Writing Exercise # .... um ... yeah ... - Lance

Johnny sits down for a bowl of Fruity Flakes, taking a moment to notice the kooky parrot on the front of the bag. It looks nowhere near as colorful as the toucan that is the box in the commercials. Still, this is a step up from the last cereal, the one that came in a large bag with the word “FLAKES” written in black lettering on a plain beige label. Johnny still smiles when he thinks about his Uncle meandering through the pantry, and stopping every time he came to the can labeled “MEAT” in the same beige label. He would take it out and point out how it has a little picture of a chicken, one of a cow, and one of a pig. Uncle Larry would say, almost every day with the little can in his hand, “this is a damn long way from tracking Buffalo, Little Warrior. Yup. Damn Commods. We go from mastering the great plains to playing guess the species. Heh, whatever.”

It brings a short-lived smile that is swallowed by the mess that has become the kitchen and living room. The walls blend one room to the next in a pale blue paint, the kind that comes in the pastel package. There are very few things on the walls: a black and white photograph of a lean Indian man with a giant and regal bonnet on his head, leaning against a telephone pole outside a used car dealership, a piece of paper with Garfield the cat looking disheveled without his morning coffee, a beer bottle that was thrown hard enough to pierce the cheap plaster wall. Two of the kitchen chairs are broken, now a lineage of splinters. All around the room are beer bottles, a couple of teeth, limited rugs made out of loose pieces of old maroon carpet.

Johnny pours Fruity Flakes into his bowl and wrestles with the gallon of milk, which is larger than his head. He moans and manages to pour more than half of the milk into his bowl and sets the milk down with a thud. “Hmmph,” he sighs, then surveys the destruction of the room and decides it is not much worse with milk dripping steadily off the edge of the table. Crunch, crunch, crunch. About this time he would be sitting down to watch cartoons with the volume turned down low, watching the cats chase the mice while the morning sun sent a slowly moving rectangle across the vacant room.

Now matter what changed in the house, whichever piece of furniture came from the giveaways down at the Tribal office, nothing seemed to fill the space. From the faded green couch, it was a long way to the television on the other side of the room. But that was no matter today. This morning, when Johnny walked into the living room he looked over to see broken glass around the television. It made him think about the time he saw a three-legged dog on the side of the road, his stomach busted open and parts of his insides baking on the warm dirt road. He saw the television’s innards, the wooden chairs that were now shattered orphans of the table, and he knew this was just not a day for cats chasing mice, power rangers fighting monsters.

He pours himself another bowl and sloshes it in the milk. The colors bleed quickly and leave long trails of red, orange, blue, yellow, and green on the white surface. Johnny swirls them for a while and then scoops another bite into his mouth. He pushes his long dark hair behind his ear and looked again at the dull parrot on the bag, humming a song he thought he knew.

“What the heck, Little Warrior?” A question comes in the form of a long and blurred moan as his Uncle Larry walks around the corner. His shirt–which Johnny remembers with Indians on it and the words “Homeland Security” on the bottom–is in more or less three complete pieces. A large tear is down the front, from just underneath the collar, and leaves the Indian men on the cover leaned way forward. The back is also torn, Johnny sees as his Uncle digs through the couch cushions, and there are dark red scratch marks beneath the tears. Johnny can see the soft skin of his Uncle, how it sits above his muscles on a thin layer of fat.

Larry yells, “Ah-ho!” and leans up from digging in the couch cushions. Pinched between his fingertips is a bent cigarette, which he places in his mouth and begins to pat down his pants’ pockets. “Say there, Little One, you’ll just have to bear with your ol’ Uncle for a moment here.” Larry scans the room, though his right eye is swollen shut and is a blue so dark that it looks like nightfall. He scans the floor, moaning as he sees the broken television, holes in the drywall, and broken kitchen furniture.

“Looks like we have some figurin’ out there, Little one. Just give me a minute and chow your puffs there.” Larry continues to look around, his short hair looking wiry and wanting to head in every direction. “Hey!” he hollers as he spots a lighter near the splayed out glass of the television. “Old fucker,” he mumbles, “you were about as old as the rocks outside anyways.” Larry stands up with another moan, his free hand reaching for his ribcage while he lights the cigarette with the other. He takes a deep puff, exhales, his good eye looking around the room, to his nephew, and then looking out the windows that have no curtains.

Outside the sun is well risen, casting a downward light between scattered clouds. The grass is a dusted brown, and is scarce in the yards that are crowded together. He sees his car parked in the road out front, but at an awkward angle and with the rear corner smashed in. “Isn’t that something, nephew,” he whispers, exhaling a gray rolling cloud, “they knocked up my pony.”

Johnny chews his cereal, which has become soggy. He figures he can finish the whole bag. Figures that the words that thundered through the thin walls of the house spelled out some type of journey. He cannot forget, as he steadily chews his colored flakes, the sounds of the fights the night before. How the voices bellowed out and chased any protective spirits straight out the ratty doors and single pane windows. Cannot shake the memory of walking out of his room and then attacking his Uncle, who was atop his Father, slamming his head into the drywall. There was a strange puff of white dust that popped out when his Father’s head slammed through the plaster. It made Johnny think of light snow blown off the hood of a broken down car.

And then Johnny was on top of his Uncle, pounding as hard as he could with tiny fists. It made the sound of fingertips tapping on a wooden table. And then his Mother, who had been standing there screaming at the fighting men, said the thing that sent it all over the top and brought the fight to a frenzy, the night to a standstill, and in what seemed like an instant half of them were gone.