One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist by Dustin M. Hoffman

Author:Dustin M. Hoffman [Hoffman, Dustin M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC029000 Fiction / Short Stories (single Author)
ISBN: 9780803288966
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2016-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

We Ride Back

Our van swerves the subdivision curves, in and out of cul-de-sacs. The moon blares, white and shiny as our van. We are invisible in this gleaming box. We look like workers. Workers look like us. We can sneak in and steal all we deserve.

The back has no seats. Ribs and Lizzy bounce and bobble across the cold metal floor. Ribs stands, braces, pressing his palms against the walls. His long arms stretched, he looks like a skeleton Jesus, thin layer of skin and T-shirt over those jutting ribs. So many damn ribs. Lizzy’s balled in the back corner. Trying to stay so small she can’t fall.

Cal aims us square at a mailbox but pulls left just in time. Tires squeal. Van lurches. Ribs and Lizzy thud against the right wall. Cal can’t keep his big horse teeth in his mouth, laughing it up while we risk blowing cover. What the hell’s the point of finding a white van as invisible as a workingman’s van, then? Why the hell go begging Lizzy’s ex-stepdad to ask his new brother-in-law, Stew, to borrow one off his used-as-shit bad-loan lot? And Lizzy had to act all cute, leaning over his desk and flashing down her low-cut shirt and talking baby voice. That used to be her dad in a way, and that’s something just not right. But a stepdad ain’t a dad-dad—our stepkids never let us forget that.

We slap Cal’s head for wasting Lizzy’s cleavage. Time to drive straight and be hidden and aim for the houses in the back that are getting built. Ones where no people live. No families yet.

Not like that one with the light glaring upstairs and a shadow of a kid staring through lacy curtains. That kid looks like he’s looking at us. We don’t want that. We want scabbed siding, gravel lawns, garage doors like gaping black mouths. Houses where people work instead of live. Houses like where we used to work before they stopped making families to make houses to make work.

Cal parks the van. We tumble out. Ribs hurls. Lizzy laughs. Cal pisses in the moonlight. We scope out this back cul-de-sac. Four half-finished houses. We each pick one and split.

In the dark, alone, wearing all black, we wait for our eyes to adjust. Our bodies feel like nothing. Lighter than Ribs’s rail-thin frame. We cough or clear our throats or giggle or tap our teeth just to be sure we haven’t turned shadow. We rub our thighs, pinch our necks. When we’re certain we’re here, no fooling, we hunt.

We hunt closets. We hunt basements. We hunt cabinets and garages and behind the furnace. We hunt alone, but there’s Lizzy’s flashlight sparking up the basement window next door, or maybe that’s Cal’s house. Neighbors of the absent. Not so much alone as apart. Not so much apart as departmentalized, delegated, defined by what we don’t do anymore, defined by what we find. And we find lots.

We hug armloads of hand tools, shiny and Stanley. Ribs drags a compressor heavy enough to rip his sparrow bones.

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