Dad says he saw you at the mall

by Ken Sparling

The fictional Sparling is a more than slightly befuddled everyman. He works in an office where people appear to do nothing but shuffle paper and carry boxes of files from one room to another. He's married to Tutti, who spends her evenings engrossed in reruns of Star Trek, and whose bedtime ritual consists of constructing food charts for the next day's meals. He looks back on his parents failed marriage with no small measure of regret. And - most important - he is father to Sammy, the little boy upon whom he lavishes all the seemingly boundless affection he's able to summon from the depths of his quietly aching heart. In his attempt to find his place in a banal and sometimes not very pretty universe, Sparling seeks solace and validation not only in his interaction with his son, but also in language - a language all his own that is by turns repetitive, imagistic, even hallucinatory. He tells this traditional story in a very untraditional way by reciting interior monologues, spinning anec