My clunker of an 1987 Oldsmobile came to a stop, but too abruptly for nurse Cathy’s liking. I’d applied a bit of excess pressure to the brakes, causing a slight jerking motion to our bodies, but no more. She was being Cathy the drama queen though. Her head shifted violently forward and then backward against the head rest, arms and legs splayed outward and apart, as if I’d crashed us – high impact – into a cement wall. She groped at her neck, whiplashed of course, and then her head toppled to the side, with tongue distended.
Category: Fiction
Rambling love
Dear Rebecca,
First off, I’m not being critical my love. I love you as is! It is just that, well, you always seem to be in flux, eluding my mental net of insight into you, which sometimes frustrates me to no end. And so I’ve been wondering, is this a premeditated effort on your end, for the fun or adventure of keeping me guessing? This seems to be a popular pastime among younger women nowadays. Or, is this changeability the product of your young, restless mind, always channel surfing or role playing one possibility after another, never settling down for long? I think it is mostly the latter.
Elephant in the room
This was the last leg of our father & son trip, to cross the Canadian border and explore the innards of another country, a first for both of us. But Dad always ran his tires into the ground, until they were bald and ready to bust open, and so there was always a 50/50 chance of losing a tire on a long trip. And this time we were on the wrong end of 50/50.
I began hearing the sound earlier, but said nothing, hoping the road was just old and noisy, keeping my eye on Dad’s involuntary expressions. Dad turned towards the driver’s side window several times, looked into the rear view mirror, wrinkling his forehead a bit, and then refocusing on the road. Once or twice he looked at me for a second and said nothing, wondering if I’d been hearing it too, but I said nothing. We did this kind of silent inquisition often, keeping elephants in the room as long as possible before acknowledging them, hoping they’d run off. But this beast was staying and getting bigger, Dad and I finally looking all over, window to window, mirror to mirror, getting more nervous.
Daydreamer
The teachers were concerned, leaving notes for Mom and Dad regarding my “staring out the window” during class. Daydreaming they called it, the politically correct term for something more sinister, such as bad parenting or inferior character, their “go-to” conclusions in those days. Social anxiety, depression, the autism spectrum, and other so called mental health conditions were not yet common terminology. This was the seventies.
“He should visit with the school shrink,” they suggested.
“Let’s find out what he daydreams about while staring out the window, so we can address the situation.”
Please don’t shoot me dad!
Dad, please don’t shoot me in the back, I thought to myself. I’d been retrieving pellets from the wooden board used for our target practice, when the vision of him shooting me from behind appeared. Several times, I turned my head for a sideways glance, making sure the gun was not pointed at me. Dad just looked at me and said nothing, but the Larkin boys laughed heartily at my paranoia. I thought of my ancestors lined up at the edge of mass graves, waiting to be shot in the back, one by one, like a factory line of executions; the soon to be executioners finding humor and a perverse justice in their victims’ predicament.
Notes from David 