm of sorts, or—as I discovered in the pages of novels that took me far away—it can serve as an escape route. It can add a little color to drab pages of black and white. It can change the story. At least for a time.

After my older brother texted me, I called the nurse station, and a man who sounded like Foghorn Leghorn answered from two thousand miles away. He laughed and told me that she was doing just fine, that she had been up and walking, and that he had been in her room yuckin’ it up with her all morning—said, “Boy, ain’t she somethin'.” I was inclined to agree.

I hung up, relief filling my lungs like welcome air, and I decided to wait. The next day, my brother texted me again, more urgent this time, and I dialed the nurse station once more. Foghorn-Leghorn answered, but there was no bounce in his words today—no pep in his verbal giddyup. He said it was bad—real bad—"say sorry”. I hung up the phone and bought a one-way ticket, knowing in my heart that I would never make it on time. I’m ashamed to admit that a terrible, miserable part of me was relieved. So, I had to make do with saying goodbye at a river.

Much of the childhood that I’d forgotten, that I’d distanced myself from, caught up to me like some long-lost shadow that I’d shaken loose somewhere along the way. As I drove down my narrow street with its too-deep ditches toward my childhood home, I was hit with a realization that I’d likely always known, at least on some level. It takes a real son-of-a-bitch to convince kids—boys and girls who are, at this moment, growing up in ways similar to my own, and worse—that they’re somehow privileged by dint of the color of their skin.

You have to have a dark heart to snuff out the already weak fires that burn within their sometimes-empty bellies, fires that will need to roar like an angry river for them to even stand a snowball’s chance of making it out of the circumstances they were born into. What type of person would also demand that they add blood debt and back-of-the-line obligation to their non-existent inheritance? My mother died with three hundred dollars to her name, a stack of past-due bills, and a desktop littered with high-interest loan denials. Was she privileged, too?

I said goodbye to my mother at the river, while the muddy waters of the Ohio did their lazy best to slow the flat-bottomed freight trains of floating cargo pushed along by the sleepy barges, because I arrived too late to do it in person. I’m not sure she would have wanted me there, if I’m being honest. Such was our relationship by the time she passed. I stared into that water, and a part of me couldn’t help but see bigger versions of us kids playing and splashing in those chocolate-colored currents. Then I closed my eyes.

The most beautiful thing about a river is that it continues on, and that change is always just around the next bend. Oftentimes, I count it a kindness that some old dead philosopher was correct when he said that no man can enter the same river twice. I said goodbye to her at the river. If there was one privilege I had in this life based upon my skin, it had nothing to do with the color that it was and everything to do with the woman who made it for me.

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