Zach Breneman
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“Constance, will you kindly get the fuck out the way?” is what Jerry Parsnip said to me. Can you believe the cheek?
I lowered the visor on my iron helmet.
There’s one road in and out of Gorsebrush and it’s barely two lanes. I picked the chokepoint between the manspreading boulders to the east and the boneshattering cliff to the west. That’s where I dug the trench, poured in the quick-dry cement and then lay down in it. Around 3am, after I watched the mailtruck fuck off from behind the scrabbling sage. Can’t stop the mail, I always say. I decorated the suit of armor I was wearing with about 700 barbs from a disused tangle of wire from the Miller farm. And then I waited for Jerry.
“Jerry,” I said, “you know what you need to do.”
He spat into the dirt, miming cowboyhood.
“Got a hankering to roll over your stubborn ass,” he said.
“But we both know you won’t.”
In a town of seventy-three you get to know a guy, particularly when he’s the ex-husband of your ex-best friend, who herself happened to run off with your ex-husband. Nick.
And then Jerry was in his pickup, harumphing the door closed and gunning the engine with it in park, and I was trying to regard the clouds and not close my eyes. I wanted to look over into his cab to see Astrid. I knew she was there, pawing at the dashboard, panting a demand at Jerry. Let me out, she’d say. I want to see my mom. But this second prick, Jerry fucking Parsnip, took my baby from me when Nick and Evelyn got smushed by a boulder in a mudslide. And I could just see him in there, stroking his little caterpillar of a mustache. But I couldn’t look, of course, what with my helmet cemented to the road.
We sat there like that, him gunning his truck, me starting to sweat, until the Sheriff’s prowler snaked around the downhill bend. She parked it and stepped out.
“Constance,” she said.
“Martha,” I said.
“Would you just quit?”
“Now, Martha,” I said. “A promise is a promise.”
Jerry turned off the truck and I could hear my baby barking when he opened the door and stepped out.
“Martha–Sheriff Olmstead–this woman is a public safety hazard and a pain in my everloving ass,” he said.
“Jerry,” she said.
“What.”
“Give the woman her damn dog back.”
“That an order?” he asked.
“If you’re making me make it an order, then yes, it’s an order.”
He crunched his way back to his truck, and then I heard the bell around Astrid’s neck twinkle closer to me. I lifted the visor and she probed my face with her tongue as I laughed and was helpless to prevent it.
“Absolutely disgusting,” Jerry said, walking back to his truck. “Bye, baby. Wednesday, midnight,” he said to me, his voice drooping.
“A promise is a promise,” I said.
Zach’s prompts were: At a Protest Event, Dog/s, A Promise
Zach Breneman writes fiction in Pittsburgh, PA.
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