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| For Lit Stack's Flash Fiction #2 |
At seventeen, she was consumed with the things most girls her age were consumed with. She loved her boyfriend, listened to her mother, and went to church on Sundays. She worked at the local Pancake House nights and weekends, serving her still-drunk classmates who were trying to sober up before going home.
She wasn’t an extraordinary child, blessed with neither an abundance of intelligence nor a deep sense of justice. She didn’t drink or smoke, she didn’t indulge in reckless behavior, and Johnny understood that hands off meant hands off.
Life in the former Onion Capital of the World had its advantages. Low costs meant she and her mom scraped by on two minimum wage jobs, and sometimes had extra money for clothes and cosmetics. She owned a tan Gremlin that her friends made fun of, but at least she had a car.
Sometimes she looked at her classmates with palpable longing. Those girls walking around in shoulder-less blouses, their skin glistening with some unnamed anticipation, their faces clear and their stomachs knot-free. She saw them try on skin after skin: Sexpot, Good Girl, Party Girl. These were erratic times, everyone on the verge.
Everyone but her.
While they were all planning on leaving as far from home as they could go, she knew t she’d be lucky to get into the state university an hour away. She needed to be close enough to her mom, in case it happened again.
The day the City Council voted on whether or not to allow the federal penitentiary to move into their county was the day their idyllic town came to an end. It brought out all the shallowly buried bitterness and brothers would go on to not speak for ten, twelve years. The Mayor and the Commissioner had a blow out that would end when the Commissioner’s wife slapped the Mayor’s wife in the old museum where they hung criminals in the 1900s.
It was the closest to chaos the town had come since The Onion Strike of the 70s.
And when her classmates guffawed over their parents’ outrage and earnest sentiments about what it would do to their town, Jessie worked, mixing banana milkshakes, perfected her Mud Slide Pancakes, and walked till the arches of her feet and her back throbbed in tandem.
While Johnny picketed, cold called, wrote letters to the state representative and governor, and slept on the lawn of the City Hall, Jessie asked her teachers to write recommendations for her college application. She listened to him list the reasons why the town would suffer, even though they were being told it would revive a local economy that had seen its shares of businesses coming and going, settling in neighboring towns with better paying clientele and nicer neighborhoods. Sometimes he fell asleep with his head on the counter. She’d wake him at the end of her shift, her eyes avoiding those of her glaring boss.
In the middle of most nights, she’d awaken, gulping in breaths, her heart stuttering in her chest, certain she was trapped in the belly of an iron beast.
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Ok, I retract my former statement. Feel free to point out errors, make suggestions, and tell me where I can go suck it. Seriously, I need some constructive criticism, even if I'll have to drink through the pain of it.
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