(Wonderful image provided by the author)
Little Marco stood by his mother and they looked at the old man in the bed. Marco wished he would die already, but he refused. His grandfather gurgled and farted, reaching out with an age-spotted claw, “Grr-Grrrr.”
“Oh, geez.” His mother’s mouth went thin and white. Marco stepped back and didn’t want to be in the room, but Marco was in training.
“When the old bastard makes that noise and farts, especially when he farts. Get the bedpan and put it under his ass.” His mother grabbed the pot. She pulled down the blanket. He was naked from the waist down. Marco looked away. “Watch!” She lifted one flabby leg and bent the knee then the other, and slid the cold bedpan under his ass. The old man’s penis started twitching and rising in a bush of yellowed white pubic hair. “Just ignore his thing and make sure he doesn’t push the bedpan out and shits the bed. That’s what he wants to do. He wants to make everything as hard as he can on us.” The old man smiled showing his toothless gums and looked evilly conscious for a moment. His eyelids fluttered in pleasure over washed-out blue eyes. Dead fish eyes. Then the smell hit Marco, and he ran out of the room.
“Why do I have to do this? I don’t want to do this?” He wiped at the tears on his face. She stormed out and slammed the bedpan on the kitchen counter, splashing urine, roiling the turd.
“Dump that into the toilet.” His mother towered over him. Marco was only a small seven. He reached up and took it with unsteady hands holding the sloshing stinking metal away from him and walked toward the bathroom. When he got back. His mother was getting all painted up for a night at BIG DADDY’S. She wore her stripper clothes under a blue and white Adidas striped sweatsuit, like some kind of basketball star.
When she left, Marco got hungry and went to the kitchen and put a pan of hamburger stew on the gas stove. He turned it on, but it only clicked after he turned it on high. Gas stunk up the kitchen. Then he remembered to put it on IGNITE. Whoosh, the flame lit. Marco studied the flame and had an epiphany. He got the Red Devil barbecue grill lighter and switched off the child-proof button. He lit every curtain in the tiny house. The flames climbed quickly. He held his nose and lit the piss-stained sheet hanging under the comatose old man. His mother had smashed Oxycontin pills into his gruel of Cream of Wheat and Gerber baby carrots. Marco almost got trapped but ran out the door when the flames caught the couch, chairs, plants—everything. Whoosh! The scorching heat pushed him like a giant gas stove burner. WHOOSH!
Marco stood outside, telling the big fireman how his mother left the stove burner going and he was home alone with his beloved grandfather. He hoped Grandad was OK. His eyes were like big sad brown saucers. Now he could go live with his Dad.
#
Everything looked wonderful. All the things Marco the fledgling firebug, murderer, and traumatized boy could ever want. His mother’s prison was way down in Rockville, Indiana, so he wouldn’t see her again, which made him sad in a way that baffled him.
His dad was a big guy who wore flannel shirts like Paul Bunyan. Marco wasn’t sure about him…His father’s voice was very strong and Marco thought he might get mean like some of his mother’s guests from “BIG DADDY’S.”
He showed Marco around the house. They went to the top of the stairs. “This is your room.” It had everything. A bed that looked like Captain Hook’s ship. A night light with Micheal Jordan slamming a basketball into a hoop. He had video games and even a Daisy “Red Ryder” BB-gun sitting in the corner which fascinated him to no end. EVERYTHING.
They left the room but didn’t go downstairs. They walked down a long dark hall that smelled like medicine. His father said, “I want you to meet someone.” A terrible dread came over Marco. “Say hello to Grandma, Marco.” The voice sounded stern like Marco’s Mother’s.
Marco said in a sour voice, “Hello, Grandma.” The room smelled like the blue porta potty at the park. The old woman was smiling like she had a big toothless surprise for Marco. He saw the same faded dead fish eyes of his Grandfather’s, that didn’t see, but did. The old woman let out a long complicated and terrible smelling fart that sounded like a baby elephant, lost in the tall grass, trumpeting for its mother. The smell rose like a brown fog.
Marco’s father pulled down the sheet, and she was naked from the waist down. Her bony legs sprang wide open like she was ready for the business.
“I’ve got a little job for you Marco. Grab the bedpan.”
THE END
Saragun Springs 
Christopher!
Oh dear God. This one teeters on the line of hilarity and offense. Naturally, in real life, there are people who have been through taking care of parents and will be mad. But I think that people who have a sense of the absurd will understand the spirit of the thing!
