Literary Orphans

Love, Mandy by Audra Kerr Brown

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I drove to the old farm today. I’m not sure why. Maybe I had a mind you’d be there, waiting. Maybe I had half a notion the trailer would be there, too, with Dad wrenching on his truck and Mom on the front stoop, blowing smoke rings like kisses. But when I came around the bend you weren’t there, of course neither was Mom or Dad, and nothing remains of the trailer but a blackened, bald stain upon the earth. All these years since the fire and nothing has grown back. Not a single weed.

Get this:  I stepped out of the car and saw something twinkling in the gravel drive—your lucky penny! The pressed one from a crank machine with an eagle on the front. I didn’t even know you’d lost it. I assumed you still had it tucked in your sock like always.  And it still has the twin depressions where you claimed it once saved you from a rattlesnake bite to the ankle.
You were so proud of that thing. I was with you the night you got it. We went to the carnival in Wartrace, and you were desperate to see the fortune teller, but Mom dropped us off with an ardent warning not to set foot inside that tent (‘Necromancer!’ she chided). So you stood in front of the tent flaps all night, pacing, foregoing the rides until the fortune teller took pity on you, came out of the tent, and read your fortune for free. Then she gave you the pressed penny as well as a red cellophane fortune telling fish which you gave to me just as long as I never squealed on your visit with the ‘Necromancer!’ And I never did. Not even when Mom caught me in my closet with the fortune fish curling in my sweaty palm then sent me to bed without supper.

I can still picture Mom in the nightgown Dad won as a door prize at the Izaac Walton fundraiser, pink chiffon with matching slippers and tufts of fur on the toes that drove our dog, Bo, nuts.  Mom would run around the kitchen table, screaming, swatting him with a dishrag while he barked and nipped at her feet. When she ran, those green bristled hair rollers would drop from her head like pine cones shaken from a tree in a storm. Sometimes we used them to brush the cats.

Today I walked, heel to toe, around the charred perimeter where the trailer once stood, counting each step, trying to remember the layout: the front room, the kitchen, our bedrooms. I suppose you are anxious to know how many steps it took, so you can devise an algorithm that might explain the trajectory of our disappointing lives. That’s how you put it, right? During that shouting match before you left? Or did you say train wrecked?

I was amazed at how small the trailer must have been; it seemed like a castle when we were kids. We’d race from end to end ready, set, go! out the bathroom, through the hallway, down a straight-as-an-arrow track to the bay window in the living room. Whoever touched the glass first chose which cartoons we’d watch on Saturday morning. How did we ever compress our lives into such a space? Our thoughts, our words, our possessions, mixed together, spilling and rolling over each other like snakes in a hole, as Dad would say.

Dad. He knocked out my front teeth on the door jamb while carrying me to my bedroom one Christmas Eve. You and I had tried to stay up to see Santa, but we fell asleep next to the cardboard fireplace we’d made. I can still conjure up the memory of waking, seeing his ridiculous honey-glue/cotton ball Santa beard spattered with my blood, thinking the world had blown to pieces. As a result, I went through my elementary years looking like a vampire, and you swore off St. Nick for the rest of your life.  I hope you still don’t go around punching department store Santas in the face.

That’s also when I was stricken with ear infections. I’d wake in the night—a screaming banshee—and Dad would rock me in his recliner and blow cigar smoke in my ears to ease the pain. He’d make me close my eyes while he watched Benny Hill reruns on the public broadcasting station, the volume turned low. All I could hear was the audience laughter, smoke whistling in my ear, and Dad’s heart thudding in his chest like a giant knocking on a distant door.
While he blew smoke, he whispered stories about the boogeyman. He told me the boogeyman stole the souls of bad children out of their ears while they slept. And when he couldn’t carry anymore souls, he stuck them in the ears of good children for temporary storage. The pain I felt—that stabbing, searing, throbbing, pain—was merely the bad kids’ souls kicking on my eardrum to get out. “Smoke makes them sleepy,” Dad told me. Then he’d tug on my lobe, blow into my ear and growl, “Go to sleep, you hooligans! You should’ve listened to your folks!”

I know you think it’s terrible to tell a story to a child rather than take them to the doctor, but I enjoyed those times Dad held me in his arms, his scratchy beard, his sour breath, his words thick with Thunderbird. Sometimes I pretended to have an ear ache just to have an excuse to climb into his arms. He also told me to never let a boy whisper in my ear. I should’ve thought of Dad when I first met Bobbie Bryant, huh?

 

Mom started working the nightshift at the Food-n-Fuel. Dad started driving truck again, and whenever I woke up howling in pain, it was you who took me in your arms, lit up one of Dad’s Black and Milds, and blew smoke in my ears to put the bad souls to sleep. You had to have been so young, seven, maybe eight, years old? Mom eventually pawned the microwave so I could get tubes in my ears, Dad stopped holding me, and you became a chain smoker. I also remember you started sleeping with your head beneath the covers. But you didn’t need to worry about the boogeyman stealing your soul. You weren’t a bad kid. Not then. And if you want your penny I don’t have it. I gave it a kiss and buried it deep into the scorched-earth rectangle. With any luck, it will bring you back home.

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Audra Kerr Brown lives betwixt the corn and soybean fields of southeast Iowa. Her fiction can be found at Fiction Southeast, Cheap Pop, Fjords Review Online, and People Holding, among others.

me in mirror

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–Background & Foreground Photography by Jon Damaschke

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