Flash! Fiction by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

77

They Say

Do you remember when you were a kid and you thought that all the dead people were up there (or down somewhere else) watching the living, kind of like in a coliseum? I heard that in church ... many times. That's the image I had when my parents, my teachers and other old people started on about what "They say." 'They' was a tricky concept for me, but I caught on and learned that these 'they'

were just too remote for me to know personally.

I was a spirited, often unsupervised little boy, on the eve of integra-tion in a small south Alabama town where summer vacations went on forever. I wasn't especially clever for my age and was for the longest confusing words like 'lion' and 'line.' In our backyard, 'the clothes hanging on the lion' was an invitation to a real adventure. In school, I remembered they taught us "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again," so I did, several times. Each time I got a whipping.

In church, my dad, the pastor, used to say "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." One Sunday after lunch, I asked my oldest sister — she did the crosswords — what intentions were and she told me it was what made me want to play lion tamer with the clothes. From that day on, I ceased lion-taming. Hell was the scari-est thing I knew. And I could see all those people in Hell watching me.

There were lots of rules I ran into. So many I couldn't keep track.

Besides most of the time, my head was filled with all sorts of other little boy thoughts. And my writing was 'ineligible' Mrs. Martin said and my spelling atrocious. In my final spelling test I wrote "Q-E-S-S"

when the teacher sad "dress." Diphthongs were an issue for many years.