Tough Guy

He remembers his father's concrete slab hands. Balled into fists they resembled kettlebells. The man was born to fight and those doomed to that life doom anyone in their orbit who want anything else. He remembers his mother, remembers her red and blue butterfly chest tattoo as much as her face. The sound of her voice an amalgam of the women he's come to know since. In the gentle grasp of what have been described his whole life as piano fingers, his newborn daughter gawks with eyes he's stared into a million times before and a million more to come.