Category: Short Fiction

My Father The Clown

 

“My earliest memory is waking in the predawn of a midwinter morning to the sound of my father’s clown shoes treading the floorboards of the hallway outside my bedroom. It was a sound I’d continue to hear through the years, and one that gave me great comfort. As much comfort as the summer rain when it danced the Charleston on the tin roof of our Illinois home on hot July nights. I always smiled beneath my covers when I heard the sound of those clown shoes. As much as I wanted Dinky the Clown to eat his Pop Tart with me over breakfast, I knew he had a job to do, and that in a few hours he’d be titillating a gaggle of four year olds with his clever bag of tricks somewhere in the wilds of Illinois.”

Read the rest of “My Father The Clown” at Little Old Lady Comedy.

Eye For An Eye

Eye For An Eye

A Short Story
by Caine O’Rear

 

 

Charlie Craddock stood on his wharf and looked out over Barnacle Bay with two good eyes. It was the morning of his seventieth birthday. The day was clear and he could see schools of mullet in the water. He threw his casting net and caught several on the first cast but decided to release them back in the bay. Honor thy fish, he thought. His wife Tammy never had a taste for mullet anyway (“a trash fish,” she snobbishly would say) and he sure as hell wasn’t frying or smoking anything on his birthday. Today was a day for fishing.

Charlie didn’t mind that he was 70. Still it wasn’t cause for celebration. He wasn’t always sure he’d live that long. He’d smoked nearly a pack a day since the age of 16, cutting back to four or five a day two years ago after suffering two heart attacks in the span of six months. He flatlined at one point during heart surgery and liked to joke that his family told the doctors not to revive him. Charlie wasn’t exactly active and was never one for exercise. Ever since his last high school football game playing noseguard during senior year he hadn’t so much as jogged. The walk to the wharf from the house had become burdensome in recent years, so he used a golf cart for transportation. He’d light up a Pall Mall during the trip as Tammy no longer allowed smoking on the patio even going so far as to post a no smoking sign on the side of the house.

 

Charlie’s little brother Big John was arriving that afternoon from North Carolina. Tammy was driving to Albacore in Charlie’s Lincoln to pick him up from the airport. She couldn’t take her Ford Fiesta because Big John weighed 400 pounds and couldn’t fit in an economy car.

Charlie thought of Big John as a pain in the ass. Ever since they were little kids growing up in Chicory County Big John had been a pain in the ass. To Charlie at least. Big John always got car sick on trips and shit his bed a few times a year. The two brothers quarreled a lot as kids. Perhaps it was Charlie’s doing. When Big John was six Charlie took a pebble and blinded his brother with a sling shot during a game of war at their grandaddy’s farm on Old Dike Road. Charlie got a whipping every day for two weeks as punishment. On some days Daddy whipped him with a stick, other days it was the belt. His daddy spanked the boys with the palm of his hand when they were real little, but after a certain point, the bare-handed spankings made Charlie laugh. That really pissed daddy off. So there was no laughing with the belt. Not by a long shot. Charlie screamed bloody murder during those whippings. Especially when the belt would lash the back of his thigh. Mercifully, daddy never hit him with the buckle. That would have been cruel and unusual, something mama never would have allowed. Big John watched the series of whippings from his bed with his one good eye, solemn and stoic like a prison guard observing an execution. Daddy had done his job all right, but in his mind justice had not been served.

For the entire next year Big John wore a patch over his eye and earned the nickname Pirate John at school. The paper even did a story on him. He became Big John when he fattened up around age 10 and got a glass eye. His pirate days were over.

****

Big John and Tammy arrived at the house around 2 p.m. Charlie had eaten a box of Fig Newtons for lunch and was eager to get on the water once Big John arrived. The day was still clear.

When he saw the Lincoln pull in the driveway he drove the golf cart back to the house.

“Well, we made it,” Tammy said as she got out of the car. She was wearing a floral top that matched her pants. “You wouldn’t believe the traffic in Albacore. Don’t see how folks live there.”

Charlie pulled the golf cart up next to the car. He got out and helped Big John out. Big John breathed heavily as he struggled to pull himself out of the fine American automobile that Charlie had purchased with cash money.

“Gimme a hand, will you old brother?” Big John wheezed.

Charlie grabbed the upper part of Big John’s left arm. There was so much loose skin it was easy to maintain a grip. He got him situated in the golf cart.

“Tammy, you can take his suitcase in now or I”ll get it out later. We need to get out on the water.”

“You boys and your fishing,” Tammy said. “I’ll start getting stuff ready for the party tonight.”

“Thank you, baby doll, I love you,” Charlie said.

****

It was 3 p.m. by the time they reached the artificial fishing reef in Barnacle Bay. Charlie had brought along some frozen shrimp and cut-up cigar minnow for bait.

