Fiction by Larkin
If you can’t laugh about death, then I’d say you don’t know shit about life. I can even laugh here in front of my Pa’s grave. It’s all pretty damn funny when you think about it, and if you don’t think about it, it’ll find a way of sneaking up on you. Trust me. That’s what I come here to think about every year: the sneaking.
I was just a boy that Memorial Day weekend when Pa got back from the cemetery with loads of reds, whites, and blues in the back of his old pickup. I ran out to him from the backyard because I knew he was back from putting up new flags. I wanted to go with him, honor the vets, but he said he wanted to do it himself.
“I need some time alone with the dead,” he grunted when I asked.
He was a vet himself, so I imagined he was there with his old pals. While he was living it up with the dead, I waited at home.
Pa was leaping from the truck when I got to the driveway. He landed on the gravel with a grunt and then did a real nice spit from deep down in his gut.
As a boy I would stand in front of the bathroom mirror and try to spit like Pa. I never got the same sharp, smooth, solid bullet of spit.
Pa took a step towards me. “Got the old flags.” He jerked his head over his shoulder to the bed of the truck. “Need you to take care of ’em for me. Forgot to do something, need the bed for it.
“Yessir,” I said, tempted to salute him, but I just stood there, waiting for more instructions.
“You need to get ’em out the back, boy.”
“Yes, yessir.” I hopped into the truck bed real quick. The flags were dirty, so the white was more like yellow, and some of the sticks were broken. They looked tired back there. Some even had little tears that I didn’t think weather alone would’ve done.
The door up front slammed shut, and I knew I had to hurry because Pa wanted to go. I panicked and tossed the flags in heaps off the side of the truck. The engine started and shook the pickup like the old piece of junk it was under my feet. I got one bunch off the side. Then another. And another. And then I threw myself over, too, as Pa was backing the thing up. I waved to him, but he didn’t see me, so I hollered, “Bye, Pa!”
The flags looked plain sad sitting there scattered about. I wanted to help them, but I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do. Did he say get rid of them? Take care of them? I didn’t know what exactly he might’ve meant by either. Pa never had a way with words.
I needed to get them inside. It didn’t look like rain or anything, but I didn’t feel like the flags should’ve been left on the ground. I also couldn’t leave some unguarded while I took a handful in. I needed to haul them all in one go because if I didn’t, someone could come and piss on them or something. And I had a responsibility: I was the protector of these flags.
I took a moment to wipe the sweat off my brow. I’d say there were about eighty flags, which was a lot because Pa went round to a few cemeteries. That meant at least eighty dead vets in Alabama got fresh flags from Pa.
I could fit about forty under my arms, but that would’ve left a lot of flags. I stopped thinking and tucked my shirt into my shorts. My hands grabbed flag after flag and shoved them down my shirt against my sweating skin. The flags stayed in the pouch I created, so that I could carry them all at once.
My chest grew from scrawny to big and bulky and awkward-looking. I had to hold my chin up real high, or else some of the wood would’ve poked me. Then I tucked the rest of the flags under my arms and walked towards the shithole. Shithole was what Pa called the house.
I kicked the door, and it creaked open in reply. The living room was just as goddamned hot as it was outside, probably worse. We turned the air off every night to save money, but no one remembered to switch it on that morning. I was busy waiting for Pa to come back, but Johnson could’ve bothered to flip it on since he was in the house all day.
I plopped the flags in my arms on the couch and picked the sweaty ones out from my shirt. Piled up there, they looked livelier. They were retired, so they’d never look quite alive again, but this seemed to make them happier than the gravel drive. I also felt happier since I managed to get every last one inside.
Still, the sofa was a sorry resting place for these flags. He did say dispose of them, right? I thought, no, Pa would never say dispose. But I thought that was what he must’ve meant.
Trying to come up with a plan, I sat next to the mountain of flags. What do you do with tired old flags? Bury them? Put them in the trash? Sing to them like how there’s music at a funeral? But this wasn’t no funeral.
I dug my hand down between the cushions of the sofa until I found my phone, where I always managed to forget it. I could tell it was my spot on the sofa by the stains. They were from the sauces I used to hide the flavor of freezer burn after Pa’s woman left and we ate those shitty frozen dinners.
