When Your Mother is Predator

When I was a child I was afraid that I was being spied on. I walked to school and then home for lunch every day and I was always wary of predators. There was the man with no left arm, the man who sang into a radio, the man who drove by SLOWLY. I would complain to my mother that Daddy Tom was following me. Get the license plate, she'd say. They're probably looking at the dog. We had a Scottish Deerhound. Very rare and yet fittingly picturesque in my mother's suburban fantasy.

I realized as an adult that my mother was the scariest predator of all.