Ornamental Pond Fish of Southwest Kansas: a short story
Garret said it’d be worth a hundred dollars and that we could split it. He said we’d have to get up early to do it, though.
“That’s okay,” I said. “You can have it.”
“Nah, you want this. Trust me,” he said, and because he’s Garret, and because the force of his insistence is so strong as to be undeniable, I agreed. Now it’s ten after six, though, and he’s in my bedroom in the basement at my dad’s flipping the lights on and off, and I’d really rather just stay in bed. “Get up, Mutt,” he says.
“Fuck you,” I say, and then he starts chucking things at me—books and my wallet, a little tin box with some trading cards in it, an empty picture frame—everything he can get his hands on off the top of my dresser. “Alright,” I say, and I adjust myself under the covers and sit up to put my feet on the floor.
“I’m going up to eat with your dad. If you’re not up there in three minutes—” he stops and thinks. “Well, you won’t like it.”
“Morning,” my dad says when I get upstairs. He’s beaming, thrilled to see me out of bed before he’s due at work. Garret’s already at the table, leaning over a plate of eggs and a bowl of Corn Flakes. My dad has served him orange juice and a mug of fresh coffee. “Garret tells me you guys have some work lined up. Want some gloves?”
“Sure,” I say, and he dumps some eggs onto a plate, slides the plate across the table to me. “When that toast pops up, you two split it,” he says, and then he opens the door to the garage. I pour my own glass of orange juice.
“We have to get at least four loads,” Garret says. It’s going to break a hundred today, but it dropped into the fifties overnight and I’m shivering in my shorts and sweatshirt in the passenger seat of his truck.
“And a bonus for really big ones,” I say. Garret nods, taking a drag from his cigarette and squinting while he blows smoke out his window.
“Best not to go looking for big ones, though. We’d waste the whole morning. We fill the truck four or five times, at least a few will find us.”
311’s “Come Original” plays on the CD player as we head out over the bridge, driving the country roads west of town. I don’t expect it will take very long—it seems like you see tumbleweeds all over the place when you’re just driving—but it’s fifteen minutes before we find our first clump caught in a fence, and I’m already wondering how long this enterprise might take.
It turns out that I don’t need my father’s gloves. The weeds aren’t as thorny as I remember them being, and Garret certainly doesn’t need my help—they’re light as air. But he’s right, I realize after we’ve filled his truck’s bed the first time and tied everything down with a nylon net: I’m glad I agreed to help.
“What’s she want these for, again?” I ask, not because I can’t remember, but because I’m still having trouble believing it. On the western end of Kansas the weeds are basically trash—trash that can scrape the paint off your car on a windy day.
“She fucking sells them,” Garret says. The look he gives me then says, I know, right? and he explains again how Mrs. Kuhn spray paints and lacquers them before she boxes them up and ships them to people who’ve ordered them on the internet—people who are having “western” themed parties, or museums with “The West”-themed exhibits. “They decorate their offices with them in fucking Japan.”
Mrs. Kuhn’s house is out in the country, a mile from the river, settled in between a couple of low hills. “Don’t cuss in front of her,” Garret warns me, as if I’m the one of us most likely to speak inappropriately in front of an adult. But then it turns out that we don’t even see her. The garage door is open, so Garret flips a bitch in the road and backs up, and we move every weed we’ve farmed from the fences outside of Plains City to the open parking space beside an immaculately polished and dust-free Mercedes. “Yeah,” Garret says when he sees me looking at it. “They’ve got money.” And then we’re back in the truck, squealing the tires when we hit the pavement, heading out to find more tumbleweeds along more country roads.
When we strike the motherload it’s after forty minutes have passed, at a train that’s been stopped for decades on a section of track that no longer connects to any other tracks. The wheels are all rusted out, wedges of dirt caked-in beneath them. There’re hundreds of tumbleweeds here—maybe a thousand—piled up and tangled together, enough to fill Garret’s truck dozens of times.
“Holy shit,” I say.
Garret drags on his cigarette before we get out. “Yeah. Jackpot.”
There are big ones to be had, tumbleweeds that come up to my shoulder. We untangle them from the mass woven against the old freight cars, high tail it back to Mrs. Kuhn’s house in the country with Warren G blaring, then switch to Bone Thugs for the drive back out. The day really starts to heat up, then, and despite the ease of the work, I’ve sweat through my shirt before we drop off the last load.
