Two Short Fictions

by Eric Nolan

Steve Johnson

Spackle

Our family was going through a rough patch.

A car crashed into the side of our house and the grill was right in the living room where the coffee table used to be. There was a commotion with the driver, a ruggedly handsome young man who reeked of booze. He made my little brother, Tony, and I tell him what we learned in school. It was awkward, Tony having to explain that he had been suspended for two weeks due to setting off a stink bomb in the boys bathroom. This man didn’t like to hear that at all. He stood there shaking his head, jittering like a cartoon teakettle. Tony took it well, I thought; he’s such a good kid. For me it was equally embarrassing. I had just won the fifth-grade spelling bee, spelling earring correctly. The last thing I wanted to do was make Tony feel like he was the troubled one, and I took it hard. The man patted me on the head and struck a firm grip of my shoulder. He asked where our mother was, and we told him she was asleep. He excused himself politely and went off toward her bedroom. Tony and I took to our bed upstairs and hid under the covers. When we woke up early in the morning, the man was gone and we repaired the wall using spackle that we found in the basement. Mother was striking eggs against the side of the pan in the kitchen and didn’t notice us in the next room. When she walked in, declaring it breakfast time, Tony had just finished the last stroke.

But this wasn’t a one time thing. A pattern had been developing.

Burning kitchens, flooded basements, broken bottles in the bedroom.

Tony woke me up after hearing a wrecking ball smash up against the house. I convinced him it was in his head and told him to go back to sleep, but I had heard it, too. In the early morning I went down to investigate and found the walls littered with holes. A musky man with a mustache and an intimidating belt buckle told me he had only been searching for fires in the walls. He was happy to report that we were all safe.

Tony confessed to me that he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the rigors of this routine. I agreed that it would be tough, but saw no other option. Yes, my homework was becoming harder to complete, and Tony was getting suspended left and right. But I, always the optimist, saw that things were looking up. We had, after all, adapted to functioning on a few hours of restless sleep a night and Tony began wielding tools like a young pro. Standing there in my overalls in front of the wondrous white wall that Tony had just erected, I patted my little brother on the shoulder and told him that he could do this for a living.

A Shared Abstraction

“I know the analogy is not perfect,” Rupert said, “but you know what I mean.”

He was describing his feelings to me. It meant a lot to him that I get it. It was painfully obvious. But I did not know what he meant. “No, I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“Well, it’s like a squirrel looking for food. At first he sees no food, and is discouraged. What goes through his mind is similar to what I’m going through. Is that better?”

“No.”

“It’s like the sea, at night, how it never whimpers.”

“I’m not following.”

He thought for a moment, staring out the rain-soaked window. We were sitting in my car.

“The child chimneysweep—how he crawls and crawls.”

“You mean like the wild bearcat,” I offered, “how he wishes he knew his own destiny?”

Rupert was silent. Then he said, “Where are we anyway?”

“Two blocks south of Henry Street. Normy told me to go about two blocks past there, and make a left. He said that’s not the real directions, but I knew what he meant.”

“What did he mean?” Rupert asked.

“He meant that we go three blocks past Henry Street, and pull in to the burger stand and wait for a sign.”

“Sounds fair,” Rupert said.

At the burger stand, Rupert ordered a hot dog. “This is not what I asked for,” he said, holding up the hot dog.

“What was it you ordered?”

“A hot dog, but I meant a poached egg.”

I went inside to file a complaint, but the women behind the counter were dreams. The last thing I was to do was argue with a dream. I came back out with a rumpled paper sack filled with condiments.

“Problem solved?”

“I couldn’t resist the way she said ketchup. Sounded like cat soup.”

“I got the analogy now,” Rupert said. “I feel like a hundred balls of clay, fighting off the birds who think there are seeds inside. But there are no seeds.”

“I see,” I said. I knew what he meant—finally.

“Are you going to wrestle with that bag all day?” Rupert asked me.

I didn’t know what I was doing.

“Open it.”

I did, and inside were not condiments, but a note from Normy. It read, “Don’t believe a word he says.” I knew what he meant. Rupert is the only one capable of solving his problems. He is the exhaust of a car. I am the car.

---

Eric Nolan has been published or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Passages North, X-R-A-Y as well as other magazines. He has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Florida.