Category — Flash Fiction

Dear Papa,

Remember when I was stick-thin? All bones and bruises with a bowl cut? I went to the big old school house, with four rooms and a quarter inch of shellack on the floor. I learned about phonics and Dick and Jane. I watched Ms. Keene every Friday as she drove in her little orange M.G. up to New Hampshire. The rest of the week, I just went home with a head full of nothing and dirty plaid pants.

Do you remember when I was the kid, and we stalked around your filthy ramshackled workshop making little wooden puzzles with your jigsaw. I’d play with them until they broke, or I lost my interest. For some reason, I never painted pictures on them. The color of the walnut stain and shapes of the wood and the grain were enough. More than enough.

After, we’d go to the refrigerator pull out the brown mustard, the cheap liverwurst and the american cheese, and make sandwiches on buttered Wonder Bread. I remember the sound of our chewing in the dusty smokey sunlight. More than thirty years later, and I still smell your Vantage 100 burning to ash in the ashtray and in your lungs. I hear the serenity of a spoon against a department store glass – stirring the generic brand iced tea & sugar before the ice cube could be added.

I was young, and you were too – in a way. Your back hadn’t hunched yet and your eyes were still steely strong. I talked about baseball, and you talked about The Kid. We played with a tennis ball and a stick in your backyard – I was Jim Rice and you were Warren Spawn.

“Always a Braves fan, kiddo, always a Braves fan,” you’d smile.

The ball would slip in a friendly arc through the gentlest evening air – too soft for stars as yet – and land upon the merry swing of that stick.

We both laughed as I ran around the places where bases might have been, then after you’d say, “Spawn.. then Saine … now pray for rain.”

“What does that mean, Papa?”

“Hahahahaha,” a laugh would roll out of your lean strong frame, “Oh Stephan, my back is tired, I think it’s time we go inside and watch the game.”

I did not know, not really, how bad it was for you. How your disks were gone and your back was crunching as you ran. You were tougher than anyone, and I was soft and young and weaker than I imagined.

Inside, I’d sit with the old tarnished door-stop lions and look at your feet. I’d think about the dry dead toe-knuckles and the cracks and the monster-thick nails on every toe but the last – where instead, the nail was just a pebble.

“Papa, Papa, I’ll put some lotion on your feet and they’ll get better.”

You smiled at me, because you knew sometimes things are beyond saving, but you knew that a good heart must true. And I tried. And I tried. And I tried.

Later, when it became obvious how the game against Jim Palmer and the God damned Oriole’s would turn out, we’d go out to get the lottery ticket at the little greek place – I think it was called Massota’s Market. It was on the corner of Main Street and High Street. You’d smile at the old man’s little girl and say, “50 cents on 447 any order.”

“Ok Mr. Fitzgerald!”

Every week, I thought we’d win and so did you. When we did, I’d get a comic book. A super hero comic book with impossible characters wearing bright colors and saving the world from the likes of me. When we didn’t it was just the sweet sadness of a pack of wild-cherry Lifesavers.

Papa, do you remember when you said someday you’d be gone, and I’d be ok. You said it’d be ok. I told you, “No, I can’t live without you and Nana. I can’t.”

You gave me a hug, do you remember? Do you remember how you told me I’d be older and more able to handle it?

When Nana died, you said, “I can’t live without her” and your body shook as you wept and I held you in my arms for an hour or more. I told you, “Somehow, you’ll find a way.”

How we stood there and watched her slip away without slipping away with her, I’ll never know. I thought, perhaps, I was a man. I did not cry. I never cried then. I just held you up and carried you until you could stop your tears and breathe.

Dear Papa, do you remember how cold it was that day when we buried her? Do you remember the hard bright sun and the endless parade of cars and sirens and despair that followed us to Reading where we laid her there to sleep away the world?

I told you, “Papa, I can not live without you, please don’t ever leave me.”

“Stephan, I’m old. I”ll be gone and you’ll go on without me.”

You were wrong you know, there is no going on without you.

Years later, a lifetime or more really, when you died the first time, the doctor in the emergency room said, “there’s a DNR, I can’t do anything without your permission.”

I told the doctor, “yes, yes, please, save him.”