The garage’s door to the back yard opens as we’re finishing this last trip, and a forty-something-year-old lady with platinum hair walks out. After Garret introduces me and she hands him the five twenties we’ve earned plus a couple extra for finding so many of the big ones, Garret nods to the door she’s just come through. “Mind if we check it out?”
“Go ahead,” Mrs. Kuhn says, throwing a pair of gardening gloves into a basket. She’s heading through the other door, the one that goes into the house. “Get you guys something to drink? Coffee? Lemonade?”
“Yes please,” Garret says, the words sounding strange off his tongue. The door shuts behind her. “You’ve got to see this shit,” he says, and I follow him outside.
As backyards go, we’re in pretty much the opposite of what I expect. Backyards, as I know them, have brown grass, plastic barriers or railroad ties along the edges, and some petunias or begonias or whatever, maybe a vegetable plot, a dog run, and a Weber charcoal grill. Most of the yards I’ve been in have access to a pretty wide swath of the sky. But this one is green and has trees. It’s practically a forest. Here are stone paths, an expanse of flat, mirror-smooth water, and a little bamboo bridge. Willows (definitely foreign to this part of the country), spreading moss (also not native), and several pieces of statuary: turtles, birds, pagodas, and a Buddha. A network of thin black hosing on some latticework is spraying a fine mist into the air. “Here’s the fish,” Garret says from up ahead of me on the path. “Get up here, Mutt.”
There’s a bench beneath one of the overhanging trees, and Garret stops beside it, sits on a rock a forklift must have brought in. There’s a low waterfall, a sheet maybe two and a half feet wide falling six inches into a pool where lily pads are coming up at angles. “There’s a frog,” Garret says, and I don’t see it at first, but then I do, its nose sticking up out of the water between two pads. Above its head, a yellow blossom hangs on a stalk like an old-timey streetlight.
“There they are,” he says, and I see them. In a clear space between tufts of pads, there are first six or eight, then twelve or fourteen of them. The water is clear—you can see two or three feet down, easy—so they must’ve been under the foliage before. Now they’re here, fish painted vivid, unnatural colors: rain slicker yellow, traffic cone orange, gas-flame blue.
“It’s fuckin’ cool, isn’t it?” Garret says, and Yeah, I say, because Garret’s the kind of guy who mocks the kind of answer I might have given to Ms. Unger, my last year’s English teacher, and he could be laying a trap. I sit down on the bench.
Garret is smoking when Mrs. Kuhn comes out, and I’m horrified. He’s going to get us in trouble. We’ll have to leave. But Mrs. Kuhn hands us each a glass of lemonade with a smile on her face, proud of the garden we’re admiring. “Can I bum one of those?” she asks. Garret offers her the pack.
“Get up, Mutt,” Garret says when he comes into my room and flips on the light that afternoon. The way he says it, ‘up’ and ‘Mutt’ kind of rhymes.
“I’m up,” I tell him. “I’m just thinking.”
“Gotta quit that,” he scolds. “It’s pool time.” He lifts my swimsuit off the knob on my closet door and chucks it at me.
“I have to work at five.”
“Not a problem. I’ll get you there.”
The microwave is beeping when we get upstairs—a pair of Hot Pockets he put in before heading down to get me—and Garret drinks about half a gallon of whole milk with his while I have a Coke.
“Shit’s bad for you,” he says, nodding at my bright red can while we eat.
“Gotta die of something,” I say, and he grins.
We pay three dollars apiece to get into the hotel pool at the Wyatt Earp, which is two more dollars than we’d pay to get into one of the public pools, but the pool at the Earp is cleaner than the city pools, with fewer adults and children. Also: Laney Rosengarten waitresses at the Earp’s Six Shooter Bar in the summer, and she’ll bring drinks out to us provided we pay in cash and pour them over discreetly into the Styrofoam Sonic cups we’ve brought along for the purpose of doing so. There’s a wall up around the blue, seashell-shaped pool at the Earp, too, and none of the hotel’s rooms look out on it, so there’s not much risk of getting caught—though the front desk manager walks through sometimes, so we do have to be careful.
It’s three o’clock, and the water, I’m thinking, is as clear as the water in Mrs. Kuhn’s pond. It’s the blue paint on the bottom that makes it look so nice. The bottom of the Kuhn’s pond must’ve been black to make it look black. Fish wouldn’t live in this water—it’s too heavily chlorinated. How was it the Kuhn’s pond was so clear? The gate opens, and Gracie Walters, Laura Perry and Kara Nash walk in. They wave and drop their pool bags onto a trio of lounge chairs across the way from us before pulling down their tiny pairs of red and pink and yellow cotton shorts to reveal their tiny black and pink and yellow swimsuits.
