Years after I moved to New York to pursue a career in fashion design, I went back home. My father showed no emotion, but he took sick a year later and sold the company to Tyronne. Quickly, I switched off the lamp, slipped on jeans in the dark, and left the house to meet my friends. I don’t know if he saw me, in front of my mirror in a calico dress I’d bought at the thrift store on Carrollton Avenue. I was in my bedroom one night, alone I thought, when I sensed Tyronne near the door. “Can’t stay wrapped in what you come from,” he’d say. Yet, whenever I asked him about his past he just placed a hand on my shoulder, a situation I very much enjoyed, and chuckled. I had the impression that he had lived a hard life somewhere else. My father was in his sixties and needed someone who would really put his back into the work. Still, I grew tired of spending my weekends hunting vermin. The males sipped nectar on swamp azaleas while the females built houses with their mouths. Berthelot’s attic-I was the first to guess and was nearly always right. Whenever we came across something we’d never seen before-like that bellows-shaped mud nest in Ms. Teeny tiny scratch marks on a pantry shelf were the sign of a mouse, for example.

I was a pretty good bug man in my teens and could tell what the infestation was by the faintest clues. I certainly never told him about my proclivities. I found insects disgusting, but it was just me and him, so I did my best to keep my objections hidden. My father named his bug company “Stevens and Son” even before I came into the world. A recipient of an Iowa Review Award in fiction, he has been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, the Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. Ruffin is the author of We Cast a Shadow, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Open Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The following is excerpted from Maurice Carlos Ruffin's new story collection, The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You.

Maurice carlos ruffin we cast a shadow