FARAWAY FREAKLUCK STRUT STUFF Flash Fiction 434 words She’s staring at me with glorious mud-colored…

FARAWAY FREAKLUCK STRUT STUFF Flash Fiction 434 words She’s staring at me with glorious mud-colored pupils, a wilting daisy jutting from the terse hillock of hair above her right ear, a clever smile aimed at me droneishly, a Venus Flytrap pushing from a knot of dirt in the middle of each sable palm. She’s offering me a choice, and she is resplendent in the offering. “Pick one,” she says to me with a voice on the verge of the punchline of a joke that only she can comprehend. I point at the meat-craving triffid in the right hand, wondering whether Pap will have me over his knee with a Buckeye branch on account of the street light crackle preceding my homecoming. I wonder if it matters, my back on punctuality on account of a girl shoving a gift at me under Mercury at the tail end of one of childhood’s doggiest days to date. Tandy Hawthorne. The prettiest, cleverest, strongest, darkest girl in Wayne County, the girl for which Pap knows full well I’d pull the stopper plum out of the bottom of the Atlantic…if she asked me to. Pap knows, of course he does…alas, he’s Pap, and Pap ain’t never figured favoring a sore ass on account of disobedience a bad thing. Still, here’s Tandy offering me something she planted and grew and saw to within the rusty cage at the top of the Miniwell Tower in the center of Miniwell Park. Here’s Tandy, showing me that the secret midnight dreams, the ones leaving my bedclothes stiff, are close to warranted. “Dad took me to Green Swamp a week before he and Ma Took argued,” she says, and by way of the odd spotlight cast by Mercury, I see tears sparkling in her eyelashes, caught like the prey of the gift she’s seen fit to present to me. “Before Dad lit out for whatever he couldn’t get from Ma Took and me.” Ma Took she calls her stepmother–unhappy about the step bit, but brimming with simple, down-home respect. Tandy. I take the flytrap out of the palm of the hand, which folds when it discovers its payload missing. Tandy can’t seem to pull her astounding eyes from the empty palm. I reckon she can feel the flytrap there, like a ghastly, chartreuse phantom limb. “Daddy’s gone on the loaf, Ma Too…Mama says.” A tear pierces the globular cluster entangled in the eyelashes protecting the right eye. It slithers down the dark cheek, rounds the curve of the delicate jaw, vanishes. I reach out. She can’t stop a smile, tremulous though it is. Mama instead of Ma Took.