In the petrol crisis of ’73, Dad grudges the car to a stop near a couple of Hawthorns failing their Wuthering Heights audition. He turns the key and hushes the radio, rationing silence under the parched cackle of birds. Dad thinks I know their names, but I don’t, no more than I know why we’re driving to the beach in a fuel shortage with a petrol canister in the boot. It can’t be for me, famously pale and flammable, nor Mam, who protested by not making banana sandwiches or a flask.
Dad steps from the car. I tune to his jangling keys while Mam twists the rear-view mirror to watch him remove the sinister cargo she’s convinced will destroy us all. Dad camouflages it with tufts of scorched grass by a telephone pole with a warped election poster of a politician looking the other way.
The dashboard Virgin Mary dances when Dad sits back in but my mother isn’t moved. She searches the road ahead for where it leads and worries a tissue with her fingers, the frayed edges dropping to her skirt like ashes.
‘Are we happy now?’ Dad asks, wrenching the mirror back to him. I flee to the moors of my book when his eyes trap me in the glass.
‘Are we happy?’ he asks again.
He turns the key, and Stealers Wheel fills the car. I sing the chorus in my head, but it doesn’t silence the plea in my father’s question.
‘Are we?’
Tom has three published Novella-in-Flash: Straw Gods, One For The River and Homemade Weather, and short stories and flash fiction in numerous anthologies and websites, with Pushcart and Best Microfictions nominations. He’s a winner of the NFFD NZ Best Microfiction and the Biffy50 Microfiction. He’s on Instagram @tomwrote.
I love this story!
ReplyDeleteNiles Reddick
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