Four people sit at a table set for five. Their heads are bowed and hands linked as the oldest says grace. A candle burns on the sideboard. Light from its skipping flame is splintered into coloured shards by the crystal holder. Beside it sits a photograph of a middle aged man, dark hair flecked with grey, creases round his blue eyes. He smiles at the incomplete circle round the table.

The family follows the same ritual every year. The table is lost under the weight of dishes offering up his favourite foods. In those first years, the feast of roast ham, sweet potatoes, gherkins, and profiteroles was barely touched. The conversation fixed on him. Talk swung from cheerful anecdotes to quiet reflection on the small acts that defined him. Inevitably the conversation would turn to those final moments spent with him, and the iniquity of circumstance that put him in such a time and place as to become part of the horror.

His mother would recall the weekend before when he had dropped by to put up a shelf. Afterwards, they sat shooting the breeze in the yard as she rewarded him with a beer. With each retelling, her voice breaks as she notes that the shelf remains standing.

The kids relived the hurried final dinner. Their excited conversation revolved around the city sites he might visit outside the conference. Presents were discussed. She wanted a snow globe and he a baseball cap, and promises were made to bring back these fragments of city glamour.

His wife remembered stirring in the darkness of the early morning. She had reached across the bed and felt his warmth on the sheets, but drifted back to sleep before he returned to the room to gather his case and leave. She hadn’t even heard the cab. She didn’t share the other nights when she had woken in the small hours and reached over to feel the cool of an unshared bed; the nights of working late and trips out of town.

At some point the conversation would falter and silence would settle over the table, until someone vocalised the shared thought: how could he be gone?

The family had prayed, hoped, pleaded that he had not been in the building even though the timing of his meeting coincided perfectly with its fall. Maybe he had slept in. Maybe he had skipped work for the day to enjoy the distractions of the city. But he didn’t call and scouring the city’s hospitals, shelters and police records returned no evidence of his escape. He was gone and denial turned to resignation. A memorial service was held and a stone placed at the head of the empty grave.

By this, the sixth anniversary, the script is growing tired and the actors around the table are beginning to ad lib. Unrelated topics from current affairs to neighbourhood gossip creep in. Still each pays vigil and the meal finishes, as always, with a toast to a loved and missed father, husband, son. The small gathering raise their glasses first to the empty place, then to the smiling image on the sideboard, and join together in remembrance.

*     *      *

A man huddles in a doorway, shielding his silhouette from the passing patrol car. They will move him on, or even worse, throw him in the back of the vehicle; another bum to be dumped in the menacing chaos of the shelter. More than once they have asked ‘Haven’t you got a home to go to?’

He doesn’t know. He thinks he may have had once, but no thought comes with certainty.

There are lapses when the fog in his brain thins and the images solidify. He remembers the noise, the dust, the running. He sees blue sky swamped with a grey flooding cloud, paper flakes dancing in the currents of the blast. He recalls the smallest fragments coming to earth so much slower than their source. So many people, all the same colour as the cloud masking the sky. Screams, sirens, silence.

After a while, the running slowed to a walk. He has walked ever since and never left the city. At the start there were people who gave out soup and blankets. Hungry and cold, he wonders where they are now.

He twists his head round the corner of the doorway. The patrol car has passed. There is a trash can just a few yards up with what looks like a burger box on the top. He pulls himself upright and moves towards it, pushing his matted hair back from a face engraved with the dirt of the streets. The disarray makes him look older; on close inspection the bright blue of his eyes and the basecoat of black in his hair suggest a man of younger years.

There is nothing in the burger box but the discarded gherkin. The best bit he thinks, pushing the shred into his mouth. As he continues down the broad avenue, red, white and blue memorial lights from the skyline’s tallest tower play on the back of his tattered jacket. The city remembers for him.

*      *      *

The chatter of the television spills through the apartment. In the lounge, the furniture has been pushed back into a battalion of wallflowers. The table, unfolded in full for the evening’s dinner, stands with authority in the centre. It is draped in a white linen cloth, the corner of which has been snagged by the hand of the small boy penned into a high chair beside the kitchen door.

