In the midst of writing “Killing the Immortals” and getting that behemoth edited and ready for publication, I’ve had to allow a few much shorter pieces to gather a bit of dust. And, frankly, that’s fine. Getting some distance from the process of writing them helps by making it easier to look at them with fresh eyes.
It’s actually funny revisiting them after all these months; it’s like I didn’t even write them. I don’t really remember typing the words, so it’s pretty much like reading someone else’s story. I’ve been trying to iron out some wrinkles, catch typos, and get these ready to send to an editor for a deeper look. After that, I’m not sure, but I definitely want to get a final manuscript complete so they’re ready to go when I decide what I want to do with them.
One of those short stories is called “The Slingshot.” On the surface, it’s about a terrible accident happening, and how a family deals with it. Theme-wise, it’s about the relationship of two brothers, and how it can transcend some very difficult circumstances. The first chapter is below. I’d love to hear your thoughts, in the comments here, on Twitter, Facebook, or come knock on my door. Ya know, whatever.
I was fifteen when I killed that girl who lived up the street. That was so unlike me. I’d never been in trouble a day in my life. I was a Straight-A student, got perfect attendance almost every year—okay, the flu bug did hit me on occasion, but I tried to work through it anyway—and was on the Honors track for college in a few more years. I had everything any good parents would want for their kid.
What I didn’t have, though, was a lot of friends. Let’s just say I was awkward. My head was far more likely to be buried in a book than a football helmet. That kid who always got picked last whenever they lined up to form teams for kickball or touch football at recess during elementary school? That was me. I threw “like a girl,” I was constantly told—but I could think of at least a dozen girls on the playground who could out-throw me. I kicked with the grace of a drunk fraternity guy with his feet tied together, and I ran like an octopus falling out of a tree.
It didn’t help that I wore glasses—not just glasses, but big black ones that looked like hand-me-downs from my sixty-year-old uncle, because they were hand-me-downs from my sixty-year-old uncle—and had braces from second all the way through eighth grade. As those years dragged on, I could barely remember ever not having braces. As far as I was concerned, I’d been born with those godforsaken sharp, metal brackets all over my teeth, and I wouldn’t get them off until the President himself issued a direct order to remove them, under threat of military invasion.
I lived in constant jealousy of my older brother, Michael, who was a god among men at eighteen years old then. He started at linebacker for the high school football team—or, well, he did until he busted up some guy’s face in a fight outside a Taco Bell at 2 a.m. and got arrested. He wore a letterman’s jacket. He smoked cigarettes, and made it look like he was James Dean. He had girlfriends. And real, actual friends. People who called our phone at the house and asked for him, to the point that my parents gave him his own line so he wouldn’t tie up the home phone. Nobody had a cell phone in 1992, but my brother had a beeper, which I thought was unspeakably cool. I suppose I could have gotten one too, but the only thing more pathetic than not needing a beeper was getting one and then never having anyone but your mom call it. Besides, I was never anywhere other than school and home, so what did I need one of those for? If anyone wanted to find me, it was a 50/50 shot on where to check.
I was the easy one, and my mom fawned over me because of it. I cringed whenever she asked Michael why he couldn’t be more like me, and they’d yell back and forth over it. It was like my mom was using me as a shield to hold up between her and Michael, trying to deflect his bad behavior off of her by citing her “good son.” How bad could she have done as a mother if she had this one studious, well-behaved, dutiful son reading a book in his room right now? Sure, Michael reeked of cigarette smoke, and may or may not have impregnated some girl at school, and probably stole that watch he was wearing, but that wasn’t her fault because she raised me too. Michael probably got his rebellious genes from his dad, whom none of us had seen in ten years at that point. Had that sent Michael down the path he was on? It was tough to say; he was only seven when the divorce happened. Not a lot of seven year olds had a pack-a-day habit or a rap sheet. Maybe his adolescence would have led to the same place regardless, or maybe having a good male influence in the home would have given him a better direction to head in. Who knows?
