Welcome to Tiny Worlds!
We’re shifting our focus to explore Mexico's eastern coast with twelve-year-old George Perez in the serialized novel: ISLA.
For longer fiction visit Stories, and for flash fiction go to Sketchbook.
December 1983
A second dark drop of blood fell next to the previous.
Blobs of red on the cement made little domed structures – “like camping tents,” George thought. A third, bigger drop hit the ground as a rush of men in suits crowded him. George saw their wincing faces, his ears still ringing from the high-pitched ting of the over-inflated basketball. George’s legs folded, his eyes stinging with tears, a porous overture to the throb-throb rhythm coming from his face.
Had he seen the ball coming at him? Maybe. Red and blue stripes of the Globetrotter basketball were just a blur like a TV show freeze frame as it hung in the air.
His mind played it back: the physics professor attempted a layup, missed, the rebound was caught by…George couldn’t remember what subject the man taught – the fat one. George saw the untucked shirt reveal his belly as he caught it, twisted, and flailed the ball in George’s direction. But there was too much spin, too much meat. It bounced at George’s feet and shot up as he looked down. Ting! A ricochet right into George’s nose accompanied by a bright flash – the kind where your brain blinks out for a minute like a TV going to commercial.
Now, the men were all squatted, gathered around, suit pants wrinkled and foreheads full of flop sweat. George had taken his suit jacket off before the game. It itched and felt tight in the arms.
“Gotta have a suit,” his father had said, “People get married, people get buried, and you gotta have a suit for the occasion.” George wondered if his father had known. Like, could he have foreseen that the stocky-kid-turned-lanky just six months ago would need a suit for today? Would he have known that a forced basketball game, ostensibly to get his mind off of things, would only last a few minutes? If he did, could he also see him now, sitting on the ground bleeding on the wide wale corduroy pants of the suit? Would he know being outside, without the protection of his father, would seem like punishment?
The men pulled George to his feet. A white, and George hoped unused handkerchief catching the stream of blood, was balled up on his face. The bloody tents at his feet were now a campground with a little red stream leading to a bigger pond. George looked at the trail of the blood through tears as it trailed off between the cracks in the basketball court. Down it went, out of sight to the ant-sized darkness below.
A biting wind, usually reserved for summer in the Bay, rushed up the coastline and helped to push them back to the Berkeley apartment. Someone held George steady as he bobbled, the rest staying mostly ahead or behind. His own private security detail was a ragged group of middle-aged men he’d only met once or twice. Elephants and giraffes, he thought they looked like, in rumpled suits. Their Sunday Best, and his too, must have looked odd traipsing along the road; missionaries just arrived from a street fight.
He didn’t want to be there, with these men, at this moment. Or home, really. The apartment would be full of people with sad eyes watching his every move, trying to ask him questions over their little plates of skewered meat from the crockpot. The steps in front of the apartment were already lined with flowers that didn’t fit inside. George just wanted the calm…something. He couldn’t put his mind on it. Some…where. Some place, but not here. His father would know, would have known, how to cajole the location out of him. What he wanted was blank, a hole. It was a missing arm or a forgotten memory that you know should be right there. It was the book you can’t find when you want it, when you remember the color of the spine but it was simply missing from the shelf.
His mother wouldn’t have music playing. The guests would be looking at his father’s records though, maybe even talking about them. The same with his books–thumbed through, a nod to an underlined passage but no words, no recitation. There would be a low murmur of quiet voices in the apartment, the clink of a spoon. It’s not that Kathryn, er, mom, didn’t like music. She simply drowned when too much was happening at once. In her world a single noise was enough, add another and she reached her limit. A third could trigger a panicky shutdown. Of course there wouldn’t be any music playing today. George didn’t know when it might ever play again for her. Or him.
George’s dress shoes scuffed the steps as he stepped in the doorway, eyes turned to look at the ragged group. To George they looked like mannequins standing there, staring, just shapes with no distinguishable features, a slowed down version of Herbie Hancock’s Rockit video.
His eyes gathered the room. Just as he thought, George saw hands holding cups, small plates and… his father’s things. George wanted all of them to go, to get out. He didn’t want the bloody handkerchief, the teary eyes and he certainly didn’t want them touching anything.
Walking over to the makeshift study in the corner, his father’s sanctuary, he started putting the filched belongings back onto the shelves, straightening the spines. But when he saw these faceless shapes weren’t taking his drift, he began yanking them from hands, from laps. These were not to be touched. The dog eared pages were important, the scribbles in the margins were private.
When George saw someone thumbing through the leather journal, his hand-drawn map falling to the floor, he’d had enough. He snatched it from the man’s hand, shoving the map back between the pages. Then, George grabs another book and a sleeve missing its record. A plastic cup tumbled to the ground, a splat of potato salad landed on the armchair. He paused, looking around the room, searching for other missing pieces.