A puff of steam billows from the tiny kitchen, forced out by the slam of an oven door. The child drops the cloth and corkscrews round to the source of the noise. One hand wavers under the weight of his bottle and the top of his lip shines with a cocktail of mucus and milk.

The woman backs out the kitchen bearing aloft a platter. The child squeals a welcome, and unwinds to follow her progress across the room. She talks to him as she deposits the ham on the table and fusses the place settings. Though more at home in the commotion of her office, she likes to ensure that they sit down to a traditional dinner on this day. She sees the small hand reach out for the profiteroles and swaps the dessert for the lesser temptation of a plate of string beans.

At the sound of his key in the lock, she turns off the television. She knows he doesn’t like it being on this time of year. This day should be a celebration he insists, the day that marks the true beginning of their family.

He hangs his jacket on a hook at the door and kisses his wife and child. She pours the wine while he freshens up.

At the table, she reaches across and clasps his hands. As they quietly give thanks, the young child beats a tattoo on the tray of his high chair and babbles a counter melody to their ceremony.

The prayer ended, they begin the meal and remember his arrival in the city with little but the promise of their future. She was the reason he left everything. She looks at her husband, then back to her son. The boy is his perfect image with sharp blue eyes and the dark fluff on his small head. She tries not to think of his life before them.

*      *      *

The room is silent except for the rhythmic shush of the ventilator and the tone of the machine recording the robotic pumping of his heart. The nurse smoothes the undisturbed bedclothes and flicks on the lamp near his head. Its yellow glow contrasts with the grey of her patient’s skin and hair.

She checks the urine bag at the side of the bed and notes the output on his chart. It is her habit to talk quietly to him whilst performing her routine checks. She tells him about the weather as she gently squeezes his fingers for absent reflexes, and updates him on the baseball scores as she watches the blue of his irises respond to her pen torch.

She knows she is his only company in this lonely black vigil. The chart reads John Doe but she calls him Joe. She thinks he looks like a Joe. New colleagues ask the same questions about this ‘life’ and she tells each the same thing. He was found in an alley, with no identification, his body so broken as to be barely recognisable; yet his story was no more than a side note to the catastrophic suffering on that day. The hospital reached out but nobody came looking. Sometimes there is no-one, or perhaps he just wasn’t where he was supposed to be. A nurse knows only too well the breadth and depth of the secrets people keep.

As she leaves, she flicks off the light and gently pulls the door shut behind her. There he will stay, unloved and neither loving nor living: a shadow of life past, present and future.

SHEILA SCOTT is a part-writer, part-scientist who most enjoys sitting with pen and paper turning idle thoughts into short narratives and illustrative doodles. She has lived in Scotland most of her life with one happy decade in Yorkshire, and recently completed the MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. Her work has appeared in Causeway, the Cabinet of Heed, Poetic Republic’s 2015 Anthology and Qmunicate magazine, and her first short story was shortlisted for Arachne Press 2014 Solstice Shorts. She also helps lead the New Writing Showcase Glasgow. She has an intermittently hyperactive Twitter account under the pseudonym @MAHenry20.

Image: Myriams-Fotos via Pixabay 

I don’t remember much about the last day of normality. I imagine it was like any other summer evening – the sun would have dipped below the horizon late in the day as the air cooled from humid to pleasant, and a throng of Sunday evening drinkers would have sat in groups on the bar patios as they laughed easily and downed colourful cocktails. Maybe some of the more generous ones would have tossed a couple of coins to the guy sitting on the pavement outside the corner shop. He would have gone inside and gotten himself a can of Carling, I reckon.

My memory of that day is fuzzy, but I do remember how it ended. Halfway down a cramped terrace in the shabby house with the broken gate, we’d ended up sleeping in front of the telly again. It happens all the time; Jade whinges and pouts whenever it’s time for bed so I usually end up putting on a cartoon to settle her down, and then we’re dozing off after a few minutes. It’s a bad habit, I know, but it’s just less hassle. She tires me out, that one.