Your heart was stopped, and so was mine. I didn’t cry then either. Not for days. Even then it was only enough tears to remind me that my heart was still there.

You came back and told me, “It’s ok. It’s ok.”

A week later when you got the dying right, I remembered how you told me, I’d go on without you. But I didn’t.

Geez, Papa, it’s been a decade, and your’e still here with me. Your body is rotting in Reading with Nana, but I hear you. I hear both of you. I see you in the dances of the dust in the last long rays of afternoon sunlight. I hear you in every cheap glass as I stir in something sweet. I taste you in every sandwich and I smell you in every cancerous breath of smoke in every seedy bar.

You were wrong. Do you remember when we put the deck on the cottage and it was supposed to last for 40 years. You said, “I intend to be here to make sure it does.”

I want to go check, to see how the pressure treated lumber held up. I want you there with me to laugh at the warping and the cracking and the occassional new planks that had to be nailed in to save it from the world that breaks us all in time.

But even the cottage is gone now. The lake still laps on the blueberry dappled shores, but the concrete walls have broken every year when the ice goes out. The tops of the mountains slide lower every year from wind and rain – and I remember how you told me as we let our worms bob for perch, “These mountains were the top of the world eons ago. Higher, by far, than Everest.”

You’d catch a kibby and toss him back, “Don’t come back. Send a bass instead.”

Do you remember the nights on the dock watching the bats, listening to Ben Oglivie smack the crap out of the ball and us down the standings to irrelevance?

Nana would call down to us over her Seabreeze from the porch, “time to come in boys, the bread pudding’s ready.”

And we’d head up for another sweet moment.

Papa, do you remember me? Who I was? Papa, tell me, who am I?

Love,
stephan

Mrs. Margaret Vaughn adjusted the thick black frames of her spectacles with her thumb and forefinger as she explained, “Happiness is weedlike, once it gets into your life it grows wild and out of control.”

I would be lying if I told you that I listened carefully to her warbling voice. I heard her, mostly, and I thought about what she was trying to say, but rather than respond, I shook my head and walked away.

I didn’t hear or think of Mrs Vaughn again until the day I read her obituary in the Journal. It was oddly juxtaposed next to an article about the Hamilton County Fair and Mr. Thomas Johnson’s prize winning donkey.

I read about her career, her family, her community involvement and her volunteer work helping those with mental handicaps. I didn’t have anyone to tell, to explain, “this woman changed who I am.”

So I let the universe gently shift away from joy and started to shave. The razor blade scraped away little bits of me from me, and I remembered looking at her. My mind wound around those endless hours carefully examining her every curve, the pale of her skin and the revelation of the myriad ways a woman can be beautiful. Yes, Mrs. Vaughn was the reason for a young man’s first knowing  blush.

It just seemed right to head back to where it all started, so I drove downtown and parked my old Buick by a stenchy little fens and a fat man selling cheap balloons. The circus was in town and no matter how vexing a clown might be when a soul is searching for meaning in a unexpected loss, I still smiled at him, and even considered buying a red one from his pudgy fingers.

I wondered if the bones of hope are like Mrs. Margaret Vaughn’s bones, or the picture of a prize winning ass. If hope can hold up a body, or if it means less than nothing at all.

Answers come, sometimes suddenly. I walked up to the wrought iron fence and realized the old library and 4-room school house were gone. The dirt lot on the other side of the wetlands was mottled with weeds and rocks and black rotted remnant of some old shrub-like plant. I stopped, my hand on the  spiky top of the fence , listened as a garbage truck rumbled past.

“Hey boyo, wha’ choo lookin’ at?” some bum in stained blue rags and dress shoes covered in buckles asked from behind me.

“Nothing, nothing at all. Just thinking,” I muttered at him so he couldn’t really hear, then I turned back to my car.

I could hear the bum all scotched-up braying about how good a ciggie would be. There seemed no point to add my words to this pathetic flourish.

I got into my car and drove past the vacant lot one more time. The weeds of happiness weren’t really copulating, and Mrs. Vaughn was still dead. Even all these decades later, the echoes of her body, her bones, her heart and  words were educational.

I never looked back again at that old lot, but sometimes, I think of it – of her.

