Pigpen did not walk onto the playground. He did not lower himself into the plastic green tunnel and slide inside and close his eyes for the night. The rain drops did not seep through the cracks and hit his face. They would not drown him.
No.
He was somewhere else.
Grandma and Grandpa’s.
Nine years ago.
Mom and Dad didn’t call him Pigpen. He was Ronnie again and six years old with his feet in the kitchen sink, butt on the counter. He scrubbed at the calluses under his feet with a sponge to try to make them disappear.
Strangers walked in the open door behind him. A Mommy and Daddy asking about the house.
Ronnie didn’t turn around. He lifted the drain stopper on the sink and, like he used to, watched a bubble bath climb high up the basin, his feet disappearing into the soapy water.
The Daddy asked Ronnie’s grandparents about the couch in the living room, the one Ronnie slept on; he liked to wake when Grandma and Grandpa did, and laugh with them quietly so Mom and Dad could get their sleep.
The Daddy asked if the couch came with the house, and Grandma said, Yeah, she guessed so. Because the thing was too used to sell. And then she laughed. She said she didn’t think it would fit on the plane.
Mom and Dad would be mad when they got home because of the couch, but not like Mom shrieking mad or Dad running away mad or anything. Ronnie thought it would be more like cursing mad, like, “If we can’t have the house,” Mom and Dad would say, while Ronnie did earmuffs in the backroom, “would it kill you to leave us some fucking furniture?”
Ronnie turned the handle beside the faucet tighter. He watched the water build up and spill out onto the kitchen floor. It slid like a soapy parade toward the kitchen table and the wall beyond it, where it would seep through to the living room, he knew, to the couch, wet it, ruin it, so he could bring it with him.
After Grandma and Grandpa first told Ronnie about moving, like a month earlier, they’d said, “You’re our best buddy. You know that, right?”
And he had nodded.
Then they’d told Mom and Dad, when Ronnie was not asleep, that he was Mom and Dad’s kid, not theirs, that they loved him so much, but Mom and Dad had to start being parents now.
Ronnie slid down into the sink, scraping his back against the marble edge of the countertop. It stung, but he stayed, halfway down the too-small sink. More water splashed onto the floor.
Twenty-three year old Joseph Walters is a writer first and a PF Chang server second. When not reading for The Indianola Review, he is at work on his novel about Ronnie, who eventually leaves the sink, or he is drooling over his stories in The Airgonaut, Dali’s Lovechild, and Down in the Dirt. He tweets @joewalters13.
–Art by Ashley Holloway