“What time do you get off?” Garret asks, and I have to check his face to make sure he’s not trying to play for a double entendre. Surprisingly, he’s not.
“Nine,” I say, “But we have to clean up, so—”
“So I’ll be there at nine-thirty,” he says. There’s a party tonight outside town at the Country Club. A sophomore kid—going to be a junior, I suppose—whose parents have gone off on a second honeymoon to the Caribbean. He’s had the place to himself for the last few nights, and his grandparents will be in town this weekend. He wants to have a blowout before they arrive.
“Get you guys anything else?” Laney asks. The front desk manager walked through ten minutes before, so we’re probably in the clear for the rest of the afternoon.
“No thanks,” I start to say, but Garret’s talking too, asking if there’s anything available that might be from off the menu, if she knows what he means. He lowers his sunglasses to look her over.
“Not for you,” she says, rolling her eyes, and he taps his cup and points at mine, telling her we’ll each have another.
“Two more it is,” she says, Garret’s words overriding mine as per usual, and while I’m watching her walk off, Garret looks across the way at Gracie Walters and company.
“Fucking Gracie Walters,” he says. Then he turns to look at me. “Was she any good?”
I look over. She’s got her hands on the armrests of her chair and is lowering herself onto it with an expression of some concentration. “I don’t know,” I say. “I didn’t fuck her.”
He snorts. “You know what I mean.”
I keep looking at her. She’s reposed, now, undoing the straps of her top to give the sun unfettered access to her shoulders and collar bones. “No, she was good,” I say. “I wouldn’t mind.”
“Maybe tonight,” my friend says. Then: “Kara’s not bad either. That butt.” He bites his lip and waggles his eyebrows. The only one of the three across the way still standing, Kara’s applying sunscreen on her arms and legs. She isn’t in Gracie or Laura’s league, but she does have a nice butt, and I say so. “Maybe I’ll hook up with them both later,” I say.
Garret’s laugh, short and barked, brings the eyes of the girls to us from across the pool. “Yeah,” he says, raising his cup to them. “Maybe all three.”
Jeff, the Rib Shack’s owner, isn’t in, so when I call to tell TJ, the night shift manager, that I’m running late, he tells me not to worry about it: he’ll pencil my time in and we can tell Jeff I came in during a big rush and forgot to hit the clock. When Garret drops me off, there is a big rush, so I’m washing my hands and pulling on gloves to scoop ribs and brisket and tong-fulls of pulled pork onto boats of tin foil without even putting on my apron. TJ’s story will check out if Jeff decides to check the timestamps on the tickets. The rest of the night is slow after that, though. There’s plenty of time to drink fountain Cokes with extra pumps of cherry syrup and get ahead on stocking napkin holders, refilling sauce bottles, and wiping down the outsides of the stainless-steel fridges.
“You can go ahead and clean up the party room,” TJ says a little after eight. “I’ll take care of business up here.” So I drag a couple of chairs into our windowless party room’s entryway to block it off, then start spraying down the tables and putting the chairs up so I can vacuum.
Maybe all three of them, Garret had joked, but I’d do just about anything to pass a few more minutes with Gracie Walters alone. The first time we’d been together, two weekends before, hadn’t seemed real. There had been an out-of-body quality about it, as if it wasn’t me making out with her, but rather me watching someone who looked like me make out with her in the basement at Stephanie Grable’s house while the rest of our friends drank upstairs. Then, last weekend, she’d taken off her shirt—but not bra—in the backseat of my car parked down at the river while our friends loitered around a bonfire forty yards away. There had been some over-the-jeans stuff, too, and I’d been hoping the trajectory we’d been on might continue, but the tone of her text messages had cooled in the last week. Not wanting to seem too try-hard, I had cooled my tone, too. By the time she’d shown up at the pool earlier in the afternoon, I hadn’t heard from her in three days.
9:15 I text Garret, because TJ’s got places to be, too, and he and I have worked like demons to ice and wrap the meats early, finish the dishes, and mop the floors. My friend isn’t anywhere to be seen when TJ and I lock the Barbecue’s door, though, and so TJ offers to give me a ride.
“No, I’m good. He’ll be here.”
