Threshing Floor: November 2022
🙦 Hiding in your home becomes a lot easier when you have something to read!
Poems: Anglo-Saxon Riddle — Jeremy Abegg; The Appaloosa — Anonymous; soil — Ava Hixson; Formaldehyde Reservoir — Bucky Hixson; Good Kid, Bland City — Michael Thomas Jones; Snow Game — Henry Sundlie
Essays: Fear and Loathing in Moscow, Idaho — Derek Dustman; Delegation is Not Democracy — Brian Marr; Screwtape Email #1 — Screwtape (h/t Leslie Taylor)
Stories: La Cascada — Alaska Youngren; 4 Square — Madelyn Youngren
🙧 Poems 🙦
Anglo-Saxon Riddle
What races and runs faster Than that fleet footed Achilles Around lofty IIlium divine But can’t be told to take a step? It reaches up toward cloud-river high With absence of arms mighty. Sightless faces seen without eyes, Two of these this thing does keep To stay the souls of savage men. It travels over towering mountains, But “weary” is not a word it knows. Tall and sturdy stays the subject, But trunk of a tree this thing has not. And though the fists might fly from men A thousand strong, strength will stay To free this thing from falling down.
Jeremy Abegg
The Appaloosa
Her hair hangs down in silky locks, a horse’s mane unwild
Her cheeks are round like polished ruby, her face is smooth and tender
Her bosom a pair of pomegranates ready for a child
Her hips and thighs grab your eyes and show their fertile splendor
Her stature states from uncommon height,
Of regal rights to choicest men, whomever she desires
Her beaming smile (her greatest wile) will any young man smite
And cause in him to burn love’s purest fires
The more I saw, I must confess, she had me quite surprised
Some worthy man will be most blest with such a wife
And after thought was given I then had realized
Her blemishless beauty remains unmatched by all the maids I’ve seen in life
Anonymous
soil
Rain on a land where nothing grows
Where water does not water
It only fills in gaps
Peace on a land where heaven swings low
The constant drip does never falter
Like oil from jars or taps
Clay and water drops like glue
Reshaping, reclaiming
Creation becoming all new
From dust we are made
Circling and swarming in clouds
Coughing in columns tall
From dust we create
In an imperfectious shroud
Before glory, fall
Pedal, rest, pedal
Fingers on the lip
Pedal, lift, pedal
Spinning, as moons in orbit
Pedal, push, pedal
Being made perfect
Ava Hixson
Formaldehyde Reservoir
Formaldehyde must smell like roses,
wafting up their glass rimmed noses.
Here's a new specimen to bedevil,
new muscles, bones, and guts to dishevel.
Pickling every this thing and that
Who knew you could crucify a bat?
It's pinned quite neatly to a board,
mocking the pose of our great Lord.
It's small wings nailed to soft foam.
Did it really deserve the punishment of Rome?
Empty lab coats, white as bleach,
sucking knowledge like a leech,
shove mounds of fodder down our throats,
they pack until your stomach bloats.
"It's not what I want!" you may say
but you're going to get it any way.
They don't care what you think,
as long as you have drunk their drink.
They'll train you like a circus flea,
when you jump, they'll clap with glee.
They'll keep your brain inside a jar,
the formaldehyde reservoir.
Bucky Hixson
Good Kid, Bland City
Let's get out of this century!
we're the homeschool co-op aristocracy.
we'll chop our own heads off
with these electric guillotines—
pocket pencil sharpners—
splintring fingerbone machines—
an infinite linking network of
seeing stones for arcane teens.
we don't spend too much time in school;
we live too far off from our friends;
spent years circling in the clouds,
drowning with the flying dead.
Michael Thomas Jones
Snow Game
The silent snow falls softly on the ground
Cleats cut and tear, turning white snow brown
A furious leather ball, a violent fight;
Cheering erupts, waking the silent night.
