"Drone" by Cody Roggio
I will have one hundred daughters and I will tell them
they can accomplish anything they set their minds to.
I will have one son and I will name him Ambient Night Music. He will grow up to be a professional wrestler and I know this because
I’m going to train him to be one from a young age. If I cannot achieve
my dreams, I’ll have Ambient Night Music achieve them for me.
I text this to Laura and she texts back and tells me
that living vicariously through your children is okay to do
and not at all abusive. She asks if I plan on homeschooling him.
Yes, I say. Ambient Night Music’s schedule will be as follows:
9 – 10 AM: Stretches and Cardio
10 – 11 AM: Chokeholds
11 – 12 PM: Fighting and Wrestling
12 – 12:30 PM: Protein
12:30 – 1:30 PM: Being Mean to People and Lacking Sympathy.
Laura comes over to my house for the first time ever
and we try fucking after five minutes but I can barely get hard.
We try again later and I can’t get hard at all. I assure her more than once that this never happens to me. She pretends to understand
and seems cool with it and leaves but she texts me less and less after that.
Years later during a break between classes, Ambient Night Music
asks me why I want him to become a wrestler so bad. I tell him
it’s so he can live the dreams I never was able to live myself.
He replies, “You wanted to be a professional wrestler?”
I tell him no, no way, what? I wanted to be a filmmaker.
Ambient Night Music looks at me and looks away. He doesn’t understand. I doubt Laura would understand either if she were still here. She’d probably tell me I’m taking this bit way too far.
An alarm goes off on my phone. Time for Chokehold Class.
"Franzen" by Cody Roggio
I know we started reading Freedoms by Jonathan Franzen at the exact same time and I know you put a cute little note at the end of my copy
of it for me to discover one day when I finished it and I know
you really enjoyed the book but I will never find the note because
I’ll never finish it because I was just not as into it as you were
and life is short and I know you know that, and that is why you left me and started taking pole dancing classes in Fishtown and are
apparently becoming what seems to be a Philly burlesque legend
or something, congrats on that by the way, and that is why I will
never find the note you left that I know is there, waiting for me
to finish Freedoms and smile at an adorable gesture,
what could have been our ‘thing,' only one year late.