The Word: In August

The Word: Written exclusively for METRO

Image credit: Kim Teeple

Recommended by the Editor

The Word: Bare Bones

The Word: The Bandit King’s Daughter

By: Kim Teeple |   January 2012   |  From the print edition

Editor's note: Each issue, METRO asks a talented local writer to submit a piece for "The Word." The January submission comes from Kim Teeple, whose stories can be found online at Salome magazine, Temenos, Literary Mama, Smoking Poet and Elimae. She also has a story in Duck and Herring Pocket Field Guide, and one in the anthology Blink Again: Sudden Fiction from the Upper Midwest (Spout Press). Kim is also a 2009-2010 Loft Literary Center Mentor Series winner in fiction.

I learned to ride my bicycle, but I still crashed turning corners. I picked apples behind the Schinders’ for the fun of getting something for nothing. I kissed a tree. I pressed my lips to the bark and pretended I was kissing Paul Schinder. I listened to a woman’s high-heeled shoes click on the sidewalk. The woman had long, dark, glossy hair that swung across her back when she walked. I called after her until she turned around and said, “I’m not your mom.” I hardly remembered my mother; she left when I was two. But I remembered she had long, black hair.

I dug up ant holes with sticks. I liked to watch them scurry, gathering eggs that looked like rice kernels. I ate cherry Popsicles that dripped down my chin and stained the front of my shirt. I bought Bazooka gum for two cents at the corner store, and saved the comics in a wooden cigar box under my bed. I made dandelion salads and mud pies. I shouted into spinning fans to hear my voice vibrate.

Shelly Schinder told me dirty jokes behind our garage—jokes that made me worry. My aunt Charlotte took me to the beach. There were hippies, soldiers and teenage girls in crocheted bikinis. I played in the sand and listened to my new transistor radio. My dad came home from Vietnam and stayed with me, and Aunt Charlotte. One night he told me he wasn’t my dad; he said he was a monster. He said it over and over again, gripping the sides of the bathroom sink with his hands, his face pressed against the medicine cabinet mirror. I believed him and started to cry. Then he stopped. He got down on his knees, pulled me into his arms and said he was sorry. A week later he went back to Vietnam and died there.

I visit him every August. He lives only in those last days of that summer and in the reflective surface of black granite. “You were never a monster,” I tell him, pushing my fingers into the engraved letters of his name.