When Pa’s woman was around, we ate real meals. She cooked like a woman should, with her hair tied back so it wouldn’t get in the food. I told her I’d eaten worse than hair, but she kept it pulled back anyway. My brother and I waited all day to eat her cooking.
Once I unlocked my phone, I typed into the little search bar, “how to dispose of american flags.” I knew how to use the word even if Pa didn’t. The first result seemed about perfect: “The Proper Way to Dispose of American Flags.” There was that nice word “dispose” again and then another nice word: “proper.” Pa would want it done good and proper.
The first way was to donate them, but I couldn’t do that because I had to take care of them myself, like Pa asked. What the article said next didn’t seem right, so I scrolled through some more sites. They all seemed to agree that the proper way to get rid of your American flags was to burn them.
Pa would sit and yell at the TV, and I remembered clearly what he said so many times: “Those damn flag-burning liberals.” How could I burn a flag like them? But that’s what it said to do. The articles mentioned something official-sounding called “flag code,” saying that the preferred disposal was burning. Burial was an option, but not as good an option as burning them.
I was gonna burn them, if that’s what it took. I had to. I’d burn them, give them a moment of silence, salute them, then say the Pledge of Allegiance. The flags were alive like our country, the article said, so they had to be put to death in an honorable way. I liked that. That way, honor doesn’t leave us in death, as long as we don’t leave it behind in life.
So, fire it was. The flags already had wood and flammable parts, I just needed to make flames.
I had to move the flags again to set them on fire, so I got up and went under the kitchen sink. Two birds, one stone, because that was where Pa kept the plastic bags and the alcohol.
While grabbing a handful of bags, I looked over the assortment of bottles. It was a liquor graveyard in there, except this graveyard didn’t stay quiet. The bottles clinked as I reached my arm around and tried to find something with liquid inside. Pa’s woman used to hassle him about keeping empties around. He would say he was gonna sell them, but she eventually threw them away. Without her, the graveyard was growing rowdy.
I ended up finding fairly full bottles of tequila, vodka, and whiskey. Brown liquid didn’t seem right for burning, so I put that one back and closed the cabinet.
I tossed the bags on top of the pile of flags and then grabbed a lighter from the junk drawer. The sun scorched my skin when I went outside with the lighter and alcohol. Fire would be easy on a day like this.
Fifty feet or so from the shithole seemed enough to avoid setting the house ablaze. It was well off our property—which extended only ten feet from our house—and into the public area. There were a bunch of woods out beyond that, maybe fifty more feet out, so I wasn’t gonna start a wildfire either. It seemed like no one else liked our house because there wasn’t another for maybe 500 feet in any direction. I placed the bottles down on the yellow grass there and headed back to get the flags.
The flags were still resting peacefully on the couch. Johnson hadn’t fucked with them. I stuffed a bag before he came out and got any ideas. The first bag fit twenty flags, so I needed four bags. I stuffed the bags quickly, and once I could see the yellow cushion beneath the pile, I found something unexpected: a stinky, dirty sock. I knew it was Johnson’s sock. Stiff. Used. I didn’t know they were learning about jerking off that young. Not learning enough to know to keep it to yourself.
I filled the last bag of flags, but the sock still stared at me from the sofa. It was telling me I had to check on Johnson and make sure he wouldn’t interfere. Pa told me to do this, so I didn’t want him to mess it up, or take credit for it.
I pinched the sock and held it out in front of me with a stiff arm. Slowly, I walked through the kitchen and down the hall to his room, managing not to blow any sock smells back at me.
Johnson’s door was covered in dark blue paint. All the other doors were plain wood, but he insisted on getting a color, and blue was the only one Pa would tolerate.
I felt no need to knock. He didn’t deserve privacy if he wasn’t gonna keep to himself.
“Eep!” he screamed like a little girl when I barged in. I don’t know if I caught him in the act or something, but he was lying on his bed. He bolted up, and I threw the sock onto the bed next to him.
“How ’bout a knock?” He picked up the sock and smelled it without reacting at all. It was his gunk, so I guess he was used to it.
“Doing it on the sofa now?” I stayed by the door because his floor was a minefield of dirty clothes, and who knows what that stuff had been through if he left a cum sock on the couch.
He shrugged and threw the sock on the floor with the rest of the stuff then laid back down. I thought that made it pretty certain he wouldn’t be coming outside to bug me, but I wanted to make sure. “You doing anything today?”
