The Paper Boy & The Winter War

The Paper Boy

&

The Winter War

A collection of short stories

––––––––

R. E. Hengsterman

The Paper Boy & The Winter War

Copyright © 2022 R. E. Hengsterman

All Rights Reserved.

Published by Unsolicited Press.

First Edition.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Attention schools and businesses: for discounted copies on large orders, please contact the publisher directly.

For information contact:

Unsolicited Press

Portland, Oregon

www.unsolicitedpress.com

[email protected]

619-354-8005

Cover Designer: Kathryn Gerhardt

Editor: Alexandra Lindenmuth

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

Penny Candy

Trapped Air

The Paper Boy & The Winter War

Grandmother

The Patriot

Tug Hill

Mrs. Robinson

Powerball

Dandelion

Annabelle

Direct TV

Sixty-Six Minutes

HASH

Redemption

@girl_wanderlust

Rehab

Shift Work

The Anniversary  

The Last Defender

Polaroid

The Red Cross

Slum Flower

Desperation

Float

Meat

Death of a Box

Roach

Forgetful

The Fishing Hole

Samuel

The Cull

Him

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the Author

ABOUT THE PRESS

This is for you.

The course of our life is determined . . . by an array of selves that live within each of us. These selves call out to us constantly—in our dreams and fantasies, in our moods and maladies, and in a multitude of unpredictable and inexplicable reactions to the world around us. 

Hal Stone and Sidra Winkelman

Penny Candy

They sat on the front porch, plucking thorned briers from the Blackberry, Red Hawthorne, and Honey Locust. The Irish Twins compared the scrapes and punctures that marked up their pale limbs as their wiry bodies soaked-in the mid-day sun.

Stay out of the briers! shouted their mother hours ago, as the two sprinted out the back door and across the lawn like puppies freed from their leash. They raced toward the whispers of a rakish boy who roamed the tangled mass of prickly plants with the promise of forbidden sweets.

Just inside the blue Cape Cod on the corner, their mother began her Sunday cleaning ritual, while their father digested freshly drawn engineering plans. She made room for her bucket and mop. Then, one upon the other, she pulled and stacked the four slotted wooden chairs from the kitchen and placed them at the edge of the living room carpet. She moved at the worn pace of someone who had labored for decades.

In the bathroom, she turned the faucet and filled her mop bucket with hot, steamy water. She allowed her hands to idle under the soak, turning them from pink to red; from tender to painful.

As their mother cleaned and their father scoured the fine graphite lines intersecting upon themselves, Simon and his brother snuck back into the living room. They removed two chairs from the stack and laid them on their slotted backs as if they had tipped over. Simon and his brother then sat with their spines against the seat bottoms and their legs placed on the chair backs. Using the armrests as thrusters, they piloted their makeshift rocket ships, rolling side to side as they dodged asteroids and navigated their way through the galaxy.

When the novelty of the rocket ships had worn off, they did something that drove their mother crazy. They stretched their calf-high white cotton tube socks, tugging at the ends until the excess cotton hung floppy past their toes. With their socks drooping, they lay on the carpet and pretended to swim, the stretched cloth acting as flippers. Hours later, they left the water and jumped from the couch to Dad’s chair and back again to avoid the sharks. Once the sharks had gone, they’d found their way back to the carpet. With their socks still stretched long and floppy, they swam through lunch. Exploring, laughing, and draining every ounce of boyhood energy from their muscles as their mother finished the last of her Sunday cleaning ritual.

When the floor dried, their rocket ships became kitchen chairs again. The couch cushions ceased being places of refuge in the dangerous sea. The dirty mop water found the toilet with a whoosh, and the cleaning supplies made their way back under the sink. 

***

Little by little, the memory of his brother disappeared.

***

There were pieces of him scattered around the house like an unfinished puzzle. His room was untouched. His toys idle. Three pairs of shoes cluttered his closet: rain boots, muddy sneakers, and dress blacks that he had worn only once to attend their grandfather’s funeral. Simon missed his brother more than anything. And because no one spoke his name, he missed him even more. His parents placed a lock on his brother’s door and put the key above the frame. However, Simon had seen his parents in the hallway when they hid the key and had since removed it. This allowed him to visit his brother’s room often. His parents, wrought with grief, were unaware of Simon’s presence in the hall, or that he even existed. This kept Simon small. 

No one exhaled in weeks. Holding in their collective sorrow until the walls and the windows and the paper-thin skin beneath their eyes, turned sallow. To stop the house from suffocating, Simon kept the doors and windows propped open. In the winter, snow blew through the house. By spring, when the snow began to melt, the walls and floors had wrinkled, and the house had grown old and stale.  

During this time, his mother’s grief swelled. He’d lay his head on the damp floor and peek beneath the door as her bare feet dangled above a scattering of loose pills, uncapped bottles, and shattered pieces of her heart. For his mother, it was a dreadful thing to love what God can touch.

