Literary Orphans

Brds, Shds, Gns, Plcmn by Christopher James

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The boy, dressed as a policeman with a Bobby Peeler hat, went into the TV-slash-dining room and saw his sister by the open window. From outside came the occasional twirrup of birds, which his sister repeated with bitter sarcasm. “TWah! TWah!” Aha, thought the boy, the detective. I deduce she’s upset. “KT!” he said, but she didn’t turn. She kept staring out the window, mocking the birds.

 

Outside, beneath the window, were the sheds filled with Dad’s stuff. Things Mum couldn’t bear to look at and couldn’t bear to throw away. They’d spent days sorting everything into three piles – keep, dump, and shed. Mum, what about this? It’s Dad’s Asphalt Weeks tape? Shed. Mum, what about this teapot? Was that Dad’s? Shed. Mum, I’m going to put this in the dump pile – it’s part of the tubing for his piss. Shed. Really? Shed. In the end, they basically only had one pile – shed – and a few things that Bobby and KT managed to either snuck into the bin or that they wanted to keep, in their rooms, under their pillows or hidden at the back of their closets. And after that, after the end, Mum found those too, and they also ended up in the shed.

 

They filled the first shed, and Mum got a new shed, to carry the things that wouldn’t fit. They shared the garden with another family, who lived in the downstairs part of the house, but Mum hadn’t asked them about the extra shed. She’d just installed it. The other family wouldn’t say anything, because these days they were afraid of her. She was tainted.

 

Eventually, it wasn’t enough for Mum to just put things of Dad’s in the sheds – she started putting Bobby’s and KT’s stuff in there as well. On Monday, Bobby found his school uniform in the new shed, folded neatly on top of the lawnmower that Dad never got around to fixing. One of KT’s K-Pop posters was in there as well, but he’d left that.

 

He didn’t tell KT or Mum that sometimes he sat in the sheds, that he could burrow himself underneath all of Dad’s old things and lie surrounded by his smell. Or by a smell, anyway.

 

“KT,” he said again, louder this time. “Have you seen my gun?”

 

“TWah!” said KT. “Try the shed.”

 

It wasn’t in the shed. It was in his pocket. But he didn’t tell her that. He joined her by the window. From here, you could see the birds had shat all over the shed roofs. “Stupid fucking birds,” he said.

 

“They’re just birds,” said his sister.

 

Which left open the question – who was she upset with if it wasn’t the birds? Bobby fingered the gun in his pocket. “TWah!” he shouted, loud enough for even Dad to hear it.

O Typekey Divider

Christopher James lives and writes in Jakarta, Indonesia, and has been previously published online in McSweeney’s, Tin House, Camera Obscura, Smokelong and other places.

Christopher James author photograph

O Typekey Divider

–Art by Mustafa Dedeoğlu

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