Henry Sundlie
🙧 Essays 🙦
Fear and Loathing in Moscow, Idaho
I despise you, you red-haired frat bro who serves ice cream for a living. Standing behind you at the grub truck I want nothing more than to punch you in the back of the head with my ice-cold and unopened sprite can. I am done cleaning. The grease of two hundred burgers has been removed from the plastic floor of the restaurant. My back sears and ripples with horrible pain. The stars shine in the ebony backdrop of the northwestern sky. I seethe with bitter fury and abject horror at the stories you tell your friends, of getting into fistfights on trampolines and losing, of hooking up with lesbians at weddings. of the concussion you have already told me about and my cousin and apparently every other person in town that will come within five feet of you and your pooka shell necklace, as if hoping to find one solitary human that gives a damn. I want nothing more than to take my mac and leave, but the line is long and winds down the concrete crowning the street in front of hodgins and whatever the u.s. bank building is now. You are the perennially millennial and unfathomably douchey Grendel to my exhausted Beowulf. In my hand the Sprite is a sword. A hacking implement with a blade forged from artery-clogging corn-based sugar replacement, an edge of citric acid, and a pommel of aluminum. You strange and seemingly sex-addicted creature, with a pelt of red curls and the instinct to cut people off in the middle of the story to semi-ironically say that “Okay, here’s another one about me!” When in reality, irony is the only thing keeping this from simply seeming like an attention hungry professional ice-cream scooper who brags about sleeping with his friend’s sister and swilling wine, bottles at a time. My hand clenches tighter onto the soda can. I bring my arm back, ready to smite you in the back of the cranium with all the might that the Coca Cola company will grant me. The carbonation and corn syrup gods blessing me with the might to strike and splinter your brain pan into fractals of white powder. But a voice booms out that number 83 your order is ready. And so I collect my five cheese with bacon and walk off into the night, having spared you a second concussion
Derek Dustman is a janitor living in Moscow, Idaho. He contributes to the Threshing Floor to help save money to have his massive tapeworm, Charles, removed and rehabilitated.
Delegation is Not Democracy
The pillars of the American order are being shaken.
Ten years ago, conservative Christians could sit comfortably with the legacy of Reagan-style conservatism. Post-World War II American values fitted comfortably with Christians, with modern democracy seen as a natural outworking of the ideas of the nation’s founding.
Many Christians still hold to this vision of conservatism, but thanks to the disruption of Donald Trump, there has been a self-conscious identity crisis as conservatives watch the game tape and diagnose how we got to gay marriage, transgenderism, and cancel culture. What went wrong?
In particular, marginalized voices on the right seem to be getting more attention. I would point to critics as different as Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and Steven Sailer all as trying to critique modern conservatism by retrieving an older more trad political philosophy.
In this short essay, I want to zoom in on one particular point that I have heard made here and there, but which I want to try to state as clearly and succinctly as possible.
One of the things that Americans lost after World War II was the idea of delegation or representation. The pop conservatism I grew up with conceived of representation as politicians carrying out the will of the people: when we elected an official, the expectation was that the official’s job was basically to do what the people told them to do. This was true of both the left and right.
There are two problems with this, which the last twenty years has made very clear.
The first problem is the problem of the mob. Most people are stupid and do not know what is good for them, and so they need leaders who force them to virtue. There is a whole tradition of Christian thinking that affirmed that one of the jobs of rulers was to direct the people and restrain their vices, rather than to meekly perform their will. This should not be surprising to us. People are sinners, and when you construct a society in which a majority of unlanded voters ultimately determine the direction of society, then it’s easy to see why people would vote themselves more money, more social programs, more bread and circuses.
However, there is a second problem, one which intelligent critics have leveled at libertarianism recently. The problem is that of coordination. Simply put, people have different desires and those desires come into conflict with other people inevitably. No matter what, someone is going to have to do something that they do not want to do, even if it is written into a contract. Say that you agree to work a job at MacDonald’s. Well, after you sign up, the manager is going to make judgment calls that you do not like and which you will be forced to carry out, if you want to take home a paycheck. This is how society holds together. Coercion is simply a part of life, no matter how you slice it.
When older conservatives complain that their politicians do not represent them, there is a part of me that wants to know why they are so surprised. Conservatives have been saying for decades that the most important value was political freedom, and so if politicians are merely there to vote as we would vote, then we should not be surprised when they have to bow down to every lobby sent their way; it’s part of the logic of representation as Americans misunderstand it.
However, delegation is totally different from this, and it occasionally comes out in the old canard that “America is a Republic, not a Democracy.” However I don’t think most conservatives spell out the full implications of this.
