Don’t Ever Ask Me Again
Nate Halda

Well, when I was eight, I was left at a gas station in Beaver, Utah. My mother didn’t realize I was missing. The attendant called the police and they picked me up. That was the first time I rode in a cop car.
And when I was twelve, my dad took me out of school early to go to the art galleries at Balboa Park. I had been begging to go there for weeks.
“No phone calls, no sports radio,” he said. “Today’s all about you, bud.”
We stood and stared at Rembrandt’s St. Bartholomew for a while. I leaned in close to get a better look and my dad asked what a bearded man holding a knife had to do with God.
Before I went to bed that night we made plans to get breakfast the next morning. He told me he’d wake me up at seven.
“We’ll go to that place with the omelets you like,” he said.
I woke up the next morning at seven-forty five. He had moved out in the middle of the night.
So yeah, you can say I have abandonment issues.