Featherless Bipeds by Richard Scarsbrook Page A

but continues glaring at me. “All of her hopes are in you. When you were a baby, she even wanted to name you after the artists she admired.”
    â€œThere’s an artist named ‘Dak’?” I wonder.
    â€œI wanted to name you ‘Albert’,” Mom says in a misty way, “the English form of the name ‘Albrecht’, after Albrecht Durer, one of the most versatile of the seventeenth century masters. Your father, though, thought you should be called Dick, after Charles Dickens . . . .”
    â€œYou wanted to call me Dick ?” I say to Dad.
    â€œ . . . Or David,” Mom continues, “after Robertson Davies. Those were two of your father’s literary heroes. So, we compromised. ‘D’ for Dickens and Davies, ‘A’ for Albrecht Durer, and ‘K’ for Kahlo. Frieda Kahlo, the great Mexican painter.”
    â€œâ€˜K’ for Kafka,” Dad rumbles, rolling his eyes. “Franz Kafka, the great Czech novelist.”
    â€œSo, my name isn’t even a name? It’s an acronym?”
    â€œThe point is this, Dak,” my father says, “your mother, and myself also, I suppose, have put a lot of hope and faith in you, and you can’t just selfishly throw it away by chasing after some immature fantasy to be a rock star.”
    He says ‘rock star’ the way another parent might say ‘drug dealer’ or ‘male prostitute’.
    â€œI don’t care about being a rock star !” I protest. “I just want to be a musician . Why did you buy me a set of drums when I was a kid if you didn’t want me to play them?”
    â€œThat was your mother’s idea, not mine.”
    Mom says nothing. Perhaps there had been a fight over those drums that I hadn’t been aware of.
    Dad picks up his fork, skewers a chunk of fish stick, and jams it into his mouth. He glares past my mother at the gleaming white face of the refrigerator door. His jaw muscles bulge rhythmically as he grinds up his food. Mom’s knife and fork clink quietly against her plate as she cuts everything on it into bite-size pieces, but she does not actually eat much of anything.
    I can’t take this. I can’t take being the sum of all of my parents’ hopes, dreams, and regrets. Charles Dickens. Robertson Davies. Albrecht Durer. Frieda Kahlo. Franz Kafka. Why couldn’t they have just named me ‘Bob’?
    â€œMay I be excused?” I ask. “I’m full.”
    Simultaneously, Mom says, “Yes, Honey”, and Dad says, “Absolutely not”.
    I get up from the table and walk outside.
    My feet carry me up Faireville’s main street, and down a random side street towards the waterfront. I’m not paying much attention to where I’m going. I am thinking about those kitchen table revelations.
    During my childhood and early teens, Dad had been desperate to make a man of me. He bought me a baseball bat and a basketball, boxing gloves, barbells, fishing tackle, a pellet gun, and finally, a pint-sized dirtbike, all in the hope of interesting me in what he considered to be ‘manly’ pursuits. I had always thought he bought me the drums because he considered rock ‘n’ roll manly, and also because, unlike all those other things, playing the drums was something I wanted to do. While the other stuff collected dust in the garage, I rattled the floorboards daily, working up a sweat and eventually even building a few muscles. I was sure it made Dad happy that he’d brought those drums home for me.
    But it wasn’t Dad at all. It was Mom.
    I look up from the sidewalk and realize I’ve taken a wrong turn. Nineteen years living in Faireville, and I’ve happened on to the one side street I haven’t patrolled a hundred times before. It’s more of an alley than a street — a narrow, broken strip of pavement, lined by the back doors and dumpsters behind the stores and restaurants on Main