I woke up a few hours later, when her hair was tickling my nose. Her hair is gorgeous – red curls with a thick blonde streak at her right temple (I know all mums think their daughters are beautiful, but everyone can tell my Jade is going to be stunning when she grows up, honestly). Don’t ask me how that happened. She certainly didn’t get it from me.

I heard the rain falling against the window, and I let myself fall back to sleep with Jade cuddling against me. We slept through the final hours of what would come to be known as “before”, and we silently passed into what could only be described as “after”.

“After” was cold. Most of the people in my group managed to nick jackets, either looted from shops or snatched from the poor people lying in the streets, but all I managed to find was a thin grey cardigan trampled in the doorway of a burned-out clothing shop. I’d pulled it on over my orange and blue polo shirt (of all things, why did I have to be wearing my uniform when the apocalypse hit?), only to find it gave no extra warmth at all. It was August, but it seemed like we moved from summer to winter as soon as everything kicked off. Maybe it just felt that way because I wasn’t used to sleeping rough.

When the yellow clouds had first arrived, the media had exploded. Twenty-four-hour news channels never seemed to stop playing the infamous footage of an elderly man in Brazil tripping over his walking stick and struggling weakly in the street as the raindrops burnt his skin. The British public had been disgusted at all the young Brazilians running past the man as he sobbed and bled, not realising that it would barely be a week before the clouds would move northwards and our own ethics would be tested.

Chaos had come first, then silence. Gradually the broadcasts faded, newspapers fell out of print and teenagers stopped tweeting. I clung to the sporadic radio transmissions which would crackle over the boombox our group had looted, but they were rarely helpful; mostly rushed messages from other street people crying for their loved ones to come and find them.

The frogs were everywhere, of course. For the first few days we had all been very mindful of them; everybody had watched where they stepped and would even pick up the little things and move them out of harm’s way, but it wasn’t long before only the only people who still bothered with it were the wackos from Trinity Church (it’s almost as if the abandoned church infected its squatters with good Christian morals). I wish I’d had the chance to join up with them, but I got stuck with my work crowd instead.

I’d only been working at the supermarket for a few weeks, and it hadn’t been going great. I hadn’t even really wanted to work there, I’d only applied because the jobcentre was getting on my case and being at home all the time wasn’t a great example for Jade. I kind of hoped it would ease my anxiety, leaving the house and getting used to seeing people, but it hadn’t. It had made it worse.

There were a few nice old ladies that worked in the cafe, but they weren’t really interested in speaking to me beyond pleasantries. The “lads” in the chilled department were obnoxious, the pristine girls on the tills were kind of bitchy, the nerds in the tech department were too cliquey, and the old men in the warehouse were disgusting. I’d probably been too quiet, as always.

When the yellow clouds came, I had been at work. Management had locked the doors almost instantly, shouting over the outcry of customers and employees that it was for the best, it was too dangerous to go outside and besides, the store was stocked to the rafters with food and other supplies. They wouldn’t let anybody leave, not even when I cried and banged my fists against the locked doors, screaming that Jade was at school, that I had to get her.

Bastards.

We stayed inside for twenty-seven days. I spent most of those days sitting cross-legged on the customer service desk, watching as the deadly rain burned through the trees and cars outside the glass doors, leaving behind only plastic hubcaps and bumpers.

Perhaps the military had done a sweep of the city and evacuated people, I thought. Maybe the teachers were keeping the kids safe.

By the time my genius colleagues decided it was time to leave the supermarket, it was probably too late. The rain had started to burn through the metal roof and was dripping onto the shelves filled with food, and so as soon as there was a break in the rainfall the doors had been wrenched open. Single-file, we had carefully walked a path through the thousands of tiny green frogs blanketing the streets. I’d lagged behind, scrutinising as many of them as possible.

The first time I saw it happen, our group had been camping in Pearson Park. It had been a lovely place, “before”. We had lived just around the corner and I used to take Jade to the park all the time; I don’t even know how many afternoons I’d spent pushing her on the swings and reassuring her that yes, I definitely was watching as she braved the monkey bars for the millionth time.

