Shorties of a Shorty...

A Short Story - 1,396 words

 

My name is Matthew Gray. I am nine and I have a hobby.

 

My next-door-neighbour Zachariah Jeffery likes to make up rhymes. It’s his hobby, and he’s good at it, for a seven-year-old, anyway.

 

A girl in my class, Katrina Chainlin, likes to make necklaces. She makes them with beads and shells and corks and bottle caps. I don’t really fancy them but Katrina makes a lot of them and she seems to enjoy doing it, so I guess that this is her hobby.

Dad’s a fireman, but he likes to fix the car in our garage. Except when he makes a mistake and something falls out the bottom of it. Most of the time when this happens Dad gets mad and throws his hammer at the tin sheets on our garage walls. My mum drilled them to the walls after Dad put a third hole in the plasterboard; she was in the adjoining laundry doing the washing when this happened. The tin sheets are drilled crookedly and have gaps between them, but Mum says that they’re better than gaping holes that show above the washing machine in the laundry wall. Dad says Mum’s just being silly.

Mum used to work as a masseuse when I was younger, but now she stays home. I don’t really think Mum has a hobby. Unless putting on make-up is one of them. It’s the thing she does the most. She puts it on in the reflection of her vanity mirror, in the mirror in the hall, in the car’s revision mirror, even in the window outside the entrance to my school. I can’t think of anything more gross that pasting gunk on my face, unless I’m playing Army Cadets with Zachariah. But Mum does it more than she does anything, even housework.

Dad had once asked her what it was all for.

“Just to look pretty for you,” was her answer.

Dad had said something about washing it off before bed because it made her ugly in the morning, but by this stage I had seen the glimpse in Dad’s eyes – the same flash I imagined he got before throwing the hammers through the wall – and I was already half way out the door. I hate it when they argue; it usually results in Mum locking herself in her bathroom all day.

I like fire. I guess it’s my hobby. I’ve liked it for a while – the smell, the look, and the warmth. When I was seven I stayed with Nanna and Grandad at their shack. We ate sausages and steak cooked on the barbeque, only it wasn’t really a barbeque, just a big hot plate balanced on two bricks above a fire.

I guess I didn’t think too deeply about the finer details of why I like fire so much, I just do. Like Zachariah Jeffery and his rhymes, and Katrina Chainlin and her necklaces. I like burning pencils and sticks over candles, I like trapping ants and then dropping matches on top of them, I like just looking at a the flames of a bonfire flicker. I like everything there could possibly be to like about fire.

It wasn’t until the day of the barn that I realised exactly why I like fire so much.
It had been a sunny Saturday. The sticky humidity had made my underarms sweaty almost instantly when I left the house.

Zachariah had come hiking through the scrub behind my house but had left early because a rhythmic-poem had suddenly occurred to him and he had to rush home to tell it to his mother.The scrubland is thick with trees for about a kilometre then after that it’s just knee high saltbush.

As I walked through the dense part of the scrub I though about Dad and Mum, and how they weren’t ever as happy as Zachariah’s parents are. They were always screaming at each other, and never seemed to have time for me. As I thought of Mum I heard her voice. At first I wasn’t sure if it even was her; this person sounded too joyful and lively.

I tried to soften my footsteps and I followed the sound of her voice. I soon came across a van and lying on a picnic rug outside the van was Mum, wearing only her pencil skirt and bra, her mousy brown hair dark against her pale skin, so pale except for the different contrasts of bruises, scattered randomly on her otherwise picturesque skin. A bald but young-ish looking man stepped out of the back of the van, carrying with him two mugs. I recognised him. He was the same guy who had come to check on mum when work was so vigorous that for a whole week, Dad had to stay at the fire station.

The man placed the mugs down and leant over my mother, kissing her on the lips.I remember thinking to myself: how dare she. How dare she do this? I knew Mum wasn’t always happy, but how could she do this to Dad… to me? This was not the same kiss she gave her brothers…
This was the sort of kiss that couples at restaurants gave each other, and older kids leaning against vandalised walls and old people sitting in bus stops.

I watched Mum’s arms snake around the neck of this man who wasn’t Dad, this man who wasn’t her husband.

I was young, yes, but I wasn’t stupid. I’d caught Dad and Mum doing it before. I watched until there was too much bare pale skin showing that I thought I might cry, or puke; which ever came first. It was then that I turned away and continued to walk.

My head was a mess with images and thoughts but I decided right then that I wasn’t going to tell Dad. It would only make him mad, and he didn’t need to be mad, and although I wanted to scream at Mum, she didn’t need to be hurt.

I’d walked for longer this day, flicking the lid of a lighter I’d flogged from Dad on and off as I walked. I had intended to turn back but I couldn’t do it. Eventually, as I took a last look into the distance, I noticed something big and solid.

I raced to it, as though getting to it faster would assure me that it was not just a mirage.It was an abandoned barn. The only things remaining inside of it were a rake a sledgehammer and a few piles of hay.

I circled the barn. Taking in its chipped, pale blue paint and the faded scent of horse manure.I went inside of it, not considering for a second that it may collapse on top me, what did I really have to lose if I was crushed under the heavy roof of an abandoned barn, far enough away that no-one would hear me scream.

I picked up a piece of hay and lit it on fire. I watched it burn until it got too close to my fingers that it began to hurt; then I blew it out. I did this a few times with various other pieces of hay, and then I lit the whole stack up. I watched the flames as they licked up the walls, reaching the roof quickly.

It took me a while to decide if I wanted to stay inside of it as it burned around me, but I chickened out and exited quickly, running a few metres. By this time the fire had wrapped itself around the barn. I watched it go up in flames, watched it burn.

And then it struck me. Right there as the paint crackled under the heat. The reason I liked fire so much, the reason I liked watching things ablaze.

I watched the barn burn and crumble under the pressure and intense heat. I stood still, not daring to blink, not wanting to miss it when the barn finally crumbled. I realised then, that what I saw – the barn falling apart, unable to ignore the flames making it weak, making it collapse – this was, in a way, exactly what I felt inside. And there was nothing I could do to put out the fire burning up my insides. I just had to wait it out, until everything crumbled and could finally relax; damaged beyond repair, but relaxed…