The exercise:
I think it's time for another dose of Hindsight.
Mine:
The firefighters showed up just before Dad did, which explains why I'm still alive to tell the tale. I guess they saw smoke, or somebody with a direct line to Chief Aidan did, so I'd stuffed my cell in my back pocket and tried to get as many men (and two, I'd discover later - but that's another story altogether - women) between me and my apologetic father.
No, wait. That ain't the right word.
Apoplectic. Yeah, that's the one.
"What... the hell... did you do?!?" he'd shouted, his face pretty much the same colour as the firetruck.
"I didn't do nothing! I just opened my suitcase and the damned thing blew up on me!"
Even amidst the chaos of his crew trying to stop the spread of flames from igniting all of Thunder Bay and burning the whole city to the ground, Chief Aidan paused to give me a withering stare. He pointed a stubby finger at me as if to say 'I'll be talking at you later, so don't get any ideas about going nowhere any time soon.' That man may have been well shy of six feet tall, but he had awfully talkative fingers.
In retrospect, I should have just blamed the whole mess on the snakes.
"You packed a bomb?!?" Dad was incredible at this point. No. Incredulous.
"Of course I didn't!" I yelled back. "Nina did!" Slight pause to consider that, now that I'd sad it aloud. "Or maybe it was Gina!" That seemed... a little more likely?
"You dumb sack of rocks! You brought a Chinese bomb into my house?!?"
"How many times do I gotta tell you, Dad? Tokyo is in Japan, not Ch-"
You know, just to look at him? I don't think most people would think my dad could throw an axe that far. I know he sure as hell caught the firefighters who were standing uneasily between us up until that point by surprise.
Anyway, that was about when somebody decided it would be everybody's best interest to get me the hell out of there. The last I saw of Dad - which is still true today, actually, seeing as I haven't seen him since - he was fighting to get the fire hose away from four of Chief Aidan's crew so that he could turn it on me, instead of his own home.
3 comments:
Haha, this brought a very wide smile to my face this morning! I'm up a bit early and everything's quiet, so let's see if I can sneak some Hindsight in before the day makes me go and conference again :) I liked the description of the fire chief, especially the side-references to his height and demeanour, and his talkative fingers. And I definitely like how the father developed; the thought of his wrestling a fire hose to turn on his son was fantastic!
Hindsight
As I ran down the road away from Dad's house, black smoke curling upwards behind me like a gigantic middle finger to my hopes and dreams, I wondered where the hell I was going. I settled into a steady pace, something a bit under what I did when I was jogging regularly and trying to get in shape for the Cowtown Marathon six months earlier, and started thinking hard. I couldn't go back to what I called home still, my room-mate would still be there. Unless Gina (or Nina) had decided to bomb everywhere I lived, but then there wouldn't be anything for me there either. Nothing to go back to I guess. I set my feet on the road to Mission Island where Dad had a lot of rivals who probably wouldn't hurt if I told them his house was burning down, and gave my own little flat a bit more thought.
It was in Maine, south of the border. I wanted to prove to everyone, when I got it, that I could live on my own and do my own thing. It wasn't in a city like New York, where everything was a bit too fast for me back then -- that was long before I went to Tokyo -- and it was still driving distance back to Dad's if things went south like a cow with mastitis, but it was still far enough away that it felt like independence. And, and this was important back then, it was where Stephen King was from, and I loved watching his films on video tape.
Nowadays of course I realise he wrote the books and someone else wrote the films, but the ideas were all his at least. His ideas have turned out a lot more profitable than mine.
I got a flat in Old Town, which is bit to the north and bendy of Bangor, and mostly situated on an island. I won't admit to being homesick, but I'm sure a psychoanalyst would have a field day figuring me out. And I got a job there too, nothing too special to begin with, just working for the town sanitation department adding up numbers and chatting up Dina, the dispatcher, on my breaks. The numbers were easy; Dina not so much. But she was fine and pretty and had a mouth on her like a pig-wrangler and she let me take her out for a drink or two after a month or two. I'd be hard put to be calling it a courtship, but it had the makings of one.
And then I realised that I wasn't making quite enough to be running a flat all by myself. It was a nice flat but maybe I'd got it a bit too large, and there was a whole spare bedroom sitting there empty and expensive, and so Dina mentioned to me when I was complaining about the high cost of rice that maybe I should get a room-mate. I ummed and ahhed a bit at that; I'd grown up with two brothers that liked how I didn't bruise too easy and didn't want a repeat of that, but Dina was persuasive and I was willing to be persuaded by her, and so I found myself, one September day, on the roof-veranda looking down the street and waiting for the three applicants what were supposed to be coming by. I'd asked them all to come together to make it a bit easier to choose.
From one way I could see a clown coming; tatty costume, oily make-up, kind of a poor-child's Pennywise. Like they'd known I liked Stephen King. From the other direction there were two of them; a nice-looking young woman that would probably only upset Dina, and a slightly older gentleman walking with a stick. And then, as I watched, the nice young woman grabbed the stick and the shoulder of the older man, shoves hard, and he stumbles out into the traffic and gets hit by a bus.
Well, naturally, that left only the clown in the running. I wasn't at all too sure how to explain that to the nice young woman, but lucky for me, the bus driver saw it all (even though she couldn't stop the bus) and called the police. So the nice young woman never knew I knew what she did.
The clown, when he got there without further incident, turned out to be a mime. So I never heard his voice. In hindsight, that was my first mistake.
Greg - happy to hear you enjoyed it :)
Ah, this is an excellent transition to the clown roommate. You somehow managed to catch me by surprise with the serial killer reveal, while also making it seem damned near logical that he ended up with the clown.
Morganna - a mime clown for a roommate. Yes, I can see how this will not end well at all...
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