The park hadn’t held up well under the rain. The grand old houses and trees that had lined its perimeter were reduced to moist piles of rubble and bark and with nothing to block the cold air, a harsh autumn wind whipped through the park from the nearby roads.

When the group had heard the tell-tale thunderclap and saw the yellow clouds gather that day, they’d scattered, tents abandoned. I’d watched them rush to the ruins of the grand houses, desperately trying to cover themselves in the rubble. But there was nowhere to go.

Then the rain started. For a terrifying minute I couldn’t move – I was stuck in dread. Nobody had noticed I wasn’t running for shelter. The rain was beginning to burn small holes in the sleeves of my cardigan, leaving painful red welts on my skin that would never go away.

Somebody was screaming. I didn’t even have a chance to look around to see who it was before a great lump lumbered past me, bashing me on the shoulder in the process. It was Geoff, one of the gross old men that worked in the supermarket’s warehouse and whom had never even acknowledged me, despite our paths having crossed several times. It felt wrong to see him this way, emasculated and screaming, like I was spying on him during a private moment.

He was headed towards the duck pond. Perhaps he thought the pondwater would dilute the raindrops enough to keep him safe. Poor sod.

I could smell the surface of my skin burning. I needed to do something. I sprinted towards the pond and jumped onto one of the large rocks by the water’s edge, ready to trust Geoff’s half-baked logic and jump in. As I teetered on the edge I looked past Geoff galumphing into the dirty water to the trees on the far side of the pond, and the small building nestled under a canopy of their branches. The old Victorian conservatory! Of course!

The door was open, but thankfully there was nobody hiding inside. The place wasn’t how I remembered it. The green vines which had hung from the ceiling and trailed down the walls were now brown and papery, there was no chatter from the tropical birds and no rustling from the lizards. All that remined were a couple of chameleon corpses and a large mottled shell which I would later discover was hiding the shrivelled body of a dead tortoise. There was no sign of damage from the rain, of course. The Victorian conservatory was constructed almost entirely from plastic and glass.

There was a commotion outside. I ran back to the entranceway of the conservatory and peered through the window to see Geoff thrashing and screaming at the edge of the pond. His grey hair had already begun to fall away in patches – most of it was floating on the surface of the water, surrounding him and reflecting the mid-morning sunlight. As the raindrops hit, his skin bubbled and then tightened, pulling his arms towards his body and hunching his spine in preparation for death. Last to tighten was the skin on his face, forcing open his jaw into a wide-eyed scream. He lumbered to the edge of the pond and grabbed desperately at the rocks, perhaps in an attempt to steady himself, but he slipped, toppled forwards and his head cracked painfully against the rocks. And then he was still.

A small lime green frog plopped out of his mouth, slid down the blood-stained rocks and hopped away into the bushes.

That night, I dreamt of Jade again. I didn’t startle awake. My eyes slowly opened, tired of the same old nightmares.

The days played in monotone and each night was a pause. For the past six weeks I had prayed for solitude; as I’d tried to fall asleep each night my thoughts had been contaminated by the sounds of my colleagues snoring, grunting, farting in their sleep inches away from my face and I had yearned for my bedroom at home, for my double bed with the memory foam mattress and the knowledge that Jade was sleeping soundly in the next room.

Now that my nights had suddenly become silent, there was nothing to distract me from the chasm in my chest.

Over the next couple of weeks, the Victorian conservatory became something like a home. The reptile skeletons were starting to upset me, so I scooped them up in a dirty blanket that somebody had left in the store room and took them outside. I decided the pond would be the best place to lay them to rest, only to find the damn things floated. I didn’t have the energy to wade in and find a better resting place for them, so on the surface they stayed.

I teased the brown crunchy leaves away from the few remaining green ones, and I even managed to build a makeshift bed from some old blankets and pieces of foam (more treasures from the store room). Each morning I would tiptoe outside the door, and venture into the park and beyond in search of food.

