A STORY by TYLER FLESER
Parade
After E.J. Koh & Carmen Maria MachadoYou’re picking your nose under the spinning Sheldon Cleaners bow tie when your sister asks you to hold your niece so she can pee at the gas station across the road. A firetruck guiding a girl scout float fires its siren and your brother-in-law waves at his scared baby daughter from the cab. Behind his aviators, you picture disapproval. You think you should get your own sunglasses. The sun is a hazard and so is the rest of the world.
A crop duster with a banner reading “Freedom Costs!” flies low, circling like a vulture. You know nothing about flying but this guy seems like a show off. The American-Legion- Motorcycle guys crowd the four corners of 142nd and 18th in clumsy rows. Four ways to go anywhere else but this town and you’re still here.
Kids are scrambling to pick candy from the road. Thirty years ago, you could have been any one of them, but now your life’s a story of lateral moves and setbacks. Tupperware full of healthy shit forgotten in the fridge for months. A McDouble-stained resume crumpled in an office trash can. The probability of getting ahead now is up there with the sky falling down.
You imagine sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of a rustic cabin up north, shooting the shit with your old buddy from the peanut factory who never got back to you about a solid job he swore he could get you selling knives. You want to move on from professional daydreaming, but you’re too good at it. You look over, and your friend is actually a human-sized crop-duster teetering back and forth.
“We’re not that different, you an’ me,” says your crop-duster friend.
“C’mon now, you have wings,” you say.
Back in the real world, a flock of birds gets blended in the crop-duster’s propeller. Its engine ruptures in a Rorschach test of feathers that you think looks like a dude sipping a beer on a stoop. The plane whines on the brief descent down and the crowd below matches its pitch with their screaming—infantile and inevitable.
You baby-like-a-football your way out of dodge and and hide behind the bow tie pole, covering your niece’s face and peaking your own out like this is a fucked up episode of Scooby-Doo. American-made aluminum bends against pavement the way bones shouldn’t. Heat hugs the firetruck. The propeller lodges itself in the cab. The rest of the plane folds over the American Legionnaires, spreading its wings to embrace everyone.
When the only motion that remains is fire, you see bodies littered like wasted prayers. No sirens anymore. We’re all God’s children, your father used to say before he moved to Florida. The carnage is like one of those internet videos you watch in your twin bed at 3am when everyone else is recharging for their daily bread. All you’ve ever wanted is a normal life like that. Normal like the newspaper. Next week, you’ll see a black-and-white photo of a man wringing half-cooked blood from a novelty t-shirt he picked up at the half-gas-station-half- body-shop your sister went into, which is now its own fireball. You and her both loved the smell of gas.
You came close to saving a baby bird once. Your mom and step-dad had kicked you out of the trailer for their weekly adult time and you asked the weird neighbor kid for a shoebox. The next morning: brittle leaves, baby twigs, and the big disappointment of a still bird inside. Your sister pestered you about mother birds abandoning their young when they smell people on them. Mom always said you were a sweet boy.
But that is then and this now. Your baby niece, bald and bright red, smiles back at you. Distorted people-shapes in the same and unreal world of blown out windows, barely blue sky, smell of charred skin and candy. The story of a town touched by God with hot metal.
“Safe here! Safe here! You’re safe here baby,” you coo. That's what they all say, until you’re big enough to know the truth.