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This car is too big for our abbreviated family. Dad drives, and I sit in the back where he can see me, as if I would budge, just the two of us since the accident that reduced us by half. Beside him is empty. Beside me too. He has a metaphorical way of holding the wheel at twelve o’clock with his left hand backwards like he’s itching for a hard right or fighting a skid, like he’s shaking his fist at whatever’s ahead, ready to flip the bird. Equally newsworthy, his favorite parking space is alongside any unattended female, and we always find ourselves in the checkout line with the cutest cashier. I learn what I observe, not what I’m told. It’s clever for a man his age to tell them what we’re up to, to frame himself as a single dad buying game cartridges with his son. When they smile, if it’s at him, he appreciates me with gum and batteries. Just once he should tell them why he’s single and who was driving if not drunk then nearly, and who was climbing over the seat to be with him when we ran into a barricade that was meant to stay put and did. We saved no one, Dad and I. We flew through the moon roof like dollar-store superheroes with the wrong set of skills. I would have been belted in, like now, like Mom and Junior were. Dad never believed in them. The belts, I mean. He doesn’t look at the passenger seat. He doesn’t look at me. But if he has to brake suddenly, which happens a lot, he reaches back to restrain Junior, while I’m the one sitting here. I don’t get it. The living were always better off without Dad’s kind of protection.
Original Copyright © February 21, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 23, 2026
At age six, we are wiser than at any other age. We know things nobody could have told us and we keep them to ourselves. Before I forget everything forever, shall I tell you what it was like for me that day? You know what it did to my sisters. Mother had taken me shopping for clothes for school—just me!—and the prettiest pair of patent leather shoes. For half an hour, I’ve never owned anything I loved more. I remember them like yesterday. When I look at the toes, my big fat baby face is smiling back. We’re almost home from shopping. Mother is smiling at the wheel of the big new Pontiac. Here comes Daddy, walking down the hill from the house to meet us. He has never done this. Something is wrong. He looks me back into my seat. I’m scared. I want to be the girl at school with the prettiest shoes. Daddy opens the driver’s door and leads Mother up to the house. I wait behind in the big hot car and swing my feet and look at my shoes, but the sun has died and all I see are clouds. Mother screams from the parlor, not an angry scream. They send my sisters, not my brother, to fetch me. Something is wrong. We walk along the dirt lane to the house and they tell me. I don’t cry. My shoes are nothing but dust. I see his body on the loveseat under a towel, but I don’t cry. I haven’t cried since, at anything. They’ll make a fuss of me at school, I thought. I’ll be the girl whose brother was shot and killed. I couldn’t say any of this until you asked me. I’m not wise enough anymore to know why.
Copyright © August 05, 2007
Very Short Novels 