It wasn’t long before the frogs began to visit. At first it had been just five of them waiting outside the door one morning. They had hopped inside as soon as I had opened the door, and that had been that. Soon enough, the place was overrun with the things. I didn’t mind. Focusing on them broke up the days.

One grey afternoon, the rain was hammering hard against the plastic roof. I wasn’t sure if it was regular rain or the fatal kind, and I definitely wasn’t about to go and find out. Instead, I continued to study the frog that was sitting placidly in the palm of my hand.

I brought the frog close to my face. Its eyes were hazel and rather small, and there was a delicate smattering of dots on its back that could have been freckles. Joanne from Mummy and Me class, perhaps? No, she had been tall and slender. This frog looked a little too pudgy. It hopped out of my hand and re-joined the croaking crowd on the ground.

I leant back against the wall and stared up at the rain hammering against the plastic roof. None of this would be happening if I hadn’t gotten that stupid job. I would have been at home when everything had kicked off, I would have gone straight down to Jade’s school, and we would’ve been safe together. I wouldn’t be sitting on the floor of a glorified greenhouse examining bloody frogs, that was for damn sure.

I needed to pee. As I hauled myself up, I noticed movement in the enclosure a few feet away from the entrance. Until a few days ago it had contained a dead chameleon. Now the only thing sitting in the wood chips was a tiny frog with a distinct white patch on its right temple.

Wait.

It was smaller than the others. Its movements in the woodchips were clumsy, as if it was test driving new legs for the first time. It seemed lonely. Frightened?

It must’ve felt me staring at it, because it paused and turned around awkwardly. It stared at me. My hands began to shake.

Numbly, I took a step forwards. Perhaps misreading this as an act of aggression, the froglet jumped through the hole in the wire fence (the one that I’d ripped open several days earlier in order to rescue the dead chameleon) and hopped into the entrance way, where it hurriedly squeezed itself between the bottom of the door and the ground. It was in the park.

I darted to the door and threw it open. It was difficult to see much of anything through the haze of the heavy rain, and I didn’t dare run without being able to see what I might be trampling underfoot. The rain drops sizzled into my skin as I walked carefully past the pond, past the flower garden and towards the playground. It had to be the playground.

The stink of the wet woodchips got up my nose, and I baulked. As my fingers touched the cold metal of the playground gate, I tried to ignore the nausea in my stomach and instead squinted through the rain, scanning the ground around the climbing frame, the slide, the see-saw. As I brushed the wet hair out of my eyes, a dark clump came away in my hand.

I found the froglet on the tarmac at the far side of the playground, staring forlornly at the swings, as expected. I scooped her into my hands and sat on the swing. It was difficult to speak.

“I’m s-sorry.”

Stupid, shallow words.

I think my skin was starting to blister at that point, but all I could feel was relief. I held my precious froglet close to my chest, closed my eyes, and let myself swing gently in the downpour. I made whispered promises of love, and swore that I would keep her safe forever.

I could feel it happening. My skin tightened and took on a waxy sheen (I probably looked like one of those old mannequins in a cheap house of horrors), and then the choking started. My oesophagus and lungs grew heavier as if turning from muscle to bone. About a minute into my body’s death, my eyes glazed over and dried out completely, and I spent my final moments blind. My jaw forced itself into the same wide, macabre scream I’d seen worn by so many poor people left in the streets, and then my heart stopped.

My used-up body toppled forwards out of the swing and smashed against the tarmac like an ugly glass figurine. A fresh frog emerged from beneath the shards of my jaw.

A few feet away, the bloodied remains of the froglet laid under one of my boots (most of the foot was still inside). The new frog hopped between the broken pieces of my body, searching urgently.

J.L. CORBETT is the editor of Idle Ink. Her short stories have been featured in The Cabinet of Heed, STORGY Magazine, and Preoccupied With the History Department, and she is a staff writer for Syndicated Zine Reviews. She owns more books than she can ever possibly read and doesn’t get out much. You can follow her on twitter: @JL_Corbett.

