Battle
Her orange dress and the butterfly hat and the edge of woods. She is saying she built a fort and I am yelling out my window that I’m not allowed out today.
“Bella,” my mother yells from where she is patching Dad’s work shirts in the kitchen, “Get away from that window and back to cleaning up your room—all those pinecones and snake skins are probably crawling with worms.”
We are only allowed to go into the woods as far as the creek, but I see Lizzie’s hat on the other side and know that the fort is out of bounds.
It isn’t long before Mom is back to shouting answers at reruns of Family Feud and I’m out the door, stomping across the creek in my muck boots.
“Who are we fighting?” I ask Lizzie.
I always let her decide—real or not real—though there are dire consequences with both. I hold my breath as she narrows her eyes beneath that butterfly hat and says, “We have a new enemy.” Zombie-parents, she continues, made so from a mutant yeast in their drinks. They blend into the trunks of trees, waiting to bite.
I know where this comes from because I hear Mom telling Dad that Lizzie’s parents spend a little too much time with the bottle. It’s her Dad’s belt that bites, but I don’t let Lizzie know I know this, just like I don’t tell her why my brother’s in jail.
We prepare for battle. I sharpen the ends of sticks with my brother’s old Scout knife, and Lizzie builds a pile of misshaped rocks, choosing only those with enough edges to do real damage.
Sometimes I get to thinking that maybe we’re too old for these games, for butterfly hats, and sharpened sticks, for conjuring up Zombie parents hiding in the trunks of trees. Then I remember my brother’s games in these same woods and I know I’ll follow Bella’s butterfly hat anywhere it flutters, anywhere it goes.
~
Reunion
Jake’s father lives in a cabin off of Route 6 in Potter’s County, God’s Country, a few miles from Steven’s Creek where Jake grew up and from where he fled when he could, fifteen years ago, at fifteen, for a scholarship offer at The Haverford School. Doddering evergreens line the endless gravel driveway that winds around nothing for no apparent reason.
Eventually that nothing turns into a narrow lane at whose end stands his father’s old black lab, tail wobbling, eyes rheumy with cataracts. Jake is back because Old Trimper, his father’s closest neighbor at two miles, left a message on Jake’s answering machine that said, “If that’s you, Jake, you best get on home to see to your old man, and I ain’t sayin’ more. ”
The dog follows Jake inside, the front door hanging open. Inside, spotless, just the essentials—a TV, reclining chair, lamp, side table, kitchen table, some chairs. The back door is hanging open too, so Jake and the dog–Jake seems to remember its name is Thunder–head past the TV and recliner to step out onto a slab of granite.
Worried, finally, Jake calls, “Pops, Pops, I know you’re out there but where?”
A blur of movement among the cones and needles of the pine trees. Thunder barks and, with surprising strength, pulls Jake into the woods.
His old man is leaning on a shovel beside two long–hell, two long graves– the first the length of Jake’s old man, the other shorter and shallower, the length of the dog.
“Old man Trimper thought you might need lookin’ in on,” Jake says, tugging on the shovel that wouldn’t budge an inch. “You been plotting this for awhile?”
“Long enough.”
“Well, my wife and son are back in the old Motel Six, two miles from here, waiting for me to fetch them so you can narrate my childhood. Dex wants to meet Thunder and Minnie doesn’t believe we had two outhouses.”
His father lets go of the shovel unexpectedly, sending Jack toppling backwards into Thunder’s grave. “Looks like Timmy might need Lassie’s help,” his father says.
The dog follows Jake inside, the front door hanging open. Inside, spotless, just the essentials—a TV, reclining chair, lamp, side table, kitchen table, some chairs. The back door is hanging open too, so Jake and the dog–Jake seems to remember its name is Thunder–head past the TV and recliner to step out onto a slab of granite.
*
Later that evening, Minnie scours the fridge for something to add to scrambled eggs while Jake’s old man teaches his grandson how to throw the ball so nearly-blind Thunder can hear where it lands. Jake sneaks out first to inspect the remaining outhouse where he replaces the Sears catalogue with city-style toilet paper from home, and secondly to work up an appetite by shovelling all that dirt back where it belongs.
“Your ‘humble beginnings’ takes on new meaning when you see it up close,” Minnie says to Jake, as she gathers the family for dinner.
“Do you think Dex will want a dog now?” he asks her.
“Dex here needs a dog,” his old man says, as he pulls his chair up to the table.
Dex nudges his chair up close to his grandfather and announces, “I’m going to call him Thunder Two.”
Jake knows what will happen—that Dex will associate Thunder Two with his grandfather, as if Jake’s old man were the one snuggling against him, begging to play ball, rolling over. What choice does Jake have but to let his son have real thunder.
~
Pamela Painter is the author of four story collections, the newest is Ways to Spend the Night from Engine Books. She is also co-author of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, Five Points, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, and Ploughshares among others and in numerous anthologies. She has received grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, has won three Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review’s The John Cheever Award for Fiction. Her stories have been produced in LA, NYC, The Hamptons and London by WordTheatre.
Randall Brown is the author of the award-winning flash fiction collection Mad to Live. His work appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, The Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction, Grey House’s Critical Insights: American Short Story, Best Small Fictions 2015, and The Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction. He blogs regularly at FlashFiction.Net and has been published and anthologized widely, both online and in print. He is also the founder and managing editor of Matter Press and its Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. He received his MFA from Vermont College and teaches in Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program.