These Dreams of You

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Zan and Parker have a fight about going out for food. “I’m hungry,” Parker says.

“I’ll run down to the corner,” Zan mutters, “get us some fish and chips.” Parker wants to go to a sushi place a few blocks away, where little dishes circulate the restaurant on a conveyor belt and diners pick out what they want, but the boy realizes this isn’t going to happen tonight. “I want to go with you,” he says instead.

“Stay here. In case—”

“I want to go with you,” the boy insists.

“You need to stay. Someone needs to be here.”

“I want to go!” yells Parker, and Zan realizes the boy is scared too of how at loose ends everything in his young life has come to feel. Zan puts his head in his hands. “Then we’re staying,” he says, immediately ashamed of how petulant it is, punishing his son by making him go hungry. After a while Zan writes a note and sticks it in the door and the two make a mad dash for the grocery store around the corner, buying sandwiches and sodas.