The two brothers hadn’t talked much on the way out. The motor on Charlie’s boat was loud and Big John didn’t hear well. Now that they were anchored on the reef Big John could hear.

“How’s the fishing been this year?” Big John asked him.

“I been fishing this bay for forty years,” Charlie said. “And I still know the spots.”

“How you been feeling? Your health holding out okay?”

“Never felt better in my life,” Charlie said. “Tammy don’t complain if you know what I mean.”

At that moment Big John’s line went taut. “Fish on,” he yelled.

The fish was in the boat within the minute. It was a white trout, which is what Charlie was expecting they’d catch.

“What’s new in North Carolina?” Charlie asked.

“Just people getting old and dying,” Big John said.

By the next hour they’d caught the limit.

It was around this time Big John felt the urge to speak his heart.

“I know we ain’t been close for a while,” Big John said. “I hate that. Lord knows Mama woulda hated the way things turned out. But I wanted to say I forgive you or what happened that day.”

“What happened what day,” Charlie remonstrated.

“With the slingshot,” Big John said. “The day you blinded me. The day you blinded me with the slingshot.”

“Accidents happen,” Charlie said. “I meant nothing by it.”

“Well, if you’re going to be that way about it,” Big John said, “never mind. Sorry I brought it up.”

“We need to head on back,” Charlie said. “My boys will be arriving soon for my birthday dinner.”

 

****

When they got back, Charlie’s boys, twins named Rod and Todd, had already arrived. Rod had taken off early from Little Caesar’s so he could make the party. Todd hadn’t slept in two days on account of his meth habit. He didn’t work. His mother hated the drugs but knew they cut down on his grocery bill. She always looked on the bright side.

Big John offered to clean the fish on the wharf but Charlie said no and that he would do it. So Big John walked back to the house to clean up. He spoke to both Rod and Todd and fetched a glass of sweet tea from the kitchen. It was so good to see family, he thought.

He thought about showering but remembered that he couldn’t fit in the shower, so he just applied another coat of Speed Stick to his pits.

By the time Big John was well fragranced, Charlie was back in the house.

“Fish cleaned,” he told Tammy, handing her two ziplock bags full of filets. “My work is done.”

“How you want me to do em? Use the crispy fry or the seasoned?”

“You the boss,” Charlie said.

****

An hour later dinner was ready. Big John and Charlie had been on the porch talking and drinking Crown and coke in plastic cups.

“It’s just so smooth going down,” Big John said, “it’s just so smooth.”

A moment later, he added, “It’s just so peaceful out here.”

Charlie wasn’t talking much. He started to think that maybe he was in the wrong when they were out there on the boat. He should have accepted Big John’s forgiveness. He should have said he was sorry for what he had done so long ago. He should have told him … something.

By this time both men were quite drunk. Crown was a fine beverage win lose or draw, Charlie thought. Charlie didn’t want to eat in the dining room so he instructed his woman to bring the fish outside. Rod came out and ate with them, as did Tammy, but Todd said he wasn’t hungry and stayed inside watching Family Guy.

After the meal was finished Charlie made a night cap and then went to bed. Tammy soon followed. Big John stayed out on the patio looking at the stars. How did the aliens live on those things he wondered. Not much later Todd came outside. Rod had left and gone back to Little Caesars. Todd offered Big John some of his meth. He snorted a bump, then another, then another. He kept drinking the Crown. He was feeling good. It was so good to be back with family. He loved his brother Charlie and wanted to rekindle the old days, not the way they were but the way he wished they were. Maybe he could pull a prank on him in good fun. Big John left Todd on the patio and went into the toolshed. He found a liquid solution of weed killer in a white bottle.

“Bingo,” he said out loud.

He took the weed killer inside and walked down the hall. Charlie and Tammy’s room was at the end. He summoned all his powers of concentration in his state of fat drunkenness and slowly opened the door. Charlie was snoring loudly through a mask he wore for sleep apnea. He was out cold. Big John approached the bed, slowly. He unscrewed the cap on the bottle of weed killer and poured it over his brother’s right eye.

 

 

 

Read the rest at Little Old Lady Comedy here.

