Short Story: A Little Bit Frightening

A Little Bit Frightening

“Ha!  Everybody was Kung Fu fighting,” shouted Spinner from his backyard to no one in particular.  He made another kick in the air, Kung Fu style, toppling three more bad guys to the brown lawn with his powerful air kick.  He stood alone in his barren backyard, the hot August sun retreating finally behind the neighbor’s sagging roof. Moe-the-Dog was his only observer.  Lined up in front of the redwood fence that separated homes and lives were ten or fifteen of his enemies watching in fear as he destroyed them one by one with the bare soles of his feet and the sides of his well trained hands. 

“Ha! I’m fast as lightning.  Ho!”  He leaned into a kick and another human domino fell.  He stood back in awe and surveyed the pile of bodies surrounding him in the backyard, unaware of the oppressive evening heat or the beads of adolescent sweat that had formed on his upper lip. 

From the corner of his eye reality appeared.  “Peter, do you want a peanut butter sandwich?” his mother called from the open sliding glass door.

He worried for a moment what she would say when she noticed his foes lying all around him, but his fear was extinguished by her loud voice calling him again.

“Peter, why don’t you answer when I call you?” 

He glanced from side to side at the evidence strewn around the yard. 

“What, Peter? I can’t understand you.” 

He called Moe-the-Dog over and asked him if he wanted a peanut butter sandwich.  Moe said yes and Spinner nodded to his mom in the affirmative.  She turned to go back in the house, the sound of exasperation emanating from somewhere deep in her throat.

A peanut butter sandwich that summer was just that, a peanut butter sandwich.  Spinner on occasion found grape jelly in the refrigerator and would put some on his dry sandwich to make it sweet and appealing, but it was near the end of the month and his mom was stretching the food money to make it to September.  School would start then and Spinner would benefit from the subsidized school lunch program for poor kids. Until then, it was dry peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and dinner, with little else in between.

While Peter ate his sandwich at the kitchen table his mother stared glumly out the window above the sink, dreading the night that lay ahead of her at the cannery.  Her back ached just thinking about it—eight hours hunched over the conveyer belt, scanning a never-ending sea of red tomatoes for the dregs of the harvest; plucking away the damaged tomatoes and the rocks, and the occasional field mouse that got caught up in the tomato harvester.  She’d stand on that hard cement floor for hours on end until at last the sun came up and she could go home, remove her red-stained clothes, and attempt to shower away the smell of harvested tomatoes from her body. Sometime later she’d collapse into her husbandless bed and, if lucky, sleep until two or three in the afternoon when she’d have to get up to fix Peter a meal before returning to the cannery for another grueling eight-hour shift.

           

At twenty-eight, she had sacrificed nearly half her life for Peter and she knew there were no prospects for change. But that’s what life turns into for girls who get pregnant at sixteen and don’t know who the father is.  One moment of passion and the sanguine life of a teenager turns into one of regret and disappointment, and dreams fade as a baby grows.  And the baby inside her becomes Peter, a boy with her eyes and nose and chin, and the rest from someone else who participated in the conception but not in the raising of his child.

She longed for that other life, a life she might have had—and might yet have—but for the unlucky meeting of her egg and someone else’s sperm.  But now, after twelve years, loving Peter had become a burdensome chore that belied maternal instincts. 

She took one more sip of her cold coffee and dumped what was left in the brown-stained sink.  She looked out the window at the darkening sky, looking past her own reflection to the pair of half-full garbage cans beside the wooden gate with a broken latch that hung horizontal to the ground. The gate had been broken for months now, and there was no one to help her fix it. 

“What time is your game tomorrow?” she asked him, without much thought. He held up five fingers, his response appearing in the window beside her own reflected face.  The faint image in the glass made her think Peter was a ghost, a vision.  For a moment she wished it so.

