ST 1.8 | "Playing House"

Prompt: Summer stands for a lot of things—vacations, days at the lake, suntans and picnics. It’s every kid’s school-time daydream and outdoor enthusiast’s favorite time of year. But summer also brings heat. Temperatures rise, tempers rise, people crowd together and test each other’s patience.

You add enough heat to anything, you get a fire.

For this sizzling summer special of the ‘Throw, send us your best story of a situation hitting a boiling point. We want to read about the straw that breaks the camel’s back, that last degree that starts the fire burning.

PLAYING HOUSE

Mary Thorson

Let’s play pretend. I’ll get the good china set out, and you run to the store and grab some soda.

“Beer?” you ask.

But I’ve only ever had sips before from the half-empty bottles my folks leave out around the house. It never tasted so good. It was always warm and flat and sour.

“It’s better when it’s cold. I’ll show you. We’ll keep it on ice.”

But the icebox is outside. I don’t think I want to go outside, yet.

“I’ll go, then.”

That’s nice.

I pull out the china from the built-in cabinet in the dining room. The doors stick because we never ever opened them. Mama got them from her first wedding with Daddy–from Daddy’s mama. Then Mama kicked Daddy out. She changed the locks on the doors and he didn’t try very hard to get past that inconvenience. She never used them, but she didn’t want to sell them.

They are covered in dust, now. They are just covered in dust so thick that when I drag my finger in the shape of a heart on a dinner plate, it cakes instead of gathers. A dark-gray thick smudge instead of seeing white bone underneath. Mama should have cleaned these from time to time.

I set the table for two. Two dinner plates, two little plates, and then the cheap nickel forks and knives that look like a play set my baby sister uses. But when I think about that I feel funny, so I don’t think about it, and I don’t touch them anymore. They are all cold and stiff.

“What are we gonna eat?” you ask, in a kind of way that doesn’t remind me of my stepdaddy and I smile a little. You’re real good at making me smile. I won’t forget that.

I tell you to check the fridge. Maybe there is something in there. I hope there is because I don’t want to tell you. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I ain’t much of a cook. My Mama kept us out of the kitchen to keep herself sane, she’d always tell us. She’d always yell it. She was always too loud.

“Meatloaf? Looks bad though.”

You show it to me. Your black leather jacket bunches around your shoulders as you cradle this small glass pan in your dirty hands. I peek. With my own fingers–my pink painted nails that now are all chipped and broken, I touch it. The ketchup hardened into an ugly crusted zig-zag over the top. There is one slice taken out. Unless Mama split that up and meant for the baby to have one half for dinner now and one half for dinner tomorrow. But I don’t want to think about that. I don’t mean to think about what the baby’s mouth looks like now.

“You see the mold?” you ask.

I do. Some blue and white fuzz sprouting off the ground beef. You scrunch up your face and it looks strange. You look ugly, and my stomach turns a little. I tell you to just cut that part off and heat it up in the oven.

“Really? That’s alright?”

Why wouldn’t it be?

“I won’t get sick?”

No, I say. But I think I don’t know what gets you sick.

“How long should I put it in?”

I don’t know so I say an hour. I tell you to twist the egg timer all the way around.

“Alright,” you say, and you are so unsure that it makes me feel sorry for you–in a bad way. My cheeks get hot. I think we shouldn’t have done this. But we didn’t do nothing.

You turn around and disappear into the kitchen. We haven’t cleaned the kitchen good enough, I suspect, so I don’t follow you in there. I picture it all hard and crusted over the linoleum floor or the yellow counters. I don’t know where it all got, I make myself think. I make myself think I might not even know it’s there.

I walk back into the dining room. It looks dirty because the curtains are all closed and the little light getting in makes everything kind of brown. Dirty and dark. The table has two big plates, two small plates, two knives, and two forks. But I’m wrong. I can’t see so good in the dark. There are five big plates, five small plates, five knives, and five forks. And a shotgun. The baby is playing with it, I think. She’s picking it up and dropping it, making a bad sound, like one of those pop-up boxes that’s meant to scare you. Mama is gripping her butter knife–but I think it’s a butcher knife. She knocks it against the table, making another bad sound. They’re all so loud–except my stepdaddy. He’s quiet. He’s got something he’s trying to get out of his throat. You come into the dining room like a dog following me.