When we delegate authority, it is not the case that the official acts as you would act, but rather that you recognize that while he shares a common ground with you, he is in fact wiser and more experienced than you. Thus, when he goes to Washington, DC to represent you, you defer to his judgment. This means when he does something you don’t think he should do, you recognize that he might know something you don’t know. Indeed, you should expect him to do things differently than you would because he will be more experienced and better informed than you.
The family is a great example of how delegation works. It is not the case that the husband’s goal is simply to make decisions that the wife or children like. The husband has a unique perspective that should make him equipped to make decisions in the interests of the household. The wife can and should make her opinions known, but should also recognize that her husband is making judgment calls, many of which can result in failure without the husband being at fault. This allows for the kind of decisions and adventures that are necessary if the household is to function properly.
This principle extends to all sorts of institutions, including churches, schools, and guilds. We do not owe any of these institutions absolute obedience, and we should keep our minds critical without becoming critics. We should defer to the pastor’s judgment when he preaches the word because of his wisdom and office, even if we see here and there the things that he gets wrong. This principle also applies to government. If you want politicians that say “no” to the lusts of their people, then we need to defer, every once in a while, even when we disagree with them.
Delegation, of course, on this understanding is never absolute. There are times when you come to reasonably recognize that an elected official is not acting in your best interests, and you can lobby in all sorts of ways. However, this is a far cry from our current democratic mindset, in which any lapse of judgment is latched onto, by conservatives and liberals alike, as a grievous failure in principle. Cancellation is a much bigger problem on the left, but the right engages in it as well, and it often attacks democratic practices (i.e. abortion, the welfare state, sexual promiscuity) without ever challenging democratic systems (i.e. universal suffrage, society of spectacle, maximal individual liberty, etc.).
Consider the problem of women suffrage, a universally taboo discussion in conservatism today. Women do not want to get involved into politics that much. One time I was talking to a girl at NSA and she was explaining how she wanted to be able to vote, not just have her vote go to her husband. I was like, “Oh cool. Well have fun researching the candidates!” She then laughed and said something like, “Oh I don’t care about that.” Indeed, this is how most Americans think. Most Americans probably do not need to vote, and we should only give them the vote when it allows us to delegate power properly.
Think of it like this: would you prefer an America where everybody voted and felt (as I do) that their vote was always trash, or would you prefer one where a far smaller pool voted but where the voters listened to their neighbors who could not vote and tried to represent that?
I know that we cannot ever do this perfectly: injustice will always exist as long as sin rules in the human heart. Women will always know all about the things their men do wrong, and the peasants will always have jokes about the nobles. However, the converse will also be true: men should be allowed to laugh at some of the insularity of their wives and politicians will know certain big picture things better than their people.
Democracy failed in Athens, and it has failed in America, leading to incoherent policies and increasing libertinism. The expansion of voting rights has taken place at the same time as social roles have been flattened. The more power we have to lobby our politicians on every single major issue, the less power they have and the less power we all have.
It’s time for us to delegate and to stand by that delegation.
Brian Marr
Screwtape Email #1
My dear Wormwood,
It’s easy to see from your last letter that you don’t properly understand the value of choosing the appropriate language for getting the pathetic little humans to think in the terms we want them to think in instead of in the Enemy’s terms. One of the best examples of how to properly carry out a language campaign is how our Father Below has recently trained people to think in terms of social justice.
By using the term “justice,” we can convince even the Enemy’s followers to think in our terms. After all, the word justice is in the Enemy’s book. But the key is that Our Father Below means something different by justice than the Enemy does. This difference is subtle enough that those who aren’t paying attention won’t know the difference. And if you’ve been following my advice to keep your patient constantly distracted by digital media, then it’s almost certain he won’t be paying careful attention to such subtleties.
When the Enemy’s book talks about justice, he means using equal weights and measures, and not showing partiality. In essence, we mean the exact opposite of this, but we must not let on that it’s the opposite. When we talk to the humans about social justice, we must very subtly convince them that true justice is about equal outcomes. As soon as this switch is made in their minds, we can then convince them that it is right to use unequal weights and measures to ensure equal outcomes. This idea that equal outcomes are intrinsically just is an idea that is especially pleasing to our Father Below. This is because it flies abruptly in the face of the disgusting diversity that the Enemy used when he made the humans.