Image: pixel2013 via Pixababy

As I rode in my Uncle Marv’s new 1979 Cadillac, I kept looking out the window and wondering how I was going to deal with such a fuckin’ control freak.

We drove past the sea of row homes, past the shabby gas stations, the cheap chicken shacks and the cheesesteak shops that always claimed that they were the best in the city.

“I used to live on that block,” my uncle bragged about one of the rundown streets of rowhomes. “It looks like a ghetto now. They don’t know how to take care of things.”

My uncle was an asshole. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say about poor people, so I leaned over and turned up the radio. He gave me a scowl, but it didn’t stop me. He just ranted about how people shouldn’t make excuses for their poverty. “They have to pick themselves up by their bootstraps as I did.”

We drove past the Philadelphia Zoo and turned onto the City Avenue ramp. These were my uncle’s people. People with high paying professions like doctors and lawyers, who lived in big stone houses and drove cars that seemed to purr with power instead of old junkers that coughed up fumes.

My uncle bragged about his expensive suits and his fancy wingtips.

“Why buy cheap clothing when you can afford the very best.”

I knew I was getting closer to his house when I could see the high wooden fences and the thick green hedges. We pulled into his gravel-filled driveway and entered his big, sprawling brick and stone house with a huge wooden double door at the entrance. It was like entering a mausoleum.

Aunt Trudy greeted me at the door and gave me a hug, “Harry, It’s so nice that you could get away from the noisy city.”

I hugged her back and said, “It’s not that bad, Aunt Trudy.”

She grew up in Wayne and thought that everyone should be as privileged and entitled as her. She didn’t understand why people were poor. Like my uncle, she thought it was some moral defect.

“Boys,” Uncle Marv called his sons as if they were bellhops. “Please, take Harry’s stuff to his room.”

Joel grabbed my duffle bag. He was the oldest and, after years of lifting weights, was pretty well ripped. He was also the starting running back for his high school football team and had a scholarship to Bowling Green. Uncle Marv talked about him like he was going to be an-other Larry Csonka.

I unpacked my clothes. I knew that I had to stack everything correctly or my asshole uncle would say I was a slob or a bum.

“When you’re in my house, you do things my way,” he’d say, but in my mind, I had already planned to break some his precious rules.

The son of a bitch bought me a Timex watch for Christmas, so I could keep track of his nutty agenda when I was over his house. He even taped the damn schedule to my door. At 11 a.m., there was some shit in the living room. At noon we had lunch. He was so anal that he wrote down what we were going to eat like some fuckin’ restaurant— tuna salad on rye with chips and sweet pickles. Big whoop.

I quickly put my duffle bag into the closet, fixed my clothes, made sure my sneakers were tied and my shirt wasn’t hanging out of my pants. By the time I got to the living room, Uncle Marv and his family were already talking about some bullshit.

“Structure,” he kept emphasizing as if it were a magical word. “You got to have a structure in your life, or you won’t amount to anything. That’s what I learned in the Army. That’s what I’m going to drill into your heads if its the last thing I do.”

Uncle Marv had everything. He was tall, handsome and had pearly white teeth. He was as rich as hell, and he was a war hero. He never let anyone forget that he had a fuckin’ Purple Heart from World War II, which was the first thing he showed anybody when they walked in the house. “The war was tough,” he said, “but I came out of it like a man. Everyone should have to go the Army if you ask me.”

If you ask me, the Army screwed him up. He was probably a reasonable guy before he went in. All that killing and crap probably made him a psycho.

Even his kids were brainwashed. They cowered to him worse than some beaten-down dogs in Philly. Joel told his father his schedule for football practice, and Eric handed him a pa-per to sign for basketball tryouts. I just sat on one of his gaudy velvety chairs looking up at the high ceiling. There wasn’t anything for me to announce except that I got straight D’s on my re-port card and that I had two detentions last week.

Aunt Trudy, like some servant, filled everyone’s water class and made sure the plate of mixed nuts was close enough for all of us to reach. Aunt Trudy was tall, thin, and stood straight up with perfect posture. She wore a light-blue turtleneck sweater and khaki capris pants with her auburn hair puffed up with hairspray.

