Scheherazade – XIII — The Matador

I hated my father’s score-settling letters the way some people hate bullfights. Having my father read them out loud to me was an exquisite torture… but I'm the son of a matador.

My father wrote to master the world, to make it obey him. He enjoyed the expression of himself in writing and particularly in writing letters – his turns of phrase, his unassailability there, his ownership of the last word, the seductive bon-bon of the putdown.

The uglier, bloodier letters were often chivalry skirmishes over humiliations, responding to slights real and imagined. He could stick it back to them in words and an envelope, wind the offender in a twirl of lasso and turn his back to acknowledge the invisible crowd.

He’d make the victim stumble, stick swords in him – or her. He would imagine the brute trying to keep up the fight, its head moving slowly from paragraph to paragraph, glassy-eyed, salivating absently in long strands, tracking the executioner with difficulty because of the enormous blood loss.

My father would always be in control, a step ahead in words and ideas, or he’d change the rules or the entire narrative thread unexpectedly, his complete prerogative as write…