This is a short story written for LineByLine, a prompt-based writing community. The community provides one line which much be used somewhere in the piece. This week's line was "It wasn't because of that."
This short story centers around characters that have been popping up in my writings for a while now: a guy named Beck, who dropped out of college to raise his daughter, Tansly, in the absence of Tansly's mother (and Beck's ex-girlfriend) Amanda.
"Man of the House"
The beaten, old couch in my living room sagged under me,
even though I was stretched out across it with my weight pretty evenly
distributed. Lonnie and Still Wind said it was the first couch they bought
after they got married, in the early 80’s, and they hadn’t had the heart to
throw it out so they had put it in the little shack. When I had become the shack’s new tenant, I
had inherited it. There were strips of
duct tape on it older than I was, but for my purposes it was perfect.
I circled another job in the classified section of the
newspaper while the radio played another old Rolling Stones song; it was ‘Two
for Tuesday,’ so Jumping Jack Flash was
the perfect follow-up to Paint it Black. From her crib next to the couch, Tansly cooed
and slapped a toy with her chubby pink hands.
“I know,” I told her.
“Mick Jagger is still awesome, even after all these years.”
Tansly slapped the toy harder in agreement, and started
cooing again. I couldn’t help but smile
when she sounded so happy, so I set aside the newspaper long enough to lift her
from the crib and lay her on my chest.
She slapped my chest in excitement and kicked her feet, one of which
struck me a little too hard in the stomach.
I grunted through the pain but still smiled at the beautiful little
infant. Tansly had Amanda’s eyes, no
matter how much I tried to pretend she didn’t.
The baby we made was beautiful, no doubt about that. And the pang of
sadness was still hard to ignore, no matter how much I tried to convince myself
to hate Amanda for leaving.
A wet spot of droll appeared on my shirt as Tansly laid her
face on my chest and blew a feeble raspberry.
I picked up the classifieds again and held them over Tansly, where I
skimmed them with my eyes. Lonnie had told
me that he was going to have to cut my hours at the hardware store for a few
months, during the off season, so I had to pick up a few extra hours somewhere to
keep earning pocket money.
Just as I started to turn the page, I heard something from
the kitchen.
Our little shanty in the Mojave Desert didn’t have much, but
we got by pretty well. It was little
more than a wooden shack, with only the basic necessities. It had electricity but it was temperamental; I
could only run one of the window air conditioners at a time without blowing the
breaker. The running water took forever
to heat up, but I rarely wanted a hot shower. I was getting used to the little
noises the house made as the old wood swelled and shrank with the changing
desert temperature. And that was why I
noticed the out-of-the-ordinary sound.
I had no neighbors.
As far as I knew, the closest house was more than a mile away, and the
last person who had been in the house besides me and Tansly was Amanda, two
months ago, when she had left the baby with me and disappeared into the night. So
I felt a little stupid when I asked, “Hello?” into my home. Of course, no one responded. I held my breath and waited, trying to listen
over Tansly’s chorus of baby noises. After a few seconds of nothing but the Rolling Stones, I released my breath and looked back to the newspaper.
Thirty seconds later, I heard it again: a shuffling, chittering noise, once more from
the kitchen.
My fatherly instincts started to kick in. If there was something in the kitchen, it was my duty to my daughter to kill it. So I set the newspaper aside, lifted Tansly from my chest, and placed her gently back in her crib. “Stay here,” I told her, feeling like a badass cop in a crime movie.
Before venturing to the kitchen, I took my Louisville
Slugger from next to the couch and wrapped my hands around it. My footsteps were almost silent as I
approached. Just before I crossed the
threshold I heard the noise again, though I didn’t see anything out of the
ordinary.
First I approached the refrigerator, thinking that the noise
was from something falling from the shelves.
But it wasn’t because of that; it was almost empty, because I had put
off going to the grocery store for so long.
I performed the same search of the cabinets and cupboard, but found
nothing out of place.
Just as I was shutting the coffee cup cabinet (yes, I need a
whole cabinet for coffee cups; I drink a lot of coffee, okay?), I heard the
noise again, slightly behind me. When I turned, I spied the only place in the
room I hadn’t yet searched: the squeaky
floorboard in front of the stove. I had
become well acquainted with the board; when I’d stand in front of the stove,
making eggs in the morning, I’d lean to and fro on it in time with whatever
song was on the radio. But the board had
never made sounds without my weight on it before.
Quickly ruling out ghosts as the cause, I let the bat dangle
from my left hand and knelt to the floor.
With my knuckles I gave the board a quick rap, which responded with the mysterious noise.
The bat rattled to the floor, and I retrieved a claw hammer
from the kitchen junk drawer (we all have one). Cramming the claw into the space between the
squeaky board and its neighbor, I craned the hammer back and pried up the
board.
Five tiny scorpions, no bigger than my thumb, immediately
scurried out.
I screamed, dropped the hammer, and dove away from the
opening. The little white arachnids tested the air with their tiny claws and
tails, as if claiming this new land as their own.
The end of the bat was just within arm’s reach. I wrapped my fingers around the knob at the
bottom and slowly dragged the implement to me, afraid that sudden movements
would startle the creatures and they’d run beneath something, where they would
plot to overthrow me and Tansly another day.
Not in my house.
Lonnie had shown me the correct way to stomp a scorpion
without being stung, even while barefoot (which I currently was), but I didn’t
feel like testing my skills. I brought the bat down on the first scorpion, and it
exploded like an overripe grape. The
other four seemed stunned for a second by the sound of the impact, so I
capitalized and pounded the rest of them into oblivion.
The board had snapped back into place when I had dove away
like a scared little girl. With the bat
still in my right hand, I took the hammer in my left and lifted the board
again, more carefully this time.
When I had first moved into the shack, Lonnie and Still Wind
had explained the problem with scorpions that many dwellings in the Mojave
developed, and had explained that the shack was no different. The first three days I had slept in my car,
because I was too terrified to sleep in the house. But, after three solid days of killing scorpions
every hour, I finally stopped seeing them, and assumed that my scorpion days
were over.
But, it turns out, scorpions are like crazy exes: just when you think you’ve seen the last of
them, they come crawling out of the woodwork.
Beneath the board I found myself peeking into a meager
little crawlspace. And there I saw at
least three times as many tiny, white scorpions as I had just pounded into pulp
on my kitchen floor. It was a nest. It must have been full of scorpion eggs (just
the thinking those words made my skin crawl) when I exterminated all the others
from the shack. They must have hatched
not long ago.
I quickly slammed the board back into place and carefully cleaned
up the smashed scorpions from the floor and the bat with a handful of Clorox
wipes. Then picked up the hammer from
the floor, picked a few nails out of the junk drawer, and hammered the board so
securely into place that it would never squeak again.
The radio had changed songs, and now blared Rock You Like a Hurricane from the
living room. Heh. Fitting. I beat the last nail into the board to the
rhythm of the music, then stood with the hammer in one hand and the bat in the other,
once again feeling like a total badass.
As I stood in the doorway, hoping I looked as awesome as I felt,
Tansly burbled happily to me from her crib.
“That’s right, baby,” I told her in my best tough-guy voice. “This house is safe for another night. Your dad’s a real man.”
