ST1.1 | "Kindling Delight"

PROMPT: The beginning of a new year is always seen as a time for personal change. Whether we’re casting off old relationships, starting new ones, or just taking up running (from our problems), the goal is to be proactive in making our lives better. But as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, sometimes our attempts to improve our situation just dig our hole a little deeper. For January’s Stone’s Throw, your stories don’t need to take place on the New Year holiday, but they do need to be about change. Send us your best stories of people trying to change, no matter how ill-advised that change may be.

KINDLING DELIGHT

by Joseph S. Walker

“Look around you,” the little Asian lady on TV said. “Contemplate each object in your space carefully. Does it kindle delight? If not, why not set it free?”

I blinked. It was all the answer I could manage.

“Your home is beautiful,” the Asian lady told a family, standing in front of a five-foot pile of clothing they’d dragged from every room in the house. “But it has become a place where you merely store things, not a place where you live. By ridding yourself of all that does not kindle delight, you will create space to breathe and be content.”

That sounded nice.

I was on the couch in the middle of the morning, my eyes fixed on the big TV mounted to the wall. I was hyperattentive, but completely incapable of movement; aftereffects of whatever brew of booze, pills, and pot I’d subjected myself to in the last twenty-four hours. During a commercial break, I thought hard about my left hand, but couldn’t get it to budge.

Uncle Chad had been over the previous night with a bunch of his crew. You don’t say no when Uncle Chad offers you a pill, even if you don’t know what it is. The last thing I remembered was a couple of his guys getting in a fistfight over a poker game. Seemed like I just blinked and here I was, alone as far as I could tell, captive to the screen.

It was tuned to a cable channel showing a marathon of Kindling Delight. In every episode, the woman, Sakura, visited three families who had lost control of the sheer volume of stuff in their homes. One of the couples was always gay or interracial. Sometimes both. Sakura solved their problems, basically, by making them throw a lot of shit out, but before they could toss anything, they had to hold onto it, and think about it, and see if it kindled delight. Then, at the very end, Sakura went back to each family a month or two later, to bask as they thanked her for changing their lives.

At first, I was annoyed by the people Sakura visited. They all lived in beautiful homes, homes like I only saw in real life when I was breaking in while the owners were on vacation, but they would be in tears about a little clutter. I mean, I’m supposed to feel sorry for you because you have too much crap?

I’ll be damned, though, if I didn’t start feeling a little sorry for them by the third episode, and even happy when they felt better. It was the way they acted like completely different people as they stood in emptied-out rooms marveling at their sense of inner peace. They looked like the actual weight had been lifted off them. Hell, they looked younger.

After several hours of Sakura, I couldn’t help thinking about the stuff I was surrounded by all the time. Like, take the big cardboard box in the corner to the side of the TV. Uncle Chad stuck it there years ago to throw beer cans into, so they wouldn’t be rolling around on the floor. That worked great, except nobody ever cleared out the box. Actually, you couldn’t even see the box anymore, but I was pretty sure it was down there, in the base of the mountain of sour-smelling, sticky beer cans crawling up the walls where they met. I didn’t think the box kindled delight. It wouldn’t have kindled delight even if I could still see it. So I found a roll of trash bags and started shoveling the cans in. I was on the fifth bag before I realized I wasn’t paralyzed anymore.

I kept it up for the next few days. Uncle Chad was on a trip down south for some business he didn’t tell me about, and nobody else had any reason to come by with him gone. Uncle Chad installed me in the house three or four years back to keep an eye on the trailhead at the back of the property, that led a few miles back to the cabins where his guys cooked. I got to be Uncle Chad’s problem when my daddy, his brother, was killed by some Oklahoma bikers who objected to Uncle Chad moving product under their noses.

Sometimes days or weeks passed without anybody coming to the house. Sometimes Uncle Chad stashed stuff there. Sometimes he came by with members of his crew and some women and partied. Sometimes he showed up in the middle of the night and dragged me out to unload a hijacked truck or help beat the shit out of a guy who came up short on a bet.

Uncle Chad dabbled in a lot of lines of work.

The house never really felt like home, so I never really took care of it. Now I did, applying Sakura’s test to everything. Aside from some of my clothes, the TV, and my personal supply of weed, hardly anything in the house kindled delight. I hauled bag after bag out to the side of the road to wait for trash day. I couldn’t do anything about the broken-down furniture, and I knew better than to mess with Uncle Chad’s stuff. He had a big safe in a back room that I didn’t have the combination for, several loaded handguns and shotguns under piles of old blankets in the front closet, and a go-bag behind a false back in a kitchen cabinet.

Even leaving all that stuff alone, I got the place looking a lot better pretty quickly.

Smelling better, too. I started to understand the way the people on Sakura’s show felt, like I could breathe easier. It was nice to walk from one room into another without immediately seeing some huge mess that would never be taken care of.

That’s when I really got to thinking.

If I could make the house better, could I make myself better?

Could I kindle delight?

I remembered Uncle Chad at the card table in the dining room, sharpening a knife and smoking a cigar-sized joint, telling a bunch of us about a high school girl who OD’d on some of his junk. Good news, though, he said. She had paid upfront.

Everybody laughed.

I laughed.

I remembered Uncle Chad smashing a guy’s fingers in a car door for looking the wrong way at the wrong woman in the wrong bar.

I remembered the way I felt when I visited a guy who owed Uncle Chad money and drove my fist, again and again and again, into the middle of his face.

None of those memories kindled delight. I couldn’t think of any that did.

“It’s never too late,” Sakura always told her families. “The life you want is already here, if you carve away the things you don’t.”

I was a week into my project when I came back from a walk in the woods and found Uncle Chad on the back deck. He sat in a chair with his long legs stretched out in front of him and watched me come across the yard.

He wasn’t drinking or smoking, which was a bad sign.

“What the fuck you done to this place?” he asked when I got close.

I stepped up onto the deck. “Nothing. Cleaning up a little.”

“There must be fifty sacks out there by the road. You trying to draw attention?”

“Just got tired of living in filth. That’s all.”

“That’s all, huh?”

“Actually, no.” I perched on the arm of the chair facing his. “I’m gonna get my GED. Maybe go to college.”

“College.” Uncle Chad said the word flatly.

“I can’t live like this anymore. I want a real life, a straight life. I want to kindle delight.”

Uncle Chad could be hellishly fast when he wanted. I didn’t see him move, just felt the back of his hand whip across my face. My head snapped to the side and I went sprawling to the deck. I might have passed out for a second. When I was fully aware again, I was propped up on my elbows and my head felt like the inside of an alarm bell. Uncle Chad was in his chair, still leaning back like nothing had happened.

“You ever talk like that again, I’ll tie you to the wall and let the boys take turns beating on you.”

I didn’t answer. I was moving my jaw gingerly back and forth.

“Now, speaking of college, there’s a couple boys been dealing at frat parties without paying tax. You and me are going over tonight to show them the error of their ways. So go wash the blood off your nose, and don’t give me no more shit about delight.”

I picked myself up and went inside. I went straight to the front closet and pushed aside the blankets on the floor. All the guns were loaded. I picked one up at random.

Even a worthless old asshole like Uncle Chad could be turned around, I figured. Even he could kindle delight. All I had to do was turn him into fertilizer.

Flowers kindle delight. I’d plant some beauties on top of him.

Joseph S. Walker lives in Indiana and teaches college literature and composition courses. His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, Tough, and a number of other magazines and anthologies. He has been nominated for the Edgar Award and the Derringer Award and has won the Bill Crider Prize for Short Fiction. He also won the Al Blanchard Award in 2019 and 2021.