our last hibachi

he’d feed us when he thought we needed it though we always did though not always because we were hungry we’d sit at the grill and try and recall something to tell someone who instead looked at the meat or rice in the flames of his eyes and sometimes they’d laugh but it was about food cooking and not a story that wasn’t ours and there wasn’t really any flame left in his eyes anyway just unseasoned rice some days I thought I could hear mom remembering a summer vacation we didn’t have through the connecting doors at a neglected motel other days it was the sound of disintegrating pills and I wasn’t sure they were all that different or if either happened at all