“Nah.” He turned on his side so that his back was to me, and I took the hint to go.
I smiled as I slammed the door behind me. He yelled, “Fuck off!” Johnson was a prick. I wish I’d left the sock out for Pa to find so that he’d yell at him. But Johnson might’ve lied and said it was mine, and then I’d have been getting the shit end of the stick.
Back at the sofa, I started looping my arms through the bag handles. I brought all of them out to where I had placed the bottles and lighter. The flags stayed in the bags while I made sure the ground was clean.
Hunters liked to come around these woods and sometimes wander off into this clearing. Pa taught us to shoot here, too. Johnson was never a good shot. He was slow to load and couldn’t aim for shit. I was better but never great. I knelt and felt around the dead grass for any live bullets.
A while back, some Fourth of July, Pa made a campfire for me, Johnson, and his woman, for roasting hot dogs. He didn’t usually do stuff like that, so us kids were jumping up and down with excitement. I thought Johnson might’ve peed himself. Pa was in a better mood when he had his woman.
We were out by the fire, and Pa had it all ready to go. He was squinting at the forest beyond with a piece of starter wood in one hand, the other on his woman’s ass. The woman was staring down at the woodpile with her bright blue eyes. She wasn’t squinting.
Pa took his hand off her butt, then reached it out in front of me. I looked at the ground and saw the red lighter sitting brightly on the grass between us. After picking it up, I placed it in Pa’s hand, and he grunted a thanks.
Pa bent down to put the piece of starter right in the center of the stack, and the fire began to grow from the lighter’s flame. It was slow, but it was spreading, sputtering outward, then downward, then outward again. Johnson and I watched, waiting for the upward.
I looked at Pa looking at the fire, and I asked, “You think we can start ro—” But I couldn’t finish asking about the weenies because there was a loud pop and then, a shriek.
I thought it was Johnson’s girly yelp, but he didn’t even look at me. He was peering straight past me, past Pa, over at the woman. I followed his gaze and made eye contact with the woman over Pa’s shoulder. She was staring right at me, with those shocked shocks of blue in her eyes.
One of them live bullets must’ve been lying on the ground there, hiding right under the fire Pa had made. It popped off when it heated up, combusted, and somehow the shrapnel caught the woman. None of us, just her.
Pa was already hoisting her up, and she closed her eyes before she looked at anything that wasn’t me. She was like one of them damsels in distress when Pa swung around with her. It was only then that I got a glimpse of the deep red oozing down her leg, onto Pa’s arm.
“Put out the fire,” Pa barked. Then he was off.
Johnson and I ran to the kitchen and took out bowls full of water as fast as we could, spilling half of them on the lawn while we were sprinting. The fire went out easy. We sat there and ate the raw hot dogs, our butts soggy from the water we spilled. Me and Johnson didn’t say a word, except when he asked, “Tammy’s gonna live, right?” I nearly smacked him. It was a single bullet, not a bomb.
We never saw the woman again, and Pa never talked about her or what happened that day.
That’s why I was looking like a fool, flailing my arms around to triple check for the sneaky bullet that my eyes might’ve missed. The red that dripped out of that woman was the reddest red I ever saw, and I didn’t want to see it again. I never saw a red come close to the truth of that color.
I decided it was safe and dumped out the flags, my eagerness taking over the properness I had in mind for the ceremony. This was still supposed to be proper, but I was rushing to get those bags spilled out into a big old pile of flags.
And I was sweating, too. Greased like a pig in my slickness, legs, arms, and face all crying out for the sun to back off for a minute or two. I circled round the mass of flags, pushing them up to make a higher peak, a tighter mountain for the send-off. I felt like a fancy movie director, focusing on if the angle of the pile was proper enough.
The cap of the tequilla came off first. I gave it a good sniff, then did the same to the vodka. It only seemed right to give a bottle of liquor a good sniff if I wasn’t gonna drink it.
With a bottle in both of my hands, I started pouring. Slowly, I stretched my arms out and circled them around the pile, making sure not to soak any area for too long. I was questioning myself, wondering if having such a high peak was a good idea now that I was doing the pouring. An even spread would mean more flags were touched by the alcohol. I stepped onto the pile to flatten it out. There was no snap beneath me, so I continued and gently kicked the rest of the heap down. I trampled over the flags to get the other side of the pile even and started pouring heavier once I was off the mound.
