Black Hole, 1953
by Christine Naprava
On a third or fourth date, third especially if they really cared for the girl and had intentions of wedding her, they’d tell the tale of their father’s untimely passing: his neck broken cleanly as a chicken’s, no blood save the teeth punched out and spat into his palm. None of the girls would ever be country enough to know how efficiently a chicken’s neck can be broken, but they’d nod their heads like they knew, and they’d rest a hand on their future husband’s arm if they thought him more than a handsome face, and sometimes, by the night’s end, they’d go to bed together, and the sex would be the stuff of future daydreams, and they’d marry a few months later in a summer wedding, always the summer, June, and the kids would come in twos and threes, and the fifties would all be a haze.
There was more to the beginning of their end than a broken neck, though. There was Lily, the matriarch of the Wojcik family, instructing her two eldest to go collect their father, John, only thirty-three, from the Senate parking lot, and there was the knowledge Lily cruelly kept to herself (she already knew her husband was dead; the man at the bar who’d phoned the house was a man she was involved with and he’d wanted to be the first to break the news to her), and there were her boys, Harold at thirteen and Malcolm at eleven, arriving on foot just as their father was being scraped off the Senate parking lot and heaved into the bed of a pickup better suited for a deer carcass, and some man they knew to address as mister asking, Jesus, what are they doing here?, and another man they knew to look through placing his hat where his heart should’ve been, saying, Boys, I wish the circumstances were different, and the killer’s accomplice, his buddy, asking, Anybody seen Britt? even though he knew very well the whereabouts of Britt Exeter.
There was Malcolm, on the evening of his eleventh birthday, in the bed of Mr. Feckley’s pickup with his father’s arm draped across his ankle, John’s outstretched palm bobbing all the way to the hospital like a beggar in a big city or Mr. Hunter with the Parkinson’s, and Harold, the new man of the house, seated precariously on the wheel tub, thinking then, remembering now, how the sun didn’t really set that night. It’d stormed miserably earlier in the day, and the sky was gray patch, gray patch, gray patch, apocalypse orange, and the sun didn’t really set that night, no. It was being sucked into a black hole none of them yet knew they were headed toward, and the two sons and one of the men, maybe the fat and ordinarily jolly Mr. Mosal, opened their mouths to the night air, not caring if a bug or two flew in, because the worst wasn’t behind them, the worst was right in front of them, it had to be, and it was dead at their feet.
The Molotov Cocktail 