She filled the sink with scalding water and dish detergent. Steam rose and swirled around her face and began to accumulate on the window, distorting Peter’s reflection as well as her own, and beside them the garbage cans and gate with its broken latch. As she rinsed the peanut butter knife she allowed her thoughts to wander, to blot out the image of the twelve-year-old boy beside her in the window.  She’d had bad thoughts like this before. It wasn’t the first time she’d wished him out of her life, but her thoughts had never gone this far and they made her stomach turn, same as when she found a shredded mouse on the cannery conveyer belt.  Fear rose from her stomach and stuck in her throat, which tightened and grew hard. The window became a blur through her tears and steam.  Their two reflected faces stared back at her and grew murkier until the steaming water began to bead and run down the window into the sill. She took a deep breath and exhaled, picked up a kitchen towel and wiped the window clean of the beaded water and their reflections.

From outside she could hear the revving of a car’s engine followed by the screech of rubber tires on the hot, dry pavement.  After a year and a half she’d grown accustomed to the sound of their seventeen-year-old neighbor storming out of the house after fighting with his drunken father.  Despite its familiarity, the noise frightened her, more so because she knew it meant the boy had been beaten again. The noise had startled her from thoughts unthinkable and for that she was grateful, but she felt ill again and light headed, and this time her knees started to buckle. Suddenly she felt Peter’s arms were around her waist, pulling her up until her hands found the edge of the counter.

“What’s wrong Mom?” he asked.

She tried to remember the last time she’d heard him speak to her. 

“Why are you crying, Mom?  Did I do something wrong?”

His concern brought another welling of emotion and she lost her balance again, Peter’s arms gripping her tighter. In his boy’s arms she became a weightless mass, too heavy for him to hold up.  She collapsed into his body, forcing them both to the ground. Peter took the brunt of the fall, protecting her, his arm cradling the back of her neck.

When she opened her eyes she was on the floor, Peter’s voice distant, barely audible. “Mom, are you all right?  Are you all right?”

The refrigerator fan blew hot air along the floor through its plastic, dust-covered grill.

“Mom, Mom,” he pleaded, “I’m sorry for making you cry, I’ll get better, I promise.”

She remembered why she was on the floor and felt herself trembling. “Peter, Peter, I’m fine, I’m fine.  I think I need to eat something.  I’ll be okay in a few minutes.”

He helped her to the kitchen table, his eyes darting to the crumbs left by his peanut butter sandwich. He wiped them away and looked at her, his young face filled with adult concern.

She sat on the plastic-covered chair and tried to discern which one it was, the chair with the broken backrest or the other one with the uneven legs.  When the chair rocked from corner to corner she knew intuitively that the backrest was safe to lean on. 

Peter sat in the chair next to her and held her arm.  She stroked the back of his head, brushing his long blond hair from his collar, and revealing a mix of sweat and dirt on the back of his neck.  In summer, dust moved from the plowed fields to the necks of Central Valley kids, leaving a distinctive brown ring just above the backs of their collars.  She wondered how long it had been since his last bath.

“Peter, I want you to go to your room for awhile so I can get some rest before I have to leave for work.  Can you do that for me now?” 

He wiped his eyes and got up, and as he started to walk away his hand slid across the back of her neck. She shuddered at the feeling of his hand on her skin, and another flood of guilt rose from her stomach.  She watched him leave the kitchen and walk toward the hallway. A moment later his bedroom door clicked shut and she was alone again.

She remained at the table and sobbed quietly, her chin resting in the palms of her hands, her fingers cupping her face. Her mind raced with simultaneous thoughts of disgust and opportunity; she wondered if she could trust herself anymore, and if she could actually do something evil to Peter. She felt dazed and drugged, almost trance-like as she dreamed of a life without her son. 

She awoke a moment later to muffled shouts from down the hallway and she lifted her head to listen.  It was Peter singing and shouting again and stomping his feet on the bedroom floor:

"Everybody was Kung Fu fighting,

 those cats were fast as lightning,

…it was a little bit frightening"

She buried her face in her hands and tears rolled down her arms to her elbows that dug into the table.