Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

15

Ceteris Paribus

Drew was a smart kid. His sixth grade classmates thought he was a genius. In the lower grades, he was a legend perpetuated by his former teachers. But Drew wasn't impressed. It got him nothing but trouble. His friends had over time excluded him. Only the class bullies sought out his company.

His granddaddy, an old-timey farmer, had been smart, too—he died last year—but a different kind of smart. After chores sitting on the bank of the pond with their fishing poles angled over the water, the old man used to tell his stories. He didn't have a lot of them, Drew came to realize, so he repeated them changing things here and there to make it sound like he hadn't told them before.

Drew had overheard his folks talking about his granddaddy's stroke, about how the tractor had run into the ditch, its motor humming well past supper, about the restraints Doc Cuthbert had ordered for overnight sleeping. He wouldn’t accept that the old man might have to go into a nursing home, so he arranged to sleep on a cot in the old man’s room and each day pretended the old man was getting a little better.

When his granddaddy died, Drew was shaken to the center. He lost a friend and a storyteller, and he lost his connection to a larger world. The old man always ended his stories with a pithy aphorism that Drew would later turn over and over in his mind as he was doing his chores. They sounded original and fitting, almost like they had come from the Bible. Once in Sunday school—he hadn’t yet started first grade—Drew made the preacher’s wife laugh loudly when he said that Jesus fed the five thousand people on five loaves of bread and the two fishes that were too big for the small pond at the foot of the hill.