Those teeming little blights upon the planet—no two of them closely resemble each other, they are so grossly unique. Therefore, equal outcomes are an impossible goal that they can never even approach. But that’s why our Father Below wants us to keep them constantly chasing it—because it can never be attained. The magnificent success of such a campaign—having the pesky humans chasing something antithetical to creation—is that it breeds the most rampant discontent. This discontent is so potent that in even the most prosperous nation in the entire history of the world, with the lowest death rates in history, the most food ever available, the most luxurious living quarters, indoor plumbing, more wealth than kings of old ever dreamed of—even in such a land, we can keep the vermin humans massively discontent because there will always be someone who has more. There will always be unequal outcomes because our Enemy unequally bestowed gifts, but we must make them think it’s because of social structures.
This desire for equal outcomes also wonderfully puts the sexes at each others’ throats (wha-ha-ha-ha-ha). You and I both know that the real reason there are fewer women CEOs than men CEOs is because the Enemy made the nature of women such that they are often not as ambitious in the business world as the men and often value relationships over success. But don’t let this idea get into the women’s minds. Tell the women it is because they are oppressed by the men that there are fewer women CEOs. Then it will be more likely that more women will forsake nurturing the young and will imagine themselves great heroes for the cause of all women by pursuing a life that is against their nature and calling. Even better, convince them that they must put off having any young at all, and that if they become accidentally pregnant, then women’s healthcare is an absolute right that procures social justice for all women. (You know by women’s healthcare that I mean child sacrifice, but never let that phrase enter a single person’s mind. This is another case where vocabulary is everything).
Another thing is that you must keep your patient believing in the ideas about evolution even though he professes to follow the Enemy. Let him think that the Enemy was at work through evolution if you must, but make sure that he keeps believing in the idea that man was once an ape. As long as he believes this, he will also believe that man is getting better and better. This is the foundational idea by which we convince the humans, even those who follow the Enemy, that unnatural practices that previous generations rejected should now be accepted. We know that previous generations rejected them because they were our disgustingly twisted practices (wha-ha-ha), but make humans think it was because previous generations were so backward. Tell them we’ve progressed now. What backward people once thought bad, enlightened people now understand as a lifestyle option. By this line of thinking, we can get the humans to overcome their natural aversion to same-sex relationships, we can normalize the practice of humans rejecting the sex the Enemy assigned them and get them to pretend to change their sex, and they will soon accept all manner of delightfully perverted acts that fly in the face of the way the Enemy designed the humans—isn’t it grand?)
Your homework, Wormwood, is for you to diligently study the design the Enemy had in mind for his creatures so that you can diligently promote the opposite.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
Thanks to Leslie Taylor for forwarding this email onto us. Now that demons finally have dial-up we’ll be able to hear about what’s going on down there.
🙧 Stories 🙦
La Cascada
Jackie pulled the plush blanket over her chest, resting her bony wrists on top of each other. The night air was cold and clear. It brushed the blanket across the back of her neck, sending a chill down her spine. They were close enough on the balcony to the waterfall, for which the small town was famous, that she could feel flecks of water freckle her nose and chin.
“Your father. Is a strong man, Jackie. And so is your uncle Peter.”
Her grandmother was sitting in the wicker arm chair across from her. She cupped her chin in her pale, knobby fingers. Her face was lit by the storefront light across the street.
“He’s a strong man. He’s got your mom and your brother right now. Peter will turn out all right. He has a good man on his case. Peter will turn out all right.”
Jackie wasn’t looking at her grandmother. A man was crossing the street in a tan cow-hide jacket with beaded fringe along the back and arms. He spoke softly to the woman standing in the doorway of the tienda and they went inside. Her grandmother bit the inside of her lip and tried to catch her eye.
“You know. God knows what he’s doing with Peter. He knows what he’s doing with Peter and he knows why you and your sister are here and not with your father. Trust him, Jackie. It’s sad. It is sad. People handle these things differently. You know, we had a cat that got backed over by a truck when your aunt was, well, seven, around seven and your dad was ten. He didn’t cry but your aunt and I did, I figure your sister is like your dad. Alright? She just needs time. It’ll come. It’ll come.”