I had to show the Little Red Bird. S/he is a work of art!
Thank you for sharing your work this week and you are welcome to publish more at any time!
Leila
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Leila
Thanks on the Cardinal, too! He’s one of our little backyard birds. Who might be out there right now! lol.
Christopher
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Hi Leila
I wasn’t sure about this one, but after I read it to my former wife…
She said almost the same thing. It sent an alarm through her, but she got to laughing pretty hard and I started laughing. Maybe it was my voice? So I thought I would air out the room with it, so to speak. lol.
Thanks for including me as a guest writer. That was a really fine honor!
Christopher
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Ananias
In the hands of another, lesser writer, this thing would probably fall flat on its face. But your vision, worldview, and ways of presenting characters make this work.
The reader feels like all this could really happen, and DOES really happen, somewhere. All the minor characters just naturally seem to come alive in your work. The things they do seem like the things they would really do in real life. Yet to have that fictional, story-telling significance hiding beneath the surface as well (as it has to if it’s to be a good story).
And your protagonist in this piece is made extremely believable. The complexity of this is beyond belief. How can such a young kid be a murderer, and yet he is a murderer. Or is he? Does he even know what he’s doing, really? And yet, he does seem to know what he’s doing. But he’s also escaping a terrible, horrible situation and burden being put on him from above that he should never have to deal with at his age. So the reader can admire his resourcefulness and courage. Which is where a large part of the complexity lies. And that moment when he smells the gas and makes the decision with the lighter is only a moment, after all, which leads to a few more moments or maybe a little more. It all happens so naturally – just like it really would in life.
The reader is horrified by his actions at the same time as feeling sympathy for his situation. And a part of the reader even feels that the grandfather and mother are somehow getting what they deserve (death and jail). Some people really do deserve to be punished. Jesus also said, “I come not to bring peace but a sword” (and then he never used the sword, or at least not literally).
In our world where morality is all turned around (horrible people claim Jesus as their leader and inspiration, liars and hypocrites at all the highest levels, an apathetic general populace that lets itself be led around blindly and doesn’t care) a story like this one about cute little Marco is an inevitability, IF the writer is a real writer who’s keeping his eyes open and really is the antennae of the race, one of the ones who really knows what’s going on all around us. (Bad things are happening now and much worse is sure to come.)
And you are a real writer with your eyes open! It was your artfulness that created this tale but you didn’t create the world around us that really created this thing.
You are just the messenger, as any real story-teller is.
Pure genius! No other explanation is possible!
D
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Hi Dale
I was hoping this might make a good impression at least from a story telling point of view.
Marco I think was thrown into an adult world with adult responsibilities and he couldn’t handle it. I like what you’re saying about how this solution happened at this moment of smelling the gas. Like it sometimes does in real life. Writing the story happened in my own mind, just like this. You are very perceptive, my friend.
The writing of people and their actions are almost uncanny as far as how they come alive. And how a great reader and writer like yourself can interpret things that as the writer I might not precisely be aware of. That’s what I would call excellent commenting!
Yes the mother and perhaps evil-laced dementia patient grandfather do bring the ire. The way you described Marco as a cute little boy, and murderer or is he? I found that to be intriguing. Children are capable of great evil yet they are children. They seem almost as innocent as lunatic dogs that kill a human being over practically nothing and later they will lick the hand of their executioner. It’s pretty tragic. Maybe that’s why God, in the end, has to put us all down for this lack of perspective in sin.
It’s that “moment” that you mentioned where terrible things can happen and without age there is very little perspective of the consequences.
You did a really great job–as always analyzing this story. Thanks 110%!
From the land of the morning glories.
Christopher
PS: Your Jesus reference with him as the sword is scary. He is exalted and full of grace–grace itself, but not to be messed with…
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Christopher
And you strike again with the title. This one-word title is brilliant.
Dale
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Thanks Dale!
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CJA
AWESOME picture of Mr. Cardinal eating his lunch! Being that close to him, getting that clear a picture, and catching him eating are all rare…Like with the hawk he seems like he’s your pet. He also reminds me of who Marco could’ve been if they weren’t making him take care of mean-spirited dying old people who enjoy making others clean their bedpans.
If the dying old guy had been a nice person, Marco probably wouldn’t have cared nearly so much…
DWB
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DWB
Thanks on the Cardinal! I have to admit that he is one of our backyard birds probably crunching on a sunflower seed. Cardinals are wonderful birds. My grandmother’s favorite, and The Indiana state bird. People seem to have superstitions about them as harbingers of loved ones that have died. Butterflies too, I think.
