Written by Lisa Thornton
Your father says he and your uncle taped flashlights to pellet guns to shoot rats in the dump at
night. He tells you when he was living in that house, they drove around town on Friday nights
until they found a parking spot they could drive forward out of because the Ford didn’t reverse.
He laughs about it now, but you can tell how embarrassed he is, really. How he’s made a good
story out of it as a way to cope.
You remember your grandmother’s pin curls and the way she wore dresses and pumps even in
the kitchen making pot roast and pie. She’d tie an apron behind her back, a skill you’d not learn
until you got that job at Musicland at the mall your senior year. She’d press the edges of the crust
into little ‘u’s like the curled up edges of a sweater. A ruffle you could eat.
By the time you got to that house, your father’s parents were tired. They sighed and played
Boggle at the kitchen table next to the dryer with the police scanner on it. There was only one
bathroom, and you lingered to touch your grandfather’s shaving razor, to fuzz that big brush
over your cheeks, and to admire his collection of aftershave bottles shaped like old cars.
Your grandfather sat in the armchair watching Hee-Haw and tamping tobacco into his pipe. The
wooden bird living in the clock over his head launched out of its house every hour hollering
‘CUCKOO, CUCKOO.’ You stood and waited, starting at five minutes before the hour every
hour so you wouldn’t miss it. Your grandfather said he’d tell you when it was about to come out,
but you preferred to wait.
After dinner, your grandmother ashed her cigarette at the telephone table, ankles crossed,
discussing the ailments of people in your family you didn’t know with other people in your
family you’d never met but whose names you’d memorized like famous actors in Hollywood.
One night, you fell asleep on the couch with your head in your grandmother’s lap, your eyes not
quite shut. Your grandfather picked a movie starring two men—one thin and smart, the other big
and dumb. They played in a yard with a girl and a ball. The ball went down a hill and the big
dumb man ran after it and the girl ran after him and they both ran into the street and a car hit the
girl. The big dumb man brought the girl up the hill in his arms and the thin smart man said You
are going back to jail. Your grandfather looked over from under the cuckoo clock and said Is she
asleep and your grandmother said It’s fine and the thin smart man said You’re going back to jail
where all you will get is bananas and water and the big dumb man started to cry.
A one-eyed cat lived in the cellar at the bottom of the creaky wooden steps where it smelled of
cedar and the walls were lined with glass jars of floating vegetables like the fetuses you’d see in
the Museum of Science and Industry. You were not allowed to play in the creek. Some winters
you all went sledding out back, and once you skimmed across the snow toward the busy road.
You didn’t know how to stop and you gripped the plastic edges with your mittens until your
grandfather caught up and tackled you just before the yellow lines and your mother was so angry.
Could have given him a heart attack, she spit and you didn’t know, hadn’t known, anything
about his heart.
When it rained, you and your sister posed metal army men from the bin upstairs in battle scenes
on the floor. Tiny hands pointed tiny rifles at a tiny enemy. Skinny stomachs squirmed across
pine board beaches into fields of European flowers. One marble flicked from the corner scattered
the scene. Atom bomb destruction with an orange tiger eye.
Late at night, your mother came into the bedroom you shared with your sister. You woke up and
pressed your eyes shut. Your sister lay awake crying. You laid very still. She’s doing it on
purpose, she sobbed. Your mother agreed that you were not sleeping, that you were making
snoring noises to keep your sister awake. It was something you would do, they agreed. You laid
there wet and alone in a French trench, waiting for the Germans to pounce. When your mother
left, you rolled over and watched the lights from the cars on the busy road outside, their
headlights moving from the left side of the wall to the right like a sun rising and setting in thirty
seconds every time a car drove by.
Perhaps in the backs of those cars were daughters whose mothers said Isn’t she amazing or We
are so proud of her. Perhaps in the backs of those cars were sisters who held hands. Perhaps
those families were on their way to visit far-off relatives with funny smelling closets. Perhaps
those children would carry memories from those vacations in their pockets their entire lives, like
collections of smooth rocks or sidewalk pennies discovered heads up. Perhaps someday, when
they were older, they’d take them out and turn them over in their hands. Maybe they would
be surprised at how heavy they’d become. How upon closer inspection, one rock might be
related to another. How silence can permeate generations. How resentment might be learned.
How daughters watch their mothers. Perhaps those children, watching the house on the hill pass
by out their car windows, would grow up and use their fingernails to scrape off decades of dirt
and grime to marvel at the faces imprinted on all their pennies.
.
Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse. She has stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, New World Writing, The Cincinnati Review, and other magazines. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @thorntonforreal.