The trolley rattled down the street, its pink and green neon light reflected off of the glass table between them and onto the ceiling, painted with images of blue birds. The trolley was playing La Cucaracha, and small hispanic children were hanging onto the poles and giggling and calling to one another. A boy was digging his fist into another boy’s hair and swirling it around. A young man in a sports jacket had his arm around a girl in a green dress too tight for her, and was laughing and whispering into her ear. Jackie watched them. Her grandmother was speaking. Jackie's eyes felt exposed in their sockets, clammy and cold with salt and wet. Her hands twisted around under her blanket and her face itched. Her grandmother eventually stopped speaking, gathered her sweater around herself and went to her hotel room. Jackie listened for the click of the lock.
The trolley made another circuit, playing some Spanish song Jackie didn’t recognize. She stared down at it, then walked across the clay tiled floor of the balcony to the stairs. Her bare feet felt as if they were filled with snow, and her hands didn’t sway with the rest of her body as she descended. They lay stiff at her sides, not reaching for the rail.
The lobby of the hotel was washed in the dim yellow light of a banker’s desk lamp on the wooden box holding the keys to the different hotel rooms. The chairs of the diner were lying upside down on the tables, and the desk was unattended. She hopped off the bottom step and crossed the room to the front door, opened it and stepped outside. The security light switched on. A dog sleeping on a towel in the far corner of the parking lot lifted its head and blinked at her, then nestled its head back between its forepaws. The parking lot was small and paved with uneven stone. The soft pads of her feet scraped against it as she dragged herself to the iron gate.
Her hands found the lock and, breathing slowly, she flipped it and pushed gently against the bars. It swung open quickly with a clang. The waterfall was steadily streaming down into the pool at the end of the road. Two men had stepped onto the balcony of the hotel next door. The smoke from their cigarettes floated down to Jackie. It was familiar to her. Uncle Peter and her dad would share a smoke after they got back from church on Sundays. Jackie and her sister and brother would wait inside the kitchen for lunch and listen to them speak and smoke together. Jackie sneezed and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
Her thin pale hair was sticking to the sides of her face and curling in the folds of her ears. The night air had lost its clarity among the painted stucco buildings and narrow brick streets. Jackie's hands were stuffed in the pockets of her pajamas, and sweat was gathering in the pits of her knuckles and palms. She was trying to find the cafe she had gone to with her grandma earlier that day. She needed to talk to someone and the owner of the cafe was the only man around she knew who spoke English. She needed to talk to someone badly.
“¿A dónde vas esta noche?” A man stood in the middle of the sidewalk in front of her. He smiled down at her kindly under the brim of his cattleman hat, his mouth looked too small for his teeth. “¿A dónde vas esta noche?” he repeated, and Jackie looked down at her bare feet and then to the curb. A pack of cards lay among the cigarette ends. Jackie stepped around the man and continued on. Many of the store fronts were dark but the doorways were lit with aluminum lights, and lamps on the stairways leading into the stores. They were swept clean on this street, and there were discolored chips of plaster on the mud stairs where it was waiting to be painted.
The closer Jackie got to the center of the town, the more restaurants were open and filled with people. None of them were the cafe from earlier. The cafe had a big yellow awning and a painting of a cactus in the window. It had red walls, it would be easy to spot.
An old man sat on the stoop of an Italian restaurant, sharing a cigarette with a dumpy wrinkled woman in a shawl. Young men and women passed Jackie on the street and laughed at her. Some pointed. She scowled at them and continued. There was a broken bottle on the street, and Jackie winced as its shards pushed into her feet. Her eyes were spent crying though, and her pain couldn’t produce any new tears. Only an itch under her eyelids.
The town was small. There were only so many streets, and Jackie was sure she had scoured all of them for the cafe. Her legs felt limp and her eyelids drooped. She stood under a stop light on an unfamiliar street. A group of young, shaved, well dressed men in sombreros were crossing towards her and she watched them coldly. Daringly. They didn’t notice her. The street didn’t go on for very much longer before it turned to gravel. It opened to a field and led to a path up into the mountain with the waterfall.
