Chapter One of Ran Kime’s Psychological Coming-Of-Age Tragedy Novel. Continue to the full book page for details, formats, and purchase options.
The High Place That Forgets Nothing
My father died on a park bench in Boston when I was seventeen. They said he froze. Found him early morning, stiff, eyes half-open like he’d gone in the middle of a thought. I remember being told. I remember nodding. I couldn’t find it. Just stood there holding the pay phone and felt nothing.
I didn’t know yet that this was practice.
That I was learning how to survive the next one.
We lived on Montcalm Ave in Ardlynn Hill, just outside Boston. The kind of place people called safe as long as you didn’t look too close. If something went wrong, you didn’t call the cops. You called someone who knew someone. Or you handled it yourself.
Across the street lived Shawn Burling. Everybody called him Scooter. His old man dropped dead at the kitchen table one night — heart gave out before the plate hit the floor. Then Bruce moved in. Stepdad. The kind of guy who never smiled unless he was drunk or lying. After that, things in his house shifted. Not all at once. Just enough.
We were playing street hockey in front of his house that afternoon. Buckets for posts. Bedsheet for a net. Bricks from Mrs. Byrnes’s garden holding it all together. When a car came, you yelled “CAR!” and everybody froze. Everyone respected that.
Except Bruce.
You could hear his Datsun before you saw it. Muffler rattling. Engine dragging. Like the thing didn’t want to be alive.
He rolled up slow, edging his bumper into the net like he was herding something. Revved once. Just enough.
“Fuck him,” I said. “He can go around.”
He didn’t. He smiled, not normal, something already off behind it, and dropped it into drive.
The sheet wrapped around his tire. Bricks cracked. He dragged the whole thing into his driveway like it was trash.
Scooter froze. Didn’t yell. Didn’t move. He already knew what that smile meant. What was waiting for him later.
That was the moment I understood something lived inside that house.
Dad heard the noise and came out. “You boys alright?” Saw the buckets. The sheet twisted in the tire. Didn’t ask anything else. Just stepped off the porch.
Bruce saw him coming and tried to roll up the window. Too slow. Dad grabbed the glass and ripped it out. It shattered in his hand. One punch. Clean. Bruce folded sideways in the seat like something unplugged him.
Everything stopped. Kids. Noise. Air.
Dad leaned in, said something low enough that only Bruce heard it, then walked back across the street like it was already over. Blood dotted the pavement behind him.
He went into the garage. Came back out with tools. Built a new net right there in front of Bruce’s driveway. Two-by-fours. Screws. Fishing net. Extension cord running across the lawn. The drill whining as he worked.
“Let’s see him hit this one,” he said.
We stood there watching. Not saying a word. Not fully understanding what we were seeing. Just knowing it did.
When he finished, he stepped back, looked it over, then turned to us.
“Well,” he said, “I just showed you how to do it.”
Gave me a wink. Spit in Bruce’s direction. Went back inside.
Bruce didn’t move.
That night I lay in bed staring out the window. Couldn’t see anything. So I filled it in. Bruce at the table. Face swollen. Trying to chew through it. Flinching every time he forgot and took too big a bite.
After that day, every kid on the block wanted to be like my father.
So did I.
Dad told me to fear no one. He was the kind of man people stepped around without realizing they were doing it. Tough, sure. But that wasn’t it. It was the way he carried himself. Like nothing outside the house mattered unless he decided it did.
Inside, it was different. He didn’t say much. Didn’t need to. Love came in nods. In small things. In the way he’d reach over while driving and grab the back of my neck and ask, “You good?”
That was enough.
The guidance counselor called a lot. Broken nose. Split lip. Some kid crying in the locker room. She’d ask why. I had answers: because backing down makes you prey, because the kid said something about my mother and it wasn’t wrong, because if I didn’t hit him I’d cry instead. I said, He started it. She wrote it down like it meant something.
I was nine and already learning the truth didn’t matter as much as the version people could live with.
Drinking ran through our house like wiring. Beer meant a quiet night. Wine meant music and slow dancing in the kitchen. The hard stuff meant I disappeared. Not out of the room. Inside myself. Found the switch early. Still have it. Still works.
They weren’t violent with each other. Not exactly. But alcohol warped my mother. Sharpened her voice. Hollowed out her eyes. My father would let it go until he didn’t. Then something broke. Drywall. A door. Whatever was closest. Next morning, patched over like nothing happened.
That was the first lesson. People don’t leave. They change. Disappear while they’re still standing in front of you.
I didn’t understand any of that yet. I just knew what I saw that day in the street. How everything stopped. How one man could decide another didn’t matter — and nobody stopped him.
Lying in bed that night, staring into the dark, I kept replaying it. Not the punch. What came after. The room he took out of the air. The silence he left behind. The way everyone else got smaller once it was over.
I wanted that.
Memoirs of the Felmed Coof
Psychological autofiction novel | Coming-of-age | New England
Memoirs of the Felmed Coof is a dark, psychologically intimate coming-of-age novel set in the working-class shadows of New England. Memoirs of the Felmed Coof follows Shane McAlister as grief, loyalty, addiction, and violence quietly shape the man he is becoming. Parents fade. Friends fracture. Love arrives with conditions. Memory becomes unreliable—not because it lies, but because it protects.
Written as autofiction, the novel treats truth as elastic rather than sacred. Timelines blur. Names shift. What matters is the emotional residue left behind. This is a story about survival without heroics, growing up without guidance, and the slow accumulation of damage that feels ordinary while it’s happening…..Step into the novel
Paperback · 6×9 · 550 pages · ISBN: 979-8-2955-1318-3
Books by Ran Kime
For readers of dark literary fiction and Boston noir.
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