> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.fsm.ink/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Masquerading - URL: https://www.fsm.ink/masquerading/ - Published: 2025-06-30T19:42:32.000Z - Updated: 2026-06-03T17:56:40.000Z - Author: Staff - Tags: Poetry, #Import 2026-08-03 09:59 by Kory Kosmicki All of the moms in our neighborhood smoked menthol cigarettes and sent their school- aged children to the Amoco with fistfuls of change, or maybe a small wad of bills to buy their packs. The clerks knew our mothers’ brands by our faces. I was Salem Lights 100s. I fancied the sailboat insignia and the allusion to the Witch Trials. With any leftover dough, we bought candy cigarettes, then smashed all the buttons on the soda machines hoping for free cans of pop to come rolling out: JACKPOT! The year the moms threw a Halloween Block Party, they held it out of doors so they could smoke freely without overpolluting our lungs, though every home had at least one ashtray made by a kid in art class. No dads attended the cheap costume festivities, but not because they were off winning bread. More than one had trekked off to buy his own smokes and never come back. Where do you go? After that? As a father? As a cliché? As a human being? I know now that you go to the bar. Then, I thought you walked the streets for days on end until you found a new home, in a new state, with a different family, similar to the one you’d left, but an upgrade, an alternate universe version of the family you’d deserted. The party got moved indoors due to a storm the moms should have seen coming. Us kids all moaned and groaned because they picked the Lemkul house, the cleanest, but with the worst children: Ricky bit and Tiffany might stab you with a kitchen scissors or hammer you with a meat tenderizer. The Lemkuls’ dad actually lived there: a mathematician, weird guy, pulled his pants up way too high. The moms quieted us by promising they had some big surprise, a grand finale. My pops lived with us, too, but had just returned home from a 15 month stint in the loony bin. It pissed my mom off because apparently they played volleyball and drew with charcoal all day long in the insane asylum, while she worked two jobs. The moms dimmed the lights with glee. Jerry Heinz, the oldest of us, at ten, muttered, “Oh, shit.” Jeannie Kuchler announced, “Stand back, we’re bringing down an escaped lunatic. A real Charlie Manson type!” Even the eight year olds, including me, had seen Helter Skelter on VHS. You couldn’t not piss your pants watching that movie that young. My mom escorted him down the stairs on a leash, him walking on all fours, his hair mussed like I’d never seen it before--my whole life, he’d combed it neatly often throughout the day--blood on his face and hospital gown shirt, frothing at the mouth. I jumped over the back of the Lemkul couch and wouldn’t come out, even though I knew it was him the whole time. “Son. Son,” he cooed, “it’s me, it’s just me. It’s only pretend. I won’t hurt you. I would never hurt you.” I couldn’t believe it, I just couldn’t believe it. All these grown-up years later, I still have a hard time telling for absolute certain what’s pretend and what’s not. > Kory Kosmicki runs a bookstore with the finest citizens in the Fox Cities, coaches for the vaunted Neenah Special Olympics program and directs the guerilla homeschool theatre company The 39 STEPs. He parents four extraordinary children (Felix, Elias, Frances and Rosanne) with his beautiful wife, Sara. Also, he loves to invent sandwiches named after astronauts. Ask him and he’ll invite you over for dinner and make you one.