I text again at 9:25, and then it’s 9:30, 9:35. He might have lost his phone, or be too drunk to drive. Maybe he’s up and moving and can’t feel his phone vibrating in his pocket. Or maybe he has the unexpected good sense to know he’s had too much. He could be going from room to room at that going-to-be junior’s house party looking for somebody to drive him back into town to get me. At 9:45 I’ve resigned myself to either walking home or calling my father. I just need to decide which. Garret’s forgotten me, or, worse, rolled his truck off one of River Road’s tight turns—but then, no, there he is, the headlights of his truck swinging around the corner, gravel flying away from the back tires as he guns it on the freshly oiled and graveled street, some girls screaming as he fishtails into the parking lot. He skids to a stop right in front of me (there are parking blocks and a curb between us, so I don’t bother to move) and he leans on the horn, laughing maniacally between its bursts.
“’Bout time,” he says when I open the passenger door.
“My bad,” I say, glad to see him and the company he’s brought. There, in the cab’s front bench seat, are Gracie Walters and Kara Nash. Gracie lifts a leg up over the gear shift and slides in closer to Garret, and Kara slides over to make room for me. I hop up and pull the door shut tight against my arm, throwing the lock down on the logic that this makes the door extra shut, ensuring it won’t pop open and shoot me out into a sorghum field somewhere while these three laugh their asses off down the highway.
The windows are open, the night air chasing in among us, but the predominant scents in the cab are of the Malibu rum on Kara’s breath, the PearBerry body lotion she’s wearing, and the Tommy Hilfiger perfume I know Gracie to wear. These scents and the beer Garret has leaned over to hand me. Garret has his own Natty Light open sitting in the console cup holder.
“You smell like meat,” Kara says as we roll through a stop sign.
Garret makes a show of sniffing the air, leans forward to look at me across the girls. “What is that? Sausage?” He leans back, laughing at his own joke, guns the engine again.
“Jesus,” Kara says. She’s got one hand on the ceiling and one on the dash, both feet screwed to the floor trying to keep from bouncing over me and out the window.
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” Garret says. “Mutt, show her how to buckle up.”
I pull down on the shoulder strap, feeding it out, take hold of the slack with my free hand, and pull down again, handing her the prong-end of the buckle. “Here you go,” I say, and she fishes the buckling-end out from under her leg and presses the prong in, fastening us both.
“Better?” Garret asks when he hears the click, and when she admits with some grudge that it is, he leans forward to turn up the music, popping in the button for the cigarette lighter while he’s at it.
“You doin’ alright?” Garret asks. We’re standing beside his truck at the end of a long line of other beat-up high school cars and trucks outside the party. The girls have already made their way in—they have a brown paper bag of alcohol in the refrigerator in the garage to get reacquainted with—and Garret is removing cans from a newly-opened twelve-pack, floating them with the ice atop the water in his cooler.
“I’m alright,” I say. I’ve finished the first beer he handed me and cracked another.
He lights a fresh cigarette and cocks an eye in my direction. “Alright night?”
“Good night,” I say. Even though it was relatively slow, there’d been twenty-eight dollars in the jar for TJ and I to split at the tip-out.
“K.” He’s eying me, still. He nods at the cooler our beers are floating in.
“They’re not gonna run away. You can have ‘em whenever you want.”
“I just feel like I have some catching up to do, is all.” In the almost three weeks we’ve been “talking,” Gracie Walters and I have never actually talked, only exchanged text messages and made out. Everything I’ve tapped out to her has been carefully weighed and considered—anything that’s weighed too much I’ve foregone sending—and then when we’ve gotten together at night it’s been a kind of just-add-liquor combustion, our hands tangling with one another’s and slipping around each other’s sides. Now I’m a little self-conscious of the odor of barbeque I know I’m putting off. If Garret hadn’t insisted on picking me up for the pool and dropping me off at work, I’d have driven my own car. I could’ve left the Barbeque when TJ and I closed and gone home to squeeze in a quick shower. I could have relived the moment I’d had the week before when she told me she liked how I smelled like clean sheets.
“Shot?” Garret asks, waggling his eyebrows.
It’s an old joke between us. The cinnamon schnapps has been there, rattling around in his glove compartment, since we both threw up on it, what, eight months before? And it’s seen temperatures below zero and above a hundred and six since then. Because I’m in a mood I don’t quite understand, I decide to take him up on it. “I will if you will.”
Garret shrugs—he’ll never back down—and reaches through the open passenger side window to retrieve the bottle and take a swig. Then he howls and hands it to me, and I take a swig and howl and hand it back, and then we’re walking down the line of cars along the street and into the party.