Simon wanted to have the perfect words to soothe her. He wanted his words to reach his mother’s heart and relieve her pain, but Simon had no words to carry out such a wish.

His father was an engineer, analytical, ruled by logic; unlike his mother. When his father spoke, his voice bore a light frost that clung to the pale tissue of his lips. After dinner, he’d sit in silence and sink deeper into his favorite chair, leveling his raw, red-rimmed eyes on the pages of his Popular Mechanics and Machinist Magazine, searching for understanding in science, not God. With each passing day, Simon watched his father shrink as if an invisible weight forced him deeper into the cushions.

Months passed. As his mother decayed, his father raked the autumn leaves into equal piles. When he raked, he reached forward with slow, desperate strokes as if to pull the earth toward him, so he could search every inch himself.

Simon spent his days alone. He sat on the front steps and stared into the hills where the tangled grasses and fireweed crept. The police came to the house many times, as did the neighbors, whose hesitant knocks echoed hollow. They left behind flowered ceramic dishes covered in tin foil before returning home to draw their blinds, deadbolt their doors, and hold their children tight.

At night, Simon dreamt of the stranger who lived high, high on the hill, and who brought with him a stale gust that stirred the neat piles of autumn leaves. The boy whose blue jeans sagged past the heels of his boots, fraying the denim and separating the fabric into thin, ugly strands.

***

On a lazy day, amid the second summer, Simon watched an army of ants cut across his brother’s carpet. He followed the ants, in a slow crawl, beneath the bed. They were foraging inside an uncapped mason jar—faintly sweet, wrapped in the pages of an old comic book, and placed inside his favorite Battlestar Galactica tin lunch box. A crumpled assortment of Tootsie Rolls, Butter Scotches, Cinnamon, Big Red Gum, Bubble Yum, and Gobstoppers, dozens of wrappers with bits of sugary residue and the sweet smell of cigarettes. Beneath the bed and out of sight of mother, his brother had secreted the hoard of devoured sweets.

Simon never mentioned to anyone they had seen boy in the briers just days before his brother disappeared. Or allowed his thoughts to linger on what his brother must have done to accumulate such a stash. There was no telling his mother, who worked on sealing herself in the tomb of her room; or his father, who abandoned his words; or the police, who came by the house less and less. Simon had been warned about the briers, and that left him with one choice.

As his dad crumpled inward, Simon waited for the tall boy with an appetite for tender young things to return. On a late August afternoon, a bone-dry wind resurrected the boy from a thin path of trembling aspen that stretched into the distance. He held a glowing cigarette in one hand, and a small, wrinkled paper bag in the other.

Penny Candy? the tall boy asked, his monotone voice lacking the inflection to part the midsummer air. He cinched his belt and pitched forward on his feet. Five for a nickel.  

I have no money, Simon said. Tossing his eyes upon the earth. The blonde boy closed the distance. The scuff of his boots hushed on the grass inches from Simon.

Here, he said. These are on me.

Thanks, said Simon.

Meet me tomorrow on top of the hill. I’ll have five more pieces for a favor.

Top of the hill, Simon said. For a favor.

Then the towering grass at the fringe of the yard consumed the boy.

Simon put the candy in his pocket and ran. He hurried past his parents, who slouched in silence—exhausted by their communal desperation—and down the narrowing halls and smothering walls. He snuck into his brother’s room, closed the door, and scooted under the bed.

From underneath, he grabbed the lunch box. He removed the jar wrapped in comics and dumped a handful of candy wrappers on the floor. Then he pulled the candy from his pocket, unwrapping several pieces. Simon laid each piece alongside the ones his brother had hidden. They were a perfect match.

***

Simon hiked the path to the top of the hill. He snaked through the briers. Winding and climbing until the rooftops blurred. As Simon met an open field, he caught sight of the boy slouched against a tree.

Courage carried Simon to the clearing, but it was a feral instinct that made his body small and vulnerable. Simon trembled on his knees, as the boy unfastened his belt.  

It’s okay, the tall boy said with a wide grin that summoned yellowing teeth.

***

With the first strawberry moon, a gentle breeze came from atop the hill. It blew through the tall, uncut grass and into the vacant yard where spring flowers had breached the soil.

Across the yard sat a shrunken house, where a father had passed through his chair and into the earth and a mother lay mummified in her grief. But above the house and amongst the clouds, two young boys laughed. They imagined chairs into rocket ships and hurtled through the galaxy, leaving behind the barren house far below.

Trapped Air

I blame my father. Slunk deep into his drab, earth-toned chair. His legs bent, work boots bouncing on the balls of his feet like a predator ready to pounce.

His chair sat in the corner, flanked by thin-spindled end tables burdened with years of Popular Mechanics magazines. He was king, and this was his throne.

Above his head, a runner from