In two acts.
Posted on | August 19, 2010 | 2 Comments
Scrubbing
“It seems to be speeding up,”
she said, reaching forward to fiddle with the dials on the VCR.
He busied himself in opening the battery casing on the remote and spinning the batteries around in place, an effort he knew was useless, but always tried anyway.
The actors on the screen jerked about, like marionettes. The audio grew higher in pitch and verged on screeching. She sighed in impatient frustration and snapped the television set off.
The weird decaying pitch of the vacuum tube lingered on the air, mixing with the lazy smoke ribbon issuing from the cigarette in her hand.
Ghost Town
The day our town died was a hot day. Summer hung heavy in the air, miserable and bloated, like a pregnant woman two weeks past her due date.
The entire population, my family included, had taken to floating on the lake in plastic neon inflatable tubes with cup-holders. Dogs paddled about from group to group and begged for scraps. Night and day we stayed on the water, fingers and toes wrinkled like raisins, waiting for autumn to come.
From above, we looked like so many bobbing polka-dots. Or I imagine we did, to Hereford at least.
No one noticed Hereford Hultney’s absence until we heard the roar of his prop plane. Years of crop-dusting and Texas sun had left the plane bleached out and rusted. It might have been yellow and cobalt blue once. Now the brownish-beige hunk of metal circled slowly overhead, like a giant iron vulture.
He shouted something no one could make out over the engine noise, but we did catch one thing: the glint of the sun off the iron sight of Hereford’s Red Ryder right before it started raining BBs.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Splash.
The bright carcasses of the inner-tubes drifted on the surface of the water and people flapped about, grabbing onto nearby tubes that hadn’t been hit yet. In a moment of panic, someone opened the dam, thinking to drain the lake into a giant wading pool. But instead of getting to walk to safety out of a glorified puddle, as expected, we were all swept unceremoniously down stream into the bayou that eventually feeds into the Gulf of Mexico.
Many caught onto branches along the way, or safety rings tossed in by news teams looking for a good evening feature piece. Many more were never seen again.
We try not to talk about it anymore, as it generally ends in an awkward silence.
Some people say the town is haunted, but no one’s volunteered to go back and check.
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2 Responses to “In two acts.”
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August 23rd, 2010 @ 3:31 pm
Love the short vignettes.
August 23rd, 2010 @ 3:35 pm
Thanks J! I was nervous to post them… somehow writing short fiction seems pompous or arrogant to me. But I figured that’s what a blog is for anyway… or what this blog is for. Hope Texas treated you alright.