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. [continue reading…]
