Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

16

Drew's granddaddy had been an adventurer. As a young man, he had left home and gone searching for work and for something he couldn't describe. He rode the rails out of the cotton fields of south Alabama and through the endless pine forests of Mississippi, the swampy, bug-and reptile-filled bayous and the county-sized cattle ranches dotted with oil wells. On the other side of Albuquerque or was it Odessa, he'd run out of money and found work as a ranch hand and Indian fighter. He sailed out of San Francisco long before the bridge was built and made it as far as Guam, but when the war ended, he came back to Blue Springs.

Six years was a long time to wait, and to Drew it seemed like an eternity. Every day the school bus picked him up and dropped him off at the end of the narrow, red clay road that led uphill to the old farmhouse. The hours between bus rides seemed to get longer and longer, and days merged so that yesterday and tomorrow always seemed present.

With his granddaddy gone, he felt entirely alone, especially after he'd done his chores and sat quietly looking into the pond. Struggling through his emotions, he set about reconstructing his granddaddy’s stories in all their variations. He remembered his granddaddy telling him about the underground spring shaded by a canopy of willows, near where he had grown up, that was so cold you didn’t have to worry about water snakes. Drew was terrified of snakes—literally petrified whenever he saw one—and on the long hot days during the dry summer months, his daydreams would sometimes carry him away to the ice-cold swimming hole of his granddaddy’s childhood.

First published in Aardvark Press, May 7, 2014.