Mom tried her best, though. I was confident in that. Her best just wasn’t all that good. We all have our limitations in life. I couldn’t hit a ball with a bat even if it was sitting on a tee in front of me. Michael couldn’t turn down a fight. And our mom couldn’t parent. She made an effort, but she didn’t know what to do with us, particularly as we went from adorable little kids who just wanted to run around outside or play Nintendo to teenagers with actual problems, from girls to grades to bullies and sweaty armpits. Her brother helped where he could, but he lived two states away, and our dad wanted nothing to do with any of us after the divorce. Hell, he didn’t want much to do with us prior to the divorce either. He preferred his women young and blonde, and his children non-existent. Sometimes, growing up, I wondered if my mom felt much the same way on the children side.
She worked as a secretary at some law firm in downtown Knoxville, which was one of those downtowns that time had forgotten. Empty storefronts surrounded a couple of nice old theaters on Gay Street, and everything outside of that one street and a walkable square with a few restaurants a block away was either boarded up or demolished. Many decades before, there had been streetcars and a vibrance to it, but everyone had moved out to the suburbs, just like we did, and what was left behind was kind of sad. The only places open past 6 p.m. were the two theaters; the rest of downtown rolled up the streets and went to bed until the work-a-day grunts came back the next morning.
Since she often worked late, Michael and I had been latchkey kids since he was in fourth grade, and he’d act as my “babysitter,” which typically meant he’d either punch me and try to smother me with pillows, or he’d lock our bedroom door while he and his friends played video games. I wasn’t sure which one I preferred. With the latter, at least I wasn’t getting punched. On the other hand, I was locked out of my own room, and I had to hear them having fun—probably farting on my toys when they weren’t breaking them—while I sat on the couch and turned the TV volume up.
We shared a room growing up; we had a small house, but they’d converted what was supposed to be a den into one big bedroom for the two of us. The saving grace was we had a decent amount of space; he had his side of the room, and I had mine. The Nintendo and TV—without cable—sat in the middle, against the wall. As he got older, the posters on his side of the room pushed more and more the boundaries of what mom would allow. At first, she’d tear it down if he put up a poster of “2 Live Crew” with girls in string bikinis, their butts lining up side by side. Then, she’d see a poster of Playboy girls wearing nothing but bunny stickers on their nipples, and she’d tell him to take it down—he wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t complain. By the time he’d moved on to ones of girls bent over cars wearing just a smile, and groups of girls naked except for some lathery soap sitting on their breasts and between their legs, she’d given up, and I’d started getting a hard-on just thinking about being in my bedroom. That made for some extra awkward moments in school, as if I needed more of those.
Those posters were one of his first outward acts of rebellion, pushing the boundaries mom set for him until he wore her down, and she stopped trying to enforce the rules she’d originally set. That was a common pattern with them, when it came to school and girls and curfew and whatever else, it seemed like. Maybe if dad had stayed around, he could have helped take on some of that burden, and they would have teamed up to rein Michael in. But mom alone didn’t stand a chance. Work required enough of her energy that she didn’t have that much of it to put toward us. That didn’t matter all that much with me, because I wanted to be left alone to read my books anyway, but it enabled Michael to do whatever, or whoever, he wanted.
He was a god to me, but he was a pest and a thug to the cops in town. Starting when he was thirteen, he loved to tell me how the cops were dying to nail him on something. He reveled in it, how he’d talk back to them, call them “pigs” and there was nothing they could do about it. He was just a kid. What were they gonna do? Send him to juvie? He didn’t care. That’s what he said anyway. Whether he was really as tough as he talked was hard to say. I wasn’t there the first time he got arrested to see the look on his face; he was busted for stealing a six pack of Miller Lite from the Weigel’s gas station. The owner decided not to press charges, but he was banned from the store. Then, there was vandalism—spray painting a dick on the back of a liquor store—trespassing, arson, pickpocketing, assault. I probably forgot one or two. Nothing huge, but it was plenty to get him known at the police station.
So when I killed Myra Wright, I wasn’t the least surprised when everybody thought Michael was the one who did it.
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