Where was his father to hold court, to command the room like he used to—voice rising, arms grandly sweeping, pulling people in with every word? That’s the version George wanted now. But today there was no teacher. And if no one else would speak, George would.
“These don’t belong to you!” George screamed.
The entire apartment froze, mannequins returned to their natural state: immobile.
Holding the stray objects to his chest he looked around the room, his mother came around the corner to see the commotion.
Her face was as red and weighted with sadness as his. Kathryn, in that moment and the ones that would follow, didn’t know how much space to give her son. Leave him alone? Rush to him? Neither felt like the right instinct was baked into her genes. For the moment she was frozen, just watching, seeing George rush off down the hall through her own gauze of loss and tears.
Arms full, George didn’t know why those things mattered: the record, Music for Airports, he thought was just noise. The book, Shadows and Echoes, was just bedtime stories.
But the journal, though, had his father’s handwriting in it, his sketches, notes about places far flung. To let someone else touch it, let alone read it, was an abomination to everything, to anything he wanted right at that moment. And what he wanted right at that moment was just, just, just… not there anymore.
The door closed with a lifeless thud, sealing George’s bedroom—hopefully forever—from the outside world. He thought of Leonard Cohen’s voice, now a distant memory fading, just the soft pffft-pffft sound of a needle on dead wax repeating endlessly. He didn’t want to think of the song, never wanted to hear it again. He’d heard all he needed when the police handed the Triumph keys to his mother. They jangled differently in someone else’s hands: the rabbit’s foot, the squarish key for the classroom, and other soon-to-be-forgotten keys—keys to doors that never needed to be opened again.
Kathryn had called after him but the sound, like the door closing, was only a reverberation of the wah-wah in his head. Too many thoughts and all of them just jumbled together.
And the crazy part, George thought, was that he couldn’t in that moment remember what his father looked like. He simply couldn't see more than the outline, the silhouette of him standing in the hallway, one arm resting on the doorknob of the room George now sat. Just a darkened shape without any features. And that made him mad. He kicked at the air. He wanted to punch something, to harm something, to make the universe crack and splinter. Or burn it down, to match the heat his skin felt and the pressure behind his eyes and how if he were to cry the tears would only disappear in a roll of steam down his cheeks.
He pushed the journal under the bed, into the safe space he wished he could crawl into too—a dark cave of saved things, keepsakes he wanted to protect but couldn’t face just now.
His fists pounded the shag carpet then pulled at the threads, gripping them with his fist until some of them gave up and pulled free. He threw them away, lost in the muck, the grime of his room. Somewhere next to his socks, or the pair of gym shorts that never seemed to get picked up. And he thought about who would pick them up and that’s when he saw his face, his father’s face. His slight moustache, the scruff of his three day beard and he would wink at George and say, “Did I leave these here?” as if they were his own.
He’d back up. “Kareem on the fade away.” As he tossed them comfortably in the clothes basket, its top always askew and never fully on.
But then George saw the wink, saw the shape of his nose. He remembered it through the waving vision of the room, behind his tears that didn’t steam off his face but fell in broad pools on his chest, then onto the floor.
And onto the book: Shadows and Echoes. George looked at it again, the cover rough and worn—no artwork, just a pale blue cardstock with the title printed in blocky black type. Beneath it, his father’s name: Dr. Arturo Perez, Ph.D. Maybe he’d seen it before and just hadn’t paid attention. And near the bottom edge, partly peeled at one corner, was a rectangular white sticker: Author’s Copy – Do Not Distribute
The letters on the cover were faded, almost ghostly now, but still legible. Still present. Just like him. Not gone–just in his head.
As George lay down on the carpet, his face felt tired, his teeth sore from grinding as his breathing slowed. He reached out, touching the edge of the cassette tapes neatly packed in a size eleven shoebox under his bed. His soul wanted what was on them, craved that safety, but his body needed to shut down.
Just before the darkness took him, a line floated up—one he hadn’t thought of in a long time, not really.
"Myths slumber until a journey whispers the echoes of old magic."
His father’s voice—half memory, half dream—speaking the words.
George surrendered to sleep.
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A rich chapter. Grief and anger tangled together. The need for the body/mind to just shut down is so real.
I really felt for George when he didn't want people to casually touch his dad's stuff. It was an abomination, a real invasion of privacy. He did the right thing.
I loved the absolutely raw emotion of this: "He kicked at the air. He wanted to punch something, to harm something, to make the universe crack and splinter." I know the feeling.
And, the specificity of the "size 11 shoe box". Perfect.