Who’s to say any of us have any claim to anything
- Sep 17, 2021
- 2 min read
by Jennifer Todhunter
My friend Max and I are king and queen of the neighbourhood watch, and last night we biked home late and more than a couple of beer tins in, and we came across these two vagrants loping along the road all slow-like and we circled them on our bikes like we were vultures and they were injured wildebeest or caribou and we asked them, we said, where are you from, where are you going, what are you doing, and they said, nothing, nothing, nothing, but we didn’t believe them so we rode down the middle of the road, the kind of road that’s been tamped down by tractors, the kind where there’s no yellow line left to follow when you need to stop weaving, and we said, we’ve never seen you around here before, and they said, we haven’t been here long, and it looked like the girl had shit her pants and the guy was so far strung out he was like a fishing line tangled on a rusty anchor, and I couldn’t tell if it was the pace that made me want to tip over or the tins or the circles, but I did—twice—and they never looked at us, not once, and Max and I, we followed them down this driveway, the one that runs the distance of Mr. Archer’s corn field, the one across the ditch from where Timmy t-boned the giant maple and died two days later, and we watched one of them pull a key from their pocket and unlock the door to this guesthouse type-thing out back of Mr. Archer’s, and there was nothing inside, nothing but a futon and a yellowish candle burnt to the floor, and this guy sitting next to it staring at his hand, turning it front and over, front and over, and we backed out their door, stuck our last few tins on their stoop, said, it’s all right, we’re going, we’re sorry, and we climbed onto our bikes and teetered down the road toward Max’s house, for a second not saying much of anything, but the moon that night, it was spectacular, we could see its ridges and divots, lumps and bumps, and who’s to say who gets to inhabit what space and when, who’s to say any of us have any claim to anything.
Jennifer Todhunter’s stories have appeared in The Forge, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions, and Wigleaf´s Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Pidgeonholes and founder of Trash Mag. Find her at www.foxbane.ca or @JenTod_.