“Harry is going to spend the night,” Uncle Marv announced as if everyone didn’t know. “I want everyone to show him our finest hospitality,” and he glared at both Joel and Eric.

“At 3 o’clock, I want Joel to take Harry and Eric to the high school field where you can toss the football around.”

“Yes, Dad,” Joel said in such a formal tone that I thought he was addressing the Pope.

After lunch, we went to our rooms for our mandatory “quiet time” bullshit. I shared a room with Eric who put on his glasses and started to read a Hardy Boys book. I reached into my suitcase and pulled out a Playboy Magazine.

“What’s that?” Eric asked in a squeaky voice.

“Oh, not much. Just a couple of really nice tits on Miss July.”

“Let me see! Let me see!”

It was like a sick starving kid wanting to eat a pork chop for the first time.

“If daddy ever finds out we’ll be in trouble.”

“Screw your daddy, Eric. He doesn’t have to know everything. I’m sure he has a whole closet full of this shit.”

I had another one in my duffel bag and tossed him an October. “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

After quiet time, my cousins and I walked around the boring neighborhood that didn’t have any sidewalks and only a few traffic lights. We saw the church with the big stained glass windows where my cousins were baptized, and Uncle Marv married Aunt Trudy.

“Do you want to meet our pastor?” asked Eric. “He’s a really nice guy.”

“Hell, no!” I told Eric. “I’m not going to set foot in one of those places. That’s for dweebs who wear suits and act like there’s a heaven and hell.”

Uncle Marv’s kids were corny. They were all-American types who did everything by the book. They would never fit in where I lived. We didn’t have parents who told us to go to church or who structured our time. We did everything for ourselves. If we wanted to play ball, we didn’t wait for our parents to drive us someplace and organize it. We’d go to Max Meyers Play-ground with some baseball equipment, choose sides and have a game.

At the high school field, we tossed a football around. After a few long heaves, my arm got sore, and I wanted to do something with a little more excitement.

“This is boring shit,” I told Eric and Joel. Let play a game.”

“Daddy said we should just to have a catch.”

“Fuck, daddy! He’s not here!”

Joel waved to a couple of his friends who were headed back from some Boy Scout meeting.

“Great,” I said. “Now we could have a four on four.”

I had never seen Uncle Marv’s kids smile so much. They acted like a bunch of sad pussies around their parents, always listening to them and never having any fun. But now, I could see them coming alive.

As it turned out, they played like shit, but it was fun anyway. Eric ran the ball like one of the Three Stooges rather than Larry Csonka. I lost because I had Joel on my team. He was slow, awkward and couldn’t catch for shit. He kept running in the wrong direction and fumbled before anyone even touched him. After the game, we laid on the big sprawling lawn of the high school, and I took out my pack of smokes.

“Oh, you better put those cigarettes away before someone sees you.”

“Don’t worry, Joel, nobody’s going to see me. What’s there a Gestapo around here?”

Uncle Marv’s kids looked at me as I smoked the cigarette, obviously impressed that I knew how to smoke in the first place.

“Do you follow the Sixers?” I asked as the smoke poured out of my nostrils.

“Sure,” Eric said. “My daddy has season tickets.”

Spoiled sonofabitch, I thought. Eric probably had front row seats and was able to eat all the fuckin’ hotdogs he wanted. I imagined my uncle driving his kids in his new air-conditioned Cadillac with the seatbelts strapped tight while the rest of us patsies took the hot subway to South Philly.

It turned out Eric didn’t know shit about the Sixers. He couldn’t come up with the starting lineup, and he had no idea what position Dr. J played.

“What position do you play, Joel?” I asked.

“Guard.”

“Shooting guard or point?”

He shrugged his shoulders. Jeez, it was like talking to a sports imbecile. Poor kid, I thought. His fuckin’ control freak father was destroying his mind, making him ignorant of all the important things in life.

We made a slow trek back to the house as I finished another cigarette. Joel and Eric kept watching me smoke and flipping my blond hair from my eyes. It was as if they never saw a real person before.