“What do you want to do while we wait?” you ask.

I think you mean to try something with me. Something physical. I see that your face has a smile on it that I’ve seen before. A look you get when you’re about to hit someone for no reason. I like that look. I take your hand, and before I lead you upstairs, I look, again, at the table. They’re all still there, but you don’t see them. They’re all still making noise, but you don’t hear them. Mama, in particular, looks real mad. She hates you.

The stairs creak and the baby’s room is right at the top. The door is open. I ask you to close it, even though she’s not in there. Maybe she is–maybe I don’t know. I take you past Mama’s room and through the side of my eye I can see the covers piled up in the middle of the bed, I can almost think she’s taking a nap. She’s just waiting for Betty Jean to wake up. And scream and scream because mama moves too slow like she can’t hear it and that child has a set of lungs on it that reach down and wring your spine with crazy sound. But that’s alright. She’s quiet now, and you and I can be secret.

We get to my room. It’s small. All the things in it look like someone else’s now. I don’t know why. I get sad, real sad all of a sudden, because I guess I know we can’t stay here very long. Even I know people won’t think we all have the flu forever. Mama’s work is gonna call. School is gonna call. They’ll send the truancy officer down and we’d be dumber than rocks to be answering the door. I sniffle, because I want you to know I’m sad.

“Darling,” you say, just like I planned on you saying, but now it doesn’t sound the same.

“You know I’ll take care of everything, right? You know I will,” you say. And maybe you will. Maybe we can leave and get ourselves a nice little house away from all the pigs and chickens and shit where we put them—no no no no no, where you put them. Where I don’t know. Mama is sleeping. Betty Jean is sleeping. My stepdaddy is working or maybe he’s even being real quiet out in the shed because he’s laying face down on that thin wood board that shouldn’t even be able to hold his fat ass, as all the chickens hop around his quiet self.

From my room, I can hear them chickens. They’re upset that they’ve been disturbed.

“Come sit next to me.” You’re on my bed now. You pat my yellow daisy quilt with your dirty hand. I come over. I sit down and your weight in the bed makes me lean towards you when I’m not sure that’s what I want to do. But you don’t do nothing, really. You put your hand on my back and start rubbing it. But then I kiss you so we can get this done.

Later, we walk back down the hall to the stairs, passing my still-sleeping mama and my still-sleeping sister. What time is it? How long have they been asleep? It’s a little darker in the house. You’re a little disappointed. I’m a little glad it’s over. I walk in front of you so I don’t have to contend with the way your shoulders slouch. The bottom of the stairs looks completely black. Like maybe there isn’t even a floor there anymore. But, even if I’m scared of the dark, I’ll keep walking, because I smell something burning.

“What is that?” you ask.

It’s the meatloaf, dummy. I run into the kitchen. I turn on the light but I shouldn’t have. I should have thought. I should have fumbled in the dark and burned my own hands instead. But I’m just as dumb as you because I am so surprised when the light comes on and shows everything we missed. I can’t shut my eyes, but I want to. You charge ahead and open up the stove and smoke floats out across the room, and I still see everything. There are bits of mama’s hair on the walls like spaghetti noodles.

“It’s all black,” you say, but her hair is red.

Scrape it off. It ain’t burned all the way through, there’s something in the middle there that’s good. There’s got to be. Before you can say anything, I get out of there. I go back to the dining room. They’re all still there. They’re all still waiting. Mama has her knife ready. Betty Jean has the butt of the shotgun in her mouth, working her gums around it because she’s teething. You come in and you still don’t see them. You put the meatloaf in the middle of the table. Mama bangs her butcher knife when your hand gets close to her. She wants to stick you with it so bad, but she can’t because you were stronger. Stepdaddy wants to scream and holler at you, but he can’t because you gave him such a surprise. And Betty Jean is only looking at me but she don’t know no better, because I don’t know a thing.

Mary Thorson (@MaryThorson6429) lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her MFA from Pacific University in Oregon. Her stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Milwaukee Noir, Worcester Review, Rock and a Hard Place, Tough, among others. Her work has been nominated for Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery, a Derringer, and a Pushcart Prize. She hangs out with her two daughters, husband, and dog when she isn’t teaching high school English, reading, or writing ghost stories.