I tossed the bottles to the side once I emptied them. Now I had fire on my mind.
I grabbed the lighter then held it just a hair away from the center flag. It needed to start from the center and go out from there. The middle was soaking wet, so I knew it would catch easy.
My finger pulled the trigger on the lighter, once, twice, then a flame went blazing up, so I moved half a step away. Not too far, though. I wanted to feel the heat because it was hotter than the regular hot. For some reason, it felt good.
The sweating got worse, but it was almost like freedom. I brought my hand to my heart, and I closed my eyes. Silence, for a moment. That’s what the article said, right? I opened my eyes, squinted at the fire as it reached the edges of the pile. I shut my eyes tight while a smile worked its way across my lips. That’s what the article said.
“I pledge alleg—” Then I was screaming. Actually, I don’t remember the sound being there. But Johnson said he heard screaming, so I suppose it was mine.
I didn’t even notice the wetness of that liquor on my damn legs because of all the sweat—so now the fire was a part of me.
I never quite found the words for the feeling, paging through one of them big books, looking online. Excruciating. Agonizing. Scorching. Roaring. Harrowing. None of them seemed right.
The fire liked my right leg better for some reason. Probably because it was my favorite. Fire ain’t as arbitrary as we think.
I found the word for not having the words. Ineffable. In-eff-able. It’s got “fuck” right in the middle of it. My body was so busy hurting that my ears couldn’t hear, but if I was screaming, I was screaming “FUUCKKK!” Down to the cell, the particle, the atom, proton, neuron, whatever else they did to try to break things down to nothing, they were all screaming for a mercy that wasn’t coming.
Once that pain hit, I stopped controlling my body. I saw the flags burning, but I don’t remember opening my eyes. I guess that’s how memory works. It burns.
When I woke up in the hospital, my right leg was gone, mostly. A nub of an upper thigh, but the important stuff was missing. The left leg was still there, but now it was red, new kinds of red I wasn’t acquainted with. They didn’t scare me. They mocked me.
When Pa showed up he had a brown bag to fill his mouth with since he couldn’t find any words there. He looked at the nurses and doctors who came in like prison guards.
He finally talked when they said I should have a wheelchair. He cussed them out. I almost joined him. Pa couldn’t afford a wheelchair, dumbasses.
There are two stories I tell about Pa’s death. The first one is the truth, but I can only tell it in my head. And that’s the funny one. Because I never saw it coming.
After I lost my leg, I went through school on my crutches as much as I could bear. Then I worked doing some odd stuff around a car dealership, saving up whatever scraps they gave me until I bought myself a nice wheelchair. I kept working hard until they made me a salesman. With the disability sympathy and the southern charm, I was good. I was making money.
Pa came into the dealership one day. I didn’t even know he knew where I worked. He said he wanted a new truck, and he wanted to go on a test drive. So off we went. He drove straight through a red light.
The car hit his side, and he died on impact.
The dealership yelled at me. Johnson yelled at me. And I just laughed. Pa would’ve thought it was funny, the cripple coming out unscathed.
The kid knows we come here every Memorial Day. He knows his grandpa was a good man. He doesn’t know what’s going on in my head every time we come here.
He’s picking at the grass with one hand, not even understanding who it’s growing from. He holds my bottle with the other hand. “Gimme that,” I tell him. The kid passes me the bottle, and I take a swig, a big one to finish it. I let the booze slide down my throat. The burning is nice, and I look up at the cloudy sky and see the burning there, too.
The second version is the one I tell the kid. He knows the story from the paragraph we cut out of the newspaper, plus some extra stuff I add: It was a tragic accident and Grandpa pulled me out of the car, saved my life. He was brave down to his last breath.
I look down at Pa’s grave, and place the empty bottle next to the flag planted in the ground.
And then, before I know I’m doing it, I spit at the bottle, nearly knocking it over. The kid stands and does a little spit of his own, hits Pa’s grave with the mist of slobber he makes.
“Let’s go,” I say, and start rolling myself away. The kid follows.
Then the kid stops and looks back at Pa’s grave. “I think it needs a new flag.”
I laugh and keep heading to the truck.
Larkin (they/she) is a multi-disciplinary writer and stand-up comedian based in Chicago. This is their first published work, though their plays have been produced around Chicago. Larkin is currently completing their first novel while working as a substitute teacher.
Arcturus 