“Wha’ choo lookin’ at boyo?”

Nothing. Nothing at all. Just thinking.

The wisp of a wannabe flapper with short mousy brown hair wiped away fog from the window. She looked out into her backyard to see the path down which any young woman like her would want to run. She watched the young doe run. She watched the doe disappear when the winds picked up.

She ran her fingers through over her furrowed brow and her scalp. She told herself,”No, no, it’s ok to be bit slow to sit back down.”

“It’s ok,” she told herself as she dropped back down into her worn oak chair. “It’s ok, it’s been an while and the deer’s clearly gone.”

When she was younger, she’d followed that path more times than she could ever count. More times than she would want to count even if she could. But the morning was perfect, and she wanted to forget all those other walks. The morning was perfect, and all she wanted to do was join her cloven-footed friend out in the great somewhere else.

She took a stack of dishes to the sink, and tried looked out that window as she gave each plate a brisk cleaning.

“Goodbye,” she thought. “Good bye deer friend.”

She thought it so loudly, as if she’d never see that doe again. As if the soft brown of her fur would be nothing but a memory and that was that, but the truth was far more mundane and she knew it. She knew that if she waited until tomorrow just after dawn, she’d look out at her apple trees and see the same deer munching away again, even if only for a moment.

She pulled a pack of Pall Malls from her purse, tapped one out and lit it. She pulled the first perfect fog of nicotine into her lungs and let herself go on with a bit of a sputtering shuttering fluttering like an antique lamp.  Cigarettes are cheaper than finding a way to hire a maid, she told herself as she pretended to do a bit of housework to fool herself.

For hours, she sad on the couch, fingering a little hole in the left arm with her pinky and trying not to sob as she worried about hunters killing the deer. A fierce resolve crashed over her. Today was the day.

She dressed in her outdoor clothes – blue jeans, a gray t-shirt, white socks and sneakers. She imagined some 10-point buck hard and ready to deliver his sperm into the most ordinary doe in all the woods.

She got to the door, took a long breath, opened the door and stood there on the breezeless edge of the late afternoon. She shook a little as she listened to a train pass. She took another longer deeper deep breath. She laid a powerless punch into the door frame. She watched a bird – a modest orange bird devoid of tweet or name or perhaps even feet as it flew off into that vast expanse of anywhere.

A tear fell down her cheek, and she closed the door again.

I couldn’t make out what she said, but from the reaction of the cashier, I suspect it was glib. She fixed her collar and paid for the chamois. She glanced at some perfumed called Mystical as she walked out the door past an incoming police officer.

I couldn’t get her out of my head for days, thoughI could remember nothing specific about her except that her hair wasn’t too light and she had long fingernails painted red.

My friend Bob and I were talking over a couple of Buds and some grilled rattlesnake and I tried to explain to him what made her special.

“So let me get this straight, you see some chick in a big chain department stoor, you don’t say a word. Basically, you noticed her butt wiggle and then she was gone?”

“It wasn’t that tawdry.”

“Well, what was it is if you can’t remember anything about her, you didn’t hear her voice, and you can’t even remember her face enough that you think you’d remember her?”

For a minute, I hated Bob. I tried to polish all the soot off my scorched fantasies of this woman, but it was too late. Bob had turned the magical into something plastic. Something without a breath.

A couple of days later Bob gave me a ring and asked how I was doing. There was this mockery hanging in his voice begging me to bring up the woman at the store. But I just said bye and hung up.

I watched suds refuse to parade down my drain. They waited in that midway-place between the sewer and the sky and one by one refused to die without a silent soapy pop.

While they popped, I used a bit of bleach bleach and cold water to pull up a stain from the counter. Then, with my fingers nearly frozen and completely waterlogged, I sat down to read some haiku by Buson.

I was too distracted by the way my hands reeked of dishes and bleach so I gave up trying to read and headed back to the store.

As I walked past, it was the same cashier as the other day spanking down items on the counter and tallying up absurd numbers to share with strangers. The sheer meaninglessness of all of this was plastered on her face, and I knew there was nothing I could do to save her.

I  loitered for a while, bobbed in and out of different departments looking for nothing and no one.

An hour or so later, I left when I realized it was true – she wasn’t there.