I'm certain that his blood was

in the painting,

on the painting,

dashing through and out the painting;

I know when his ear came off

the blood was on the brush

he smushed into the canvas.

My father used to drive for one hundred and forty miles on the oceanic freeway in order to pick up fresh avocados from this dusty Mexican flea market, ten minutes outside the bronzed town of Ovoya. He spent an hour and a half driving there, sweating, and another hour and a half driving back; he'd drive there with the sun in his eyes, rising on the horizon, then return when the sun was just sinking low enough into the night so as to blind him on his way home. Feeling miserable both ways, Dad would stink and melt into the leather car seat in his little silver bullet until he climbed out at the flea market, embarassingly stained beneath the armpits, soaked through in the back, and a ring around the protrusion of his belly where the stuff pooled as he sat. He spent the next half hour wandering around in that desert of tents and ancient pickup trucks, looking for the stand that would sell him the best avocados. The stand was always moving, the owner a particularly swarthy hispanic who spoke better English than I did at the time.

Dad would buy the avocados and bring the home expressly to please my mum. But each time, in the trunk of the car, without fail, five-o-clock in the afternoon, coming home on the oceanic freeway, those avocados would roast and turn brown and shrivel up like figs. So mom never did get to taste them.