Queen of the Double

 

“Queen Of the Double”
A Short Story by Caine O’Rear

Will Wise inhaled his tenth Budweiser in three swallows, paid his tab, lumbered to the bathroom and pissed, and then walked out to his truck parked in the dirt lot, a Ford 150 from the ’90s, cranking it up and pulling slowly onto Highway 100, the sun burning like a fireball at the bottom of the western sky, an old tune from Sammy Kershaw beaming on the dash, his thoughts running to the night before when he and April fought about a girl she thought Will liked who worked at the body shop, some chick named Camille who was barely 20 and dressed like the county girls did these days, all Daisy Dukes and skimpy pullovers, showing no respect for decorum or decency, April said, an observation Will couldn’t argue with, especially since his dalliance with a girl in their church group last year, a girl April called a fucking slut and one to whom she was distantly related and who she claimed invited the transgression Will had yet to live down, an episode the memory of which sent pangs of horror through his wet brain, then fading in a quicksilver flash with the chorus of the Kershaw tune kicking in, the imagery of the polyester curtains and redwood deck making him grin, the truck humming along at eighty miles an hour past the expanses of cotton on both sides of the highway, blankets of white at their peak before the November picking, the truck now floating across the center line from time to time, a paltry concern for a county boy on a county highway cruising along in his truck on a Friday night, not unlike most Friday nights since he was sixteen, pounding beers in some field or down by the creek or later at his uncle’s place just over in Lillian, where he met April at a party while being totally smashed on Jaeger, smashed enough to take her by the arm and whisk her down to the boathouse where he managed to take her bra off despite having one arm in a cast because he broke it that week in football practice, playing bull in the ring and going hard as all get out, and going hard that night in the boathouse, and falling in love with April, or so he told himself, a girl who had been with him since that night almost ten years ago, and then April getting pregnant at eighteen, walking the floor of the gym in cap and gown with a bump in her belly, more a hiccup than a world class disaster in their little zip code, and seeing in the rearview as he cruised along the carseat for their second child in the back of his cab, a reminder in the flash of the moment that maybe he should ease up on the throttle a bit, the last years of his life moving at a speed beyond his means to control them, and thinking of Camille at the body shop, and not even being tempted to go there but still enjoying the sight of that ass behind the desk up front when he walked in hungover at 10 every morning, a brief titillation before the monotony of fixing timing belts and spark plugs set in, a trade he learned from his father who passed away two years ago, dropping dead of a heart attack while hunting deer in Conecuh County, while only in his late 40s, a loss that Will still hadn’t reckoned with but one he thought about every time he lit up a smoke, his dad a heavy smoker all his life, a fact that surely exacerbated the heart disease that clipped his wings, and with these thoughts Will firing up a smoke, thinking what are you gonna do, the Kershaw song still playing, and Will turning up the music, louder, louder, still louder, and thinking if he ever found April with some Charlie Daniels with a torque wrench, he’d kill the motherfucker.

“Revenge”

Originally published in Richmond’s Style Weekly. May 2008.

Last summer Wayne’s granddad gave him a vial of poison. The bottle was small and green and featured a skull and crossbones on the label.

“I think you’re old enough to have it now,” his granddad said. “I stole it off a German at the end of the war. Maybe you can use it one day on one of your enemies.”

“Thanks, granddad. Are you sure?”

“Of course,” he said. “I know you will use it wisely.”

Aside from his Rambo survivor knife, the poison was Wayne’s most cherished possession. He kept it hidden on the top shelf of his chest of drawers, along with his Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card.

Wayne never told anyone about the gift. His grandfather had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few months earlier, and Wayne had been told to report any unusual activity.

“If he does anything weird, like complain about spies in the attic, let me know,” his mother said.

Wayne had the chance to use the poison a few weeks later, after his friend Jerry betrayed him. Jerry was one of the most popular kids at school. He was charming, athletic and excelled at Cub Scouts. He was also the first boy in class to put his hand down a girl’s pants.

But Jerry, for all his strengths, was insecure. One afternoon he began telling classmates that Wayne’s mother worshipped Satan.

“She and a bunch of other kooks go to City Park every night and make fires and praise Satan,” he told them. “Then they have sex with each other and do drugs.”

In recent weeks Wayne had begun selling chewing tobacco on the playground. Every Thursday Wayne stole all the chew he could from a drugstore, selling it to his classmates the next day for two bucks a pouch. The new business made Wayne the most popular kid in class. At least until the rumors started.

A kid named Pete finally told Wayne what Jerry had been saying.

“He says she wears a black robe and leads them through chants,” Pete said. “It’s scary stuff. I sometimes get nightmares.”

“Jerry’s a dead man,” Wayne told Pete.

The next week Wayne decided to put several drops of poison in Jerry’s pouch. Wayne sold it to his foe the next morning. Before class, Jerry had a chew on the basketball court. Nothing happened. “Why was it taking so long?” Wayne thought to himself. In the movies they died instantly. Maybe he didn’t use enough.

Jerry lived. He even had another chew that day at recess. Wayne went home that afternoon and tasted the poison. He didn’t die either. He had seen fake poison at the magic shop. This was probably the same stuff. He was pissed at his granddad. He decided to leave the bottle on his granddad’s nightstand. He wanted to humiliate the old fool.