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who writes poems and stories and essays has lived to take advantage of the dead.
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The war staggered on, but my deferment advan- tage survived. A few years after the shootings, while I was writing my dissertation, I became old enough to store my draft card in a drawer as a sou- venir. I was still teaching at the Penn State branch campus, still manning three thirty-five students per class of Introductory Composition. After1 a few months, not one of those students asked about the National Guard. What’s more, not one ever mentioned it in the thousands of essays I read before I left for another position.
One morning, the local newspaper carried a story about a son killing his father in self-defense. The father ran a karate school in a town near the campus. He was a certified and much-decorated expert, and he had seen to it that his son was an expert as well. When their argument went out
of control, they’d fought, using all of their karate skills, and the son, the student who’d written that extraordinary war experience essay during my first term, had finally strangled his father with nunchucks because, he explained, “My father would have done the same to me.”
I reread the story as if I could discover something I’d missed about what sort of disagreement would lead to a father and son fighting hand-to-hand to the death. According to the story, they’d battled for nearly an hour because their mastery of self-defense was so evenly matched. At once, I knew it was a story I would use.
By then I had a wife, an infant son, and a small house that was surrounded by nothing more than rhododendron bushes. For a few moments, I sat in the safety and quiet of a newspaper and a cup of coffee while considering which details could seed a story or a poem. And now, after forty-eight years, whether with selfishness or gratitude,
I need my dead friend’s widow to know that I walked to where my wife and small child were sleeping and listened to them breathing.
Fincke’s new essay collection, The Mayan Syndrome, will be published in May by Madhat Press. Its lead essay “After the Three- Moon Era” was reprinted in Best American Essays 2020. Besides “On Exploitation,” other essays from the collection have appeared in such places as Kenyon Review Online, Shenandoah, Quarterly West, december, and South Dakota Review.
"Ireread the story as if I could discover
something I’d missed about what sort of disagreement would lead to a father and son fighting hand-to-hand to the death."
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