The night had gotten cold, and Jackie watched her breath puff out of her and disappear. She wondered if her grandmother was looking for her. She wondered if her sister was awake or if she was still in their hotel bed, sleeping. Warm. The grass was wet and tall and clung to her flannel pajama pants. Jackie watched her shadow on the ground to her side. The moon was bright enough that her shadow was thick and dark and her hands were lit as she parted the grass in front of her. She heard something cry in the distance, and the singing and the trolley with the children.
The path turned from grass to stone, and Jackie loped her way up the mountain, crawling on all fours up the steep, smooth boulders. A breeze was at her back, brushing her hair out in front of her. Sweat cooled on her neck and dried under her arms. She finally laid down at the foot of the wooden cross overlooking the town. The waterfall was downhill from her. Its crashing swallowed the air around it. Jackie followed it with her eyes, to their hotel. The light of her grandmother’s room was on, and the curtain was pushed open.
Jackie lay on her belly in the gravel, rested her chin on her elbow, burrowed into the dirt, and watched her grandmother pacing around her room in her bathrobe. Jackie smiled to herself. Her grandmothers’ shoulders were shaking violently and her grandfather reached out to put a hand on her back, his other hand was holding his phone to his ear. Jackie let her eyes roll and she slept.
Alaska Youngren
4 Square
Wavy heat radiated off the black asphalt. Mary hovered over the four square, listening to a taut rubber ball bouncing up and down; a round twang after each initial slap.
She was hovering so that her skinned knee wouldn’t burn against the shiny blacktop surface. Her knees pointed out, away from the yellow four between her sticky, folded legs.
The other three squares were empty, excluding a cluster of browning crab apples on number two.
Mary glanced to her left at the monkey bars. Today, there was heavy two-way traffic. Slim elbows knocked together and round faces peeked through the gaps from above.
“What a ruckus,” Mary whispered. The grasshopper on her knee’s antennae twitched.
“A ruckus,” was what her dad had always called it when he caught her and Evangeline fighting. Every time, it had made her feel silly for the heat in her cheeks and the hair in her fist. Almost as if he were laughing at them, and the now-broken toy on the ground.
But his small smile always just stayed on the corners of his mouth. Something about that look and that tone always left them quiet. Still. Surprised at themselves.
Each time, it wasn’t long before the toy was mended and the argument forgotten.
“A ruckus,” she whispered again. The grasshopper jumped off her knee with urgency.
Mary’s legs shook she sprung up on her heels, rocking, slightly. The soles of her flip flops were too small. Her big toes just hung off the edges of the worn tips. If she rocked too aggressively, they would scrape against the blacktop and blister.
If that happened, she would probably need a Band-Aid. But they were out at home. She had checked yesterday, when she fell. Mom hadn’t been happy with her, “You’re always tripping on something Mary!”
It was true. She had fallen a good deal recently.
Her dad had always told her to hold a hand when they crossed the street but his was too big, so she held Evangeline’s. She never used to trip when she held Angie’s hand.
She could hear the rubber ball bouncing farther away, the three other squares were still empty.
Mary liked four square. She liked it a lot. She liked it enough to walk the half-mile it was from her house to the park in her too-small flip flops. Her arms were sweaty and her hair was hot. She should have worn her baseball cap.
She looked at the vacant squares in front of her. She’d always felt a little guilty when they had all played together until it got dark. Guilty, but not enough to stop playing. She had always thought everyone else was waiting for them to leave so that they could take their turn to play for a while.
Sometimes when mom or Evangeline got tired, Dad would have another kid play with them for a while – until they started winning. Then Dad would politely tag them out —he could always count on winning when he played with Mom and Angie.
Where were those kids? She’d walked so fast to get here in time for a spot. But it was empty.
She walked over to the too-sweet smelling crab apple tree. The leaves were green but limp, as if they all agreed August had gone on long enough. Even the branches drooped.
Mary lifted herself onto one of the lower branches and looked at the four square below her narrow swinging feet. It looked small from her perch. The yellow paint had faded in the space of only a summer. They had repainted it only that June.