The house is big, two stories, with a balcony looking out over the golf course and a kind of open floor plan inside: the kitchen becoming the dining room, the dining room stepping down into the living room. There’s an overlook where the second-floor hallway looks down over the first floor’s three-part expanse, and a group of last-year’s sophomore guys is standing on it. One of them holds his beer can out, tips it a little, and a soft yellow trickle spills out onto another sophomore’s head below. When the victim turns to look up, the prankster has already moved back into the second floor’s crowd, and I can’t hear whatever it is he tries to yell over the music.
I post up in the kitchen thinking to suck down another beer and get my sea legs under me before moving farther into the party. As I watch, Garret heads into the living room. He puts one of his feet up on the stone ledge of the fireplace, strikes up a conversation with Wesley Phillips about something most likely automotive-related. Wesley and his dad are rebuilding an old El Camino, and Garret is interested in things like that. In the kitchen, I listen to Drew Harper talk about how he and a couple other guys have been here at the house getting fucked up every night this week. He asks if I want to go to the laundry room in the basement to get stoned, but I don’t like getting stoned. I tell him it’s going to be a strictly alcohol night for me.
The girls come in from the garage especially giggly and I wonder if they have gotten stoned. Garret flags them down and Gracie, Laura, and Kara stop to talk to him and Wesley by the fireplace for a few minutes. Then Garret taps the breast pocket of the flannel shirt he’s wearing, mimes like he has a cigarette between his fingers, and points to the sliding doors leading to the house’s backyard. Parting with Wesley and Kara, Laura and Gracie head outside with him.
Kara waves to her friends, indulges Wesley by holding her hand out to receive, unsuccessfully, a complicated kind of farewell handshake, and then travels across the whole, roiling sea of the party to come squeeze in between Reggie Parra and I, leaning against the counter. I can’t smell anything on her, but that doesn’t mean she and her friends haven’t been toking.
“What’s up,” she asks, her arm pressed against mine for the second time of the evening.
“Nadda,” I say. “You?”
“Chillin’” she says. This is typical of the conversations she and I have had this summer: ironic; a little put-on. Everything a joke.
“What’re they up to?” I ask, nodding toward the sliding doors.
She squints, feigning mystification for a moment, then affects a dawning comprehension. “Garret and Gracie and Laura? They said they were going to smoke up, then go upstairs and have a menage-a-trois in what’s-his-name’s parents’ room.”
She glances at me sideways. It was an admirable attempt, but she hasn’t quite pulled it off. Trying to work in the French, perhaps, pushed it too far, and Kara’s embarrassed to have uttered these words.
“Get fucked up and fuck?” I say, to try to help her out, and she says, “Yeah, that,” with some regret in her voice.
“Who’s on top in a situation like that?”
She grins and picks back up without letting another beat go by. “Oh, they’ll take turns, but it’ll be Laura first, definitely. She’s a giver. She loves being on top.”
I look at her. “Did you guys smoke up in the garage, or what?”
She flushes. “Maybe?”
The ironic nature of our usual banter has gotten tangled, and I don’t know how to read this. I decide to leave it alone. “Good times at the pool today?” I ask, to change the subject. I like to talk about sex as much as the next guy—there’s the theory that talking about it could lead to having it—but the suggestive conversations I’ve had with Kara this summer have all been while Gracie was around. In this way Kara has been a kind of conversational proxy for her friend—another way to talk to her without really talking to her. This makes sense since Kara and I have classes together at school and Gracie and I don’t.
Maybe we should go join them, I’m about to say, and I’m thinking about saying make it a five-way, but I’m not sure how this will go over, and then our friends are walking back in. A new song starts—one of the summer’s anthems—and Garret’s first step into the house comes down with the song’s downbeat. His head nods and his hands rise. When Gracie and Laura walk in behind him and start dancing, too, people step forward from the walls and rise from the sectional couch. This is a power Garret has: he can incite action, make a party a party. Almost as soon as this new phase of the night has begun, though (it’s crackin’; it’s off the hook. People who aren’t here are going to be sorry when they hear about it tomorrow), one of the football team’s linemen, standing on a dining room chair, drops a handle of Jim Beam onto the glass dining table, cracking its surface all the way across. “Oh shit,” somebody says, and then the word shit and variants of its typical usage, holy-, and fucking-, are rippling through the party, people on the second floor leaning over the railing to get a better view and point down at the new, white vein running the length of the glass. And then it’s over, everyone has to get out—Get the fuck out!—because the sophomore who’s going to be a junior is having a meltdown, and his friends are stepping up to support him. No one has made it to the stereo cabinet, though, so the music is still playing loud, and the tangle of people in the living room are all still dancing. The last thing I see before one of the sophomore kid’s bigger friends puts his hands on my and Kara’s shoulders is Gracie moving her hips against Garret’s, Garret dropping a hand down to her waist while his other tips up one of our cans of Natty.
