Long Made Short by Stephen Dixon

you and I’m calling your mothers, so they’ll
     be looking for you to scold and I hope give a beating to, so run home quick, you slime,
     for I’m also calling the police.” He was scared what his mother would say and stayed
     away from home till dinner time, and when he got there his mother asked what did he
     do to Rachel? “Nothing, she was up in her window when I last saw her when I was walking
     up the block, so what could I have done to her?” and she said “Did you encourage her
     to do what her mother said you did?—the gang of you, Ben, Willy, Caesar and whatever
     other morons you have out there, though Willy I’m surprised,” and he said “I had nothing
     to do with anything, the older boys were the ones who said for her to do what she
     did, and I just stayed there because they’d stopped and I was walking to the park
     with them.” She believed him but told him to walk away from things like that from
     now on and docked him a week’s allowance. His father heard about it later and said
     he was lying and raised his hand as if to hit him and sent him to bed right after
     supper and took away his allowance for the next four weeks and barred him from spending
     any of the money he made on his own. Rachel’s parents took her out of kindergarten
     and from first grade on sent her by bus—“At a tremendous expense to them too, which
     they can’t afford,” his mother said—to a religious elementary and then high school.
    “So come on, out with it, what are you thinking about so deeply?” his wife says, going
     upstairs, which means she had come downstairs and passed him twice without him even
     knowing it. “Though of course if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay too,”
     and he says “Just some things, decisions, worries—let me first think them through
     a little more before I talk about them. But lots of things are troubling me, you can
     probably see that just from the strained look on my face,” and she says “No, you look
     all right, not smiling but not in any grieved or harried state.” “Well that’s good,
     but it’s for sure not how I’ve been feeling, for I’ve had thoughts running through
     like mortality, growing possibilities of sickness, painful illness, lots of nice things
     to look forward to—goddamn teeth every third week it seems with new problems, not
     to mention the daily reports of a collapsing globe, and my work, or lack of much satisfaction
     and completion in it. Kids growing up and leaving home and what they ultimately have
     to face, though who knows? Maybe they’ll do much better at it than I. And some of
     the terrible things I’ve done to them—you know, we’ve spoken of it—my anger, outbursts,
     pushing them hard, physically a few times, once slapping Sylvia’s face, ranting at
     them a couple of times that I wish they’d never been born or I was dead—that I find
     very difficult to live with. Well, not as bad as that, and the ‘live with’ and ‘was
     dead’ must sound funny, but also some deeper philosophical questions if some of those
     weren’t,” and she says “Like what? I’ve got time,” and he says “Nothing I can really
     talk about clearly right now—those are just floating around; but I’ll nab the buggers
     and get back to you with them later, I swear,” and she says “Good, I’ll be interested,”
     and throws him a kiss and goes upstairs.
    Think about Thomas. Thomas was a new kid on the block, they quickly became friends,
     for a while they also used to meet almost every weekday morning and then pick up Willy
     in front of his building and all walk to school. Then one day Thomas wasn’t outside
     his building waiting for him and wasn’t in school that day and wasn’t outside his
     building or in school the next day and Gordon asked his mother if he could call him
     and did. “Thomas is ill and won’t be returning to school this whole year,” Thomas’s
     mother said, “thank you for calling,”