It was the day that Mom and Dad had been in their room whispering for hours. Angie and her hadn’t played like they normally did when Mom and Dad talked. They weren’t used to the quiet. Angie’s round blue eyes blinked, wider than normal. They sat on the stools by the counter. Swinging their feet, facing the door that shut out the whispers.
Mary didn’t like that door. It was creaky with crumbly reddish hinges and peeling white paint. The wood had split towards the top after so many wet winters and hot summers. But what Mary despised the most about that door was how thin it was. Whenever Dad was angry, he slammed the door. He didn’t do it very often, but when he did, it was because he was so mad that he didn’t even remember that the door didn’t slam properly. It just kind of shuddered. It always got stuck at the jam so even when he slammed, it, he had to pull it extra hard a second time to make sure it was really shut. Then you heard a “click” and you knew it wouldn’t swing open when someone came through the front door or opened a window.
Whenever Dad did this, Mary hated him. She hated him because she was embarrassed for him. She knew what it felt like to be embarrassed when you’re mad. It makes you angry at yourself even more than you are at whoever made you angry. Mary hated the thought of her Dad angry at himself. It made him seem little.
The door usually was too thin to block out Mom and Dad’s talks too. Mary and Angie would talk as loud as they could so they could keep playing their game. If they didn’t, they’d lose focus. If they didn’t, they heard the words Mom and Dad were saying and that felt wrong. Even when Mom and Dad were being so loud that they couldn’t stop themselves from hearing even if they sang with their ears plugged. The door was shut and that meant they weren’t supposed to hear. But they did hear. At least they usually did. But not today.
Mary strained to hear them. She wanted to sit closer to the door, but Angie had held out her hand when she tried to get off the stool. Angie was bigger so she probably knew. They stared at the door.
Then, the door creaked open and the girls stopped kicking their legs. Dad stepped out, his hair was clumpy on one side of his head, his eyes were red and his mouth was a little open. “Mary.” His voice was hoarse and his knees were swaying slightly. Mary sat up straight. She tried to stop herself from shaking. She knew it looked stupid to shake like that.
Dad took heavy, wide-set steps towards her and reached for her hand. Mary looked up at her Dad, just under his eyes. He hated it when she did that. But today he didn’t seem to notice, “Let’s go to the park,” his voice was quieter this time, but his chest kept moving up and down, his breath was deep and fast and hot on Mary’s cheek. She nodded, and took his hand, but her stomach felt heavy.
He didn’t talk the whole way there. His steps were a little too long and quick for Mary and he kept stopping for her to catch up. Then he’d start again, just as fast as before.
When they got to the park, they both knew they were going to the four square. They walked through the swinging black rectangle gate and past the covered sandbox full of grimy toddlers. Their steps bounced on the Astroturf path past the jungle gym and it’s high-traffic monkey bars. They navigated through the soft mothers clinging to wailing children and the older kids who came without parents on their brand-new bicycles. They passed a baby laying on his stomach, struggling to reach the baby-sized ball cap just out of reach in front of him, and his red-cheeked teenaged sister chatting with a wiry woman with a thin paperback laying open in her lap. The sweet scent of crabapple blossoms filled the air. They were close. But something wasn’t right. The flowery smell from before was interrupted by a wall of a dry and sour smell like a new house with no furniture in it.
A man with overalls bent over the ground, his hard hat shining in the last orange sunlight before the cool purple evening. He had a paintbrush in his hand. He looked up at us, kneeling at the 4 square. Sweat beaded at the corners of his eyes and the surface of his ruddy cheeks, dripping into his reddish beard, “Anything I can do for you two?”
Dad hesitated, “When will you be done with this?”
The man raised his eyebrows, “This’ll only take me another 20 or so minutes but it won’t be ready to play on for another couple of days if that’s what you mean.”
Dad mouthed, “Couple of days.” His mouth was hanging a little open again. His shoulders shook and Mary could hear him breathing through his nose. He sat down on the ground and placed his face in his hands. Mary’s cheeks were hot and her eyes burned. She sat down too. He looked so little when she was standing.
Mary swung her feet from her branch, staring at the now-faded four square. She remembered how the next day they had packed Evangeline’s toys and Dad’s books. The paint had faded in only a summer. She guessed she couldn’t blame the other kids for not playing.
It was easy to miss if you didn’t know what was there before.
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