WINNER, WINTER 2022
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY ARTHUR PIKE
My Daddy had what you call a heart full of crows. He’d sit outside our rented cabin of an afternoon with his pistol, plinking at birds, missing wide most times, until finally he’d take out the sun and that’d be the day.
This sitting out shooting would attract the attention of the management which you’d think my Daddy would be adverse to after going to such lengths to sweep over his tracks, throw his implements in rivers, wipe clean all he touched, stand ever ready with a new name for the registry.
It was a regular place, the management said, running with regular tenants. Lay down your arms, the management said. But my Daddy was the kind of man whose actions persuade. Turns out he’d tapped into some vein of deep desire running just under the skin of that place. Before long, most of the rest of the regulars were out in the afternoon, peppering away.
It would have been a good time to stay inside but I was growing, growing hard, a foot or two a day. I launched up to the ceiling then curled back in on myself like some ram’s horn, doubling, tripling up. All this growth was the reason my Daddy had to cut me down to size.
He used whatever came to hand—slap to the face, knuckle to the chin, knee to the back on the cold, hard floor. This was the daily round, mine to take until I got my size. But the time did come quick enough to wrest myself back from him. One afternoon of my seventeenth year, I lifted that gun out of his hand, woke him from his sleep, and made my good-byes.
Why, son? he asked, so pure and spare I took a catch. I didn’t know quite how to put it so I turned from the bed and hopped. I came down off that bristling mountain, left it sucking light in the rearview and turned my face to the future.
Now then, a car with a big trunk is a true blessing to a man in the profession toward which I gravitated. And at 17, I felt an urgency, a need to slide out across that legendary ground floor. So I traded up fast from that squirrel of a thing I’d driven down off that mountain, traded up to a bear with a hibernation-size trunk. I’ll admit my training in the use of firearms at the knee of the old man proved a great help in this trade, as regards a particular car dealership, the first, I’ll say, of many.
I know you aren’t hearing it initially from me, but it’s a big, brash, wide-open country out there. You got your miles of wheat. You got your risen mountains, peak over peak. In between, your cities, full of careless unlocked doors and sky-scraping towers that will dizzy you. I started out across it, bound on throwing my shadow into all the bright corners and blotting them out, white to gray to black.
A man can consider himself lucky to carve a set of high points in the granite of a career well made. I can claim such. I did what traveling I did in my time with a measure of finesse, and if there were whirlwinds in it, that was what the times called for. Those few who survived beyond encounters with me emerged enriched for their time spent and their injuries sustained, besieged by bidders for stories of what they’d been made to endure. Some might have put me in the company of the brighter lights of the day in the popular imagination. But despite the growing sparkle all about, I dwelt in humility. I lacked for nothing, afterall, having found a true calling and the stiff spine to pursue it.
For all that, in the course of time and heightened attention, circumstances do tend to tighten, like hands on a nape, and in the confluence of fate and luck and superior manpower, I was brought down from on high, leveled into dark and squalid places, and chained hand and foot against a rock wall behind iron barring. The sunlight was meager dribbled into my hours from thenceforth.
After I’d sat for the last time, bound and stuck, been fully and finally electrified, and delivered over to the farther shore, I found myself released to the care of the clouds overhead and the scuff of the blue sky. I scuttled from that place where the high voltage had conveyed me, lightened some, but burdened still by a pull to return to where I’d come and make a final reckoning for what had been done to turn me into what I’d become.
Back up that rising long mountain I made my way, following familiar roads that narrowed and darkened progressively. Back I coursed, agile as wind, to that man with the heart full of crows. I caught him as I’d left him, sleeping. In the new form I’d been blessed to inhabit, I slipped down on his breath into the very dank heart of him. I turned there inside, like one of those worms that knuckle the dirt or a hard-crippled bird. I lifted him up, skin and skull and wide, wild eyes, lifted him off his bed, and dropped him back to that cold sheet, came on out, and left him there, stained for good.
So that’s the extent of the story I’m bound to relate. It ends in crows as it began in crows. It’s a challenge on us all to shoulder the mercy we’ve been promised. I wish you well with that. For myself, I can claim no rightful success in that regard. So be it. I have come instead to prefer my diffusion, the company of the sun shot down, and black birds in murmuration out ahead of its fall.
___________________________________________________________
Arthur Pike is currently working on a collection of linked crime stories set in and around Truth or Consequences, NM and collaborating with his brother on a series of young adult novels focused on brotherhood. He lives in Houston, TX with his wife, step-daughter, and two grandchildren, among others.
