Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Paris Review

    Reginald Dwayne Betts

    Sep 15, 2019 1 minute

    BLOOD HISTORY

    The things that abandon you get remembered different.As precise as the English language can be, with wordslike and , there is not a combinationof sounds that describes only that leaving. Once,drinking & smoking with buddies, a friend asked ifI’d longed for a father. Had he said , I would havedismissed him in the way that the youth dismiss it all:a shrug, sarcasm, a jab to his stomach, laughter.But he said . & in a different place, I mighthave wept. Said, Once, my father lived with us & then hedidn’t & it fucked me up so much I never thought abouthis leaving until I held my own son in my arms & onlynow speak on it. A man who drank Boone’s Farm & MadDog like water once told me & some friends that there is noword for father where he comes from, not like we know it.

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Paris Review

    The Paris Review1 min read
    Tourmaline
    is a stone some sayhelps put a feverish childto sleep and othersclaim it wakes actorsfrom the necessarytrance of illusion to become themselves again it comes in many colorslike the strange redstone set into the Russian imperial crowneveryone thoughtw
    The Paris Review1 min read
    Farah Al Qasimi
    Farah Al Qasimi’s first photographs were of the dreary New Haven winter: reflections in water, a dead cat, an angry dog. She was an undergraduate at the Yale School of Art, where in 2017 she also received her M.F.A. Since then, Al Qasimi has turned h
    The Paris Review35 min read
    An Eye In The Throat
    My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C

    Related Books & Audiobooks