Perhaps the best part of this crappy weekend was Uncle Marv’s new 32-inch Sony Trinitron. The TV had four speakers that filled up every corner of the living room.

“Oh great,” I said, “basketball.”

All of us sat on the sofa as we watched Mo Cheeks juke and duck out of the defenders’ reach, piling up assists, racking up points. You could almost touch him; the picture was that sharp and clear. For a moment, I forgot about being at Uncle Marv’s boring house and enjoyed myself. I took the opportunity to explain what was going on in the game for my cousins. “That’s a give-and-go.” “That guy’s cherry-picking.” Joel and Eric seemed very impressed.

That didn’t last long, however. At dinner, I was self-conscious again thanks to Uncle Marv asking me how my mother was and all I could say was that she was okay. The reality was that she was never okay. She was always in the midst of some emotional meltdown, and I never knew what mood she would be in next. Even if I told him the truth, he would complain and probably say something like: “See, I told your father when he was alive that she needs psychiat-ric care. He didn’t listen to me. Now, look at her.”

I was afraid that my cousins saw me as being unstable like my mother. And I also wondered if Uncle Marv viewed me as a fuckin’ charity case, and that the only reason he invited me to his house was that he felt sorry for me.

I ate everything on my plate. It was the best prime rib with mashed potatoes that I ever had. It was a lot better than the Chef Boyardee ravioli crap that my mother frequently made in that old burnt saucepan of hers. Most of the time, I scrounged up a few dollars and went to Dante’s Inferno for a pizza or a meatball grinder.

After dinner, we all took our plates and silverware to the sink and cleaned them. There were two sinks, one with clean water and the other with soapy. I kept thinking of that damn magic word, Structure, as I scraped the food off my plates, scrubbed it in the soapy water and then dipped it into the clean. Each of us dried off our plates with a separate dish towel and stacked it back into the kitchen cabinet.

At 7 p.m., everybody played a game of Monopoly while Aunt Trudy sat in the corner of the room and read some lame book. Uncle Marv quickly bought the Boardwalk and Park Place, but that was about it. Eric had a lot of cheap properties but didn’t garner much rent. Joel had all the railroads and utilities and was pulling in the dough. I was stuck in jail half the time, passing Go only twice during the whole fuckin’ game.

*      *      *

It was way too quiet at night in Uncle Marv’s house. You didn’t hear any busses or trolleys. You didn’t hear a police siren or a car burning rubber. You just heard silence as if nothing else existed but you and the pitch black night. I’m sure Joel and Eric were used to this, but for me, it felt empty and barren as if life ended at 9 p.m. I sat awake wondering how people could sleep in such quiet. I kept my eyes open looking out into the darkness, and all I could hear were crickets and the leaves fluttering from some random tree.

Once the sun shone through the slats of the blinds, I knew it was Sunday morning. I got out of bed, packed my bag as quickly as I could and sat on the chair. I was ready to leave. I shared twenty-four hours with a family that made me feel like a second-class citizen. I wanted to go back to my life, back to the city where things were alive and spontaneous. I knew that when my uncle would drop me off at home, he would give me an envelope full of money that I would hand to my mother. She would ask me how the weekend went, and I would say that it sucked and that I never want to go back. She would say, “If it weren’t for your uncle, I wouldn’t be able to afford to buy you those expensive sneakers you are wearing.”

I heard Uncle Marv and Aunt Trudy’s voices in the living room. Joel was getting dressed. I looked out the window at my uncle’s big fuckin’ yard with the six-foot-tall hedges that wrapped around his property like a noose around my neck. I dug into my pocket for a cigarette and opened the window.

MARK TULIN is a retired Family Therapist from Philadelphia who now resides in Santa Barbara, California. Mark writes about off-beat topics, humorous characters, and often fictionalizes his childhood experiences. He has been featured in Fiction on the Web, elephant journal, Friday Flash Fiction, Page and Spine, and others. His website is crowonthewire.com. And his poetry chapbook is called Magical Yogis.

Image: via Pixabay