Some kind of reconfiguration has taken place, how or when I don’t know. Was it while I was at work and they were at the party, or was it earlier? Had Garret gone back to the pool after he dropped me off at the Barbeque? Or maybe it was earlier in the week, around the time the tone of Gracie’s text messages cooled.
We stand around in the backyard for a while, Garret and Gracie and Laura and Kara and I, because there’s a chance the party could get going again after the crowd thins out. This sophomore kid might realize that the damage is done and that the sensible thing is to try to salvage something out of it—have a good time before his grandparents find out and he’s grounded for the first half of his junior year. He can’t see this, though—he’s hysterical—and his friends come out to try to muscle us away. “Don’t fucking touch me,” Garret says, and “You don’t tell guys with girls to leave,” but they won’t hear reason, and we head out by way of the gate in the side yard, making our way down the line of parked cars and trucks. Laura, who I suspect knows something I don’t, begs off and waves to us from the driver side window of her little white Cavalier, telling Gracie she’ll call her tomorrow. Then we’re getting into Garret’s truck, leaving.
Garret drives us toward a spot we know where the asphalt runs out, where there’s some new construction for some out-of-town housing, where a giant berm of excavated sand screens us from the view of passing cars on the bypass. When we get there, I reach down below the seat to get the blanket so we can spread it out on the ground and have one of our little drinking picnics, but Gracie’s gotten out on Garret’s side of the truck, slipping her hand into his. He wants to show her the view from the top of the berm.
“Weren’t you and Gracie kind of together?” Kara asks, sitting beside me on the blanket.
“Only kind of.”
“Your friend’s kind of a dick,” she says, and I have to roll back the tape in my mind and review it to make sure I heard her right. Not Your friend must have a big dick, or He must be showing her his dick, or any of the other jokey things she might’ve said on other nights. She’s being level, speaking straight.
“Yeah,” I say. Because Garret is kind of a dick. Teachers, other kids’ parents, and a lot of kids we go to school with would all agree. But the image of Garret that swims to my mind comes out of the darkness of my bedroom, nine months before, after my mom had taken off. The three light bulbs in the fixture above my bed had gone out—blip, blip, blip—over the course of two weeks, and I hadn’t had the wherewithal to replace them. It had been Garret who had come in one afternoon while I was lying in the dark and begun pulling fresh bulbs out of a sleeve, throwing a pillow at me and saying “Get up, Mutt. We’re goin’ out.”
And it was Garret, when Gracie and I first started texting, who had grabbed my phone and sent off that first string of messages. When she texted back, it was Garret who told me what I ought to say. When we’d gotten together, it’d always been at places Garret had driven us, drinking alcohol Garret had purchased with Garret’s fake ID. In some ways, Garret had been taking her out the whole time.
We can see the two of them, now, perched atop the edge of the berm, their separate silhouettes merging into one. “Dick,” Kara says. She scoots closer to me.
We’ve been kissing for a while when we hear their feet scraping the dirt road coming toward us, and there’s a pleasing flush about Kara’s face when she pulls away. Her chest rises and she blinks a few times, as if she’s just come up from deep under water, and she squeezes my arm, lowers her head onto my shoulder. “He’s not even very smart,” she says, and Neither is she is the first thought that crosses my mind. But this isn’t fair or even true, really. The true thought is my second one: He is. He’s a genius. Because he planned this, all of it. And he made it happen. What have you or I ever done, I almost ask, but instead of speaking I move my hand to tilt her chin up toward my own, and the two of us submerge into one another again.
Peter Shull is a Midwestern novelist and educator. His novel Why Teach? is now available in paperback and e-reader editions from Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Kindle Store, and Kobo! His short stories Ornamental Pond Fish of Southwest Kansas and Prague are available on this site!
Cover Design, Nathaniel Roy
Cover art credit: Maurice Olin
I hope more people read this story. I really enjoyed it.
I love that I can see the place and hear the people and feel what Mutt feels. So good Peter!