Flash! Fiction by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

78

Anyway, about that time the rules about crime not paying, honesty being the best policy, and truth always winning out were the big ones for me. That's because in addition to the coliseum, which I'd seen on TV once when O.J. Simpson played Notre Dame, there were people closer by watching to see if I did wrong. And at that age I didn't know the distinction between felony and misdemeanor.

Jail was for a while a nightly terror, ever since I overhead my dad talking about the jails he visited. Once I was so afraid I returned a half-eaten candy bar I'd pilfered from the little green store where I bought my baseball cards.

One day near the end of August, I got caught in a real mess. A few weeks before, I'd made one of my neighbors, who was one grade ahead of me, angry by saying his girlfriend was ugly. He didn't do anything at the time, because we were in the fellowship hall in the basement of the church. His beet red face showed he would not be turning the other cheek for long.

On this particular hot and sticky late summer day silenced by the drone of the cicadas, he was standing alone at the top of a small hill on the large front lawn of the Baptist Assembly. It looked down over the railroad tracks to our single downtown street in the middle of which my little green store sat squeezed between Harrington's Mens Store and Miss Glad's flower shop where Mom worked Sat-urdays. He called me over and said we should let bygones be bygones. I complied. He was not alone.

When I finally dragged in, my older brother, who was getting ready to cut the grass, took one look and growled, "Who did that?" One thing I liked about my big brother was that while he beat me up every now and then, he wouldn't let anybody else get away with it.