The Powerful Dustin Rodriguez

first day

It was a "busy-ness suit," the one my father would wear when he had no time for all the things that made him human. All his best and most wonderful traits were suffocating under that tweedy cloth.

The business suit was as crisp as a new banknote and dyed to a uniform shade of bleak grey. Above white collar line it was as if his face had been fashioned from those inky dots.

The business suit laid over his skin as a soul-coffin; as if his child self was buried while he wore it all those long hours. Perhaps he tried to dig up that original-self come the evening time, the child self who was born to love and play, but I think over the decades the layers get so deep it was too hard to resurface.

The business suit was cold on waxy skin that craved the sun. When he froze in calculating thought he could have been one of those Madame Tussauds dummies, perfectly chiseled and cold.

He stood there in the aristocratic cutting lines of a great tailor, one who could take his under-exercised and over-