The Boy In The Boat

Every foster lasted only two years, maybe less.  The boy chose a memory from each to keep.  The earliest were smells.  In one, wet paper - books floating in a flooded living room, tangerines.  When he was older, he remembered animals.  There was one that let him have a pet mouse.  Lifespan:  less than a year.  In another, an awful dog clamped down on the ankle of his bad foot and dragged him in circles on the living room rug while the other foster kids laughed.  He's going to cry!  Look, there go his eyebrows, he's going to cry! they shrieked with delight.  The boy was snail-soft, turtle-meat soft; he couldn't keep his eyebrows from arching just before tears came.

Lesley Bannatyne, from Unaccustomed to Grace

Image from visionsoflightandday.

Text source (Still pushing this book [I won't stop until you buy it]).

High School Smells Like Canned Corn

     Your brother brings you a flier about a thing.  His gift to you.  They need kids.  Some Halloween mansion.  Your mother rolls her eyes.  Because she rolls her eyes you go.  And because your brother.

     You sit with other kids in a fake mansion.  They talk you through what you signed up to do.  They show you where you stand.  Hide in a secret pocket in a hallway.  Hear people coming toward you.  Wait until they've gone past you.  Jump out and hit a metal bucket with a crowbar.  Scare them so they piss themselves.  

     They give you a black cape.

     They give you a crow mask.

     In the parlor with a pipe.

     In the dark you see with your eyes closed is the same dark you see when you open them.  You suck in sweet rubber of your mask.  Adjust to gray-on-gray, fake cobwebs against chipped drywall.  Load your greedy eyes with dark, your ears with buzzers, your nose with chainsaw smoke.  A kid comes around the corner, a stripe of red exit sign light scissoring across his neck.  

     The crowbar's weight in your hand feels adult.

-Lesley Bannatyne, from Unaccustomed to Grace

Image source.

Buy the book here (I'm really pushing this book!)

  

Corpse Walks Into A Bar

I‘m all alone around closing time and Sid the owner is back in the kitchen loading highball glasses into the dishwasher and this corpse stumbles in and starts going on about how I gotta bury him. The juke is pumping heavy metal because that’s what Sid likes and it’s just me in the bar so he doesn’t care. Well it’s not just me and that’s the problem here.

“You’re none of my business,” I say to the corpse. “I don’t know you. I don’t know your people.”

“A decent person would honor a dead man’s request,” the corpse says. “A decent man would help a pal,” he says.

“You’re not my pal,” I say, eyes steady on my glass. “And I’m not a decent man.”

“You don’t have to be a decent man to do a decent thing.”

“Right.” I grab my jacket and head for the door. The corpse lets out this long spew of rot breath and starts to wail. I mean, really wail, like he’s crying for the sadness of everyone that ever lived, for the mothers that lost their babies right inside their own stomachs, for the little kids that wandered into swimming pools. I mean a deep, shin-splitting, gut-twisting kind of cry.

By Lesley Bannatyne, from her new book Unaccustomed to Grace.

Read the short story here.

Buy the book here (totally pushing this amazing collection of short stories).

Underlake

A neighbor's 22-ft. sailboat sank because mice had eaten the foam insulation over the winter, and the first time it launched water flooded the hull and dragged the nose under.  The rest of the boat followed, drowning gracefully, like a ballerina taking a bow.  It was probably still there somewhere, Nan thought, upright on the lake bottom, sails full up.  Down past the cold layer, where the toothy, prehistoric pike trolled, down, down, to the dark vanished world, resting in the underlake, lazily rocking its mast while people went tubing and skiing, touching the surface of the lake with their slightness like water bugs.

Lesley Bannatyne, Underlake

Text source (my highest recommendation).

Image source.