If I was Marco, having to deal with bedpans and evil old men that are naked from the waist down (and having a clever enough mind)–I might have roasted him, too. lol. Grandma is probably next. Marco might get caught if he firebugs her, too. But then again who would think a seven year old could be so devious? Maybe not devious at all like you implied earlier. Just trying to survive with the tools he has.
CJA
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Christopher
Marco’s Freudian ambiguity and the fact that we don’t know for sure one way or another about him is one thing that makes him so human – such a complex and complicated character. He does devilish things (in a believable way), but he doesn’t seem like a devil at heart (or at least not most of the time). In that sense, he’s very much like a tiny Raskolnikov, from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. And that’s both terrifying and hilarious!
The open-ended conclusion, with grandma waiting in the wings and little Marco perching there, is both hilarious and terrifying at the same time as well, the epitome of a gallows humor that says a lot about life without really saying it. Brilliant irony at every level. But the deep kind of irony, not the cheap kind.
Deep irony is essential for great literature. Cheap irony destroys it every single time, without fail and no exceptions.
Your irony is deep, and that is a big reason why you’re an heir of Chekhov and Carver!
Dale
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Dale
That’s great! “A little Raskolnikov.” Gosh, I could almost see him creeping his little feet up those stairs, hatchet in hand, to the greedy pawnbroker’s apartment. What a lousy rotten women she was, kind of like the bed defecating grandpa–so I could definitely see a parallel here to these murders. The victims don’t offer much to sympathize with–besides that other woman that was in the pawnbrokers apartment.
it also pretty funny to think of him in this way and very apt!
I think the story was following the “solve the problem with a solution that makes it as bad or worse.” I never really plan these things, though. But with all the reading and life–ideas must stew around looking for a way out. Writing is a sort of life raft. Things that hurt in life can be soothed by the pen or at least used for some creative angst.
I’m glad the irony wasn’t the dime story type. I was hoping it might have been a little unpredictable.
Thanks for the high praise of my story today. It probably wasn’t for everyone. It’s great you have a keen sense of humor!
Christopher
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Christopher
Glad you like the description of little Marco as a mini Raskolnikov! I think it fits him.
I can tell you don’t plan your stories, at least not in any mechanical way, because they don’t happen in a mechanical way. In the average Netflix television series, the “good guys” are almost all good and the “bad guys” are definitely all bad, and the plot twists and turns are so mechanical, and have been seen so many times before, that almost anyone with a pulse could predict what’s about to happen, if they were awake or wanted to.
Your characters are never that clear-cut, they are always far more well-rounded, complex and complicated than that, even the minor characters.
And your plots never plod ahead adhering to unrealistic plot points; instead, your storylines unfold, or FLOW, like a stream, or a river. They have a natural-seemingness, or naturalness, to them that’s very rare.
Writing being a life raft is a great metaphor. Without it, some of us would surely drown, maybe even in a bottle of liquor!
Dale
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Hey Dale
Yes I found that to be an unusual and strangely great comparison between Marco and Raskolnikov! And it really makes want to read some more of the great novel!
On the writing for me. it’s typing and then it starts to happen or in some cases not happen, or happens later when the mind un-sticks. When a story is really becoming a story is when I’m thinking about it–out walking, but I’m not doing much of that.
My summer has been totally hijacked by this endless roof DIY job i’m doing. It’s a metal roof and doing it alone is tricky.
I wanted to send five stories for the guest writer appearance, but I’m basically tied up. I have a lot of other stories but I couldn’t get them up to a decent standard. Some may have been OK Idk it’s like a maze going through them. Then I start rewriting and the time flys
I’m happy that my characters are coming across like real people with good and evil inside them. Sometimes it’s evil people dealing with evil people. I’m not sure there are any good guys. Maybe only in the moment. People are such phonies It’s hard to know what your getting.
Jackasses at least showing who they are. But they are still jackasses. Iv’e been called one myself and about every other insult imaginable, lol.
Thanks for the kind comments. I really appreciate!
Christopher: shouting my misdeeds from the rooftops.
PS : That’s funny about drowning in the bottle and so true!
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Now that’s a horror story. One thing left me perplexed. This sentence appears incomplete: “When the old bastard makes that noise and farts, especially when he farts.”
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Yes sir, lol!
She was letting Marco know that when Grandpa blows wind. He’s honking for the right a way.
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