We slumped on the couch, Darcy and I, and faced him like spectators. We had watched him position the clay cone on the folded TV tray, and set that over the faded green fuzz that rippled the snooker table. We had watched him sandbag the sides with newsprint, in expectation of disaster.
Darcy squirmed beside me. Her small feet dangled from the quilts, one socked in red, the other bare. It hurts, her glassy eyes accused me, as if I could cure infection, but hadn’t. Shut up, I wanted to tell her. The flu passes.
Only when she closed her eyes could I watch Parker. Study the way he concentrated. The way his lips separated to reveal a fleck of tongue. The way his forearm gripped the base of the volcano, and the bare bulbs of the rec room dappled his hair with light.
“Read it again,” he said.
“’Add vinegar to container.’ Two tablespoons.”
My eyes fixed to the line of skin above his shirt collar, to the slow curve of his Adam’s apple. I made myself cough into one shoulder. Sick. You’re sick.
“Then what?”
“Measure out the baking soda.”
“How much?”
“What does it matter? Wait a few minutes and you won’t need a volcano. Darcy’s stomach’ll erupt for you.”
He fixed me with a glance like a reprimand, and I threw my head back against the couch. Stupid. And that other word: disaster. Gloomy portents for the day confession had to happen. Follow the instructions, he had said, as if aware of what I had promised myself. Today. My body clenched.
“Pass me the soda box.” He waited a half second, then reached for it himself.
I shut and opened my eyes several times, as if this could change what I saw, what I felt. Rough mohair and the serpentine smell of my old man’s bad habits. Cigarette smoke. Impossible to clear from a room after the match lit.
And Parker.
A phase. It’ll pass. Paltry consolation when my heart leaped. The feelings hadn’t passed. They wouldn’t.
“Darcy’ll love you forever,” I said then. I waited for him to meet my eyes, for him to denounce the lie, the misappropriation of the verb. We both knew Darcy would never make it to the science fair. She would have to scrunch up her nose to remember the volcano five, ten years from now. Parker himself would figure in her memory as a smudge in the shape of a babysitter.
Not for me.
I had spent two nights lost to sleeplessness, to pale puffed eyes. What I had passed off as flu had originated otherwise. These damp palms. This dry throat. These unsaid words, stricken in my stomach, powerful as nausea. Do it. Now. Tell him.
I had grown up on Parker’s street, in the shape of his unbalanced shadow, to the sound of his pensive drawl. People thought that voice signaled a slowness of mind, a parallel deficiency. Their eyes fixed to the flat shirt sleeve on the left side; they noticed nothing else. Even when the TV cameras framed him against the dark of the sky. In Rome, 1960, when sun rechristened athletes like gods.
When Parker bowed his head for the bronze medal, they expressed no surprise, only hid their relief. None of them could have walked in his wake — to the buzz-cut turf where he stood in short shorts and a damp shirt, his gaze narrowed past the cameras, past the metal bleachers stiff as steel traps. As if he looked for someone.
Parker had presented me the shot put launched through national tryouts. He had knuckled his tasseled cap onto my mop top two Junes earlier, in the promise I would graduate soon enough. The summer the Beatles played Vancouver he carried over his radio and we had listened, ears pressed to the silver Zenith chassis, its speaker rough as an unshaven cheek.
Twenty thousand fans had muffled I want to hold your hand. But what did they matter? I’d never thought they’d come here, this close, Parker had said. He had meant the Beatles, but I hadn’t. Close. Close enough to feel his breath warm my arm. Close enough to distinguish hairs on the nape of his neck.
It’s indecent, my mother would frown, rigid in her seat by the TV, in the chair that would not rock no matter how hard she pushed her heels down. She lay over her lap a blue wool peacoat transposed from my childhood and, one after another, unpicked the seams for Darcy. With the addition of a bow, the alteration of the collar, no one would suspect my mother had bought the jacket for a boy.
What? Darcy had hissed to me, in the whisper only kids think travels unheard. Her eyes stuck to the screen, eager to glimpse the forbidden. What have they done wrong?
On screen the couple entwined arms. The GLF paraded. Saddle shoes stomped. The police buckled the crowd back. My mother nodded me towards the off button: another message no one spoke aloud. Those men think they love other men, she shook her head. The coat hid my mother’s hands, as if she had none, but I heard her tug the thread taut.
For weeks, years, a lifetime, my voice had snared in my throat. Darcy, still a kid, couldn’t hear a confession. The idea of my parents side by side on the sofa before me sharpened the nausea enough for the world to vanish into haze.
But Parker. Parker who left a room with the musk of pomade, a scent synonymous with adulthood. Parker who studied encyclopedias, recited poetry, who learned and remembered facts the way he had caught butterflies as a child: those bright lives netted between his five fingers.
At my side Darcy slept, her breath heavy and sweet with sickness. Parker tugged the spoon out of his mouth, his eyes riveted to the volcano. Ready for the last instruction.
I cleared my throat.
Judges’ comments
Yvonne Blomer
I’m loving how the writers engaged with all the varying aspects of this week’s assignment. Bring in an historical event, a wiki how — for this piece it is how to make a clay volcano — and two unusual characters. The assignment suggests we could move into magical realism, but we don’t.
This piece is in some ways the most complicated, because the writer uses suggestion — we don’t know what sex the teenager is, but we know he/she is falling for Parker his/her friend or babysitter or sister’s babysitter. This character becomes embroiled in sexual-identity questions, well not questions rather the sensations of attraction, while surrounded by historical events — Parker winning an Olympic medal for shotput, the Beatles and the Gay Liberation Front’s parade on television.
Some of the dialogue confuses unnecessarily, and the volcano could have been used more as an overarching metaphor for tension in the piece … though the tension at the end works. Italics are used for dialogue throughout, but sometimes it is the voice in the character’s head, and that is not always clear. The title stopped me and needs to be rethought as well, there is no suggestion within the piece, other than the volcano, of instructions being followed in a larger metaphoric sense (at least not that I’ve picked up on). There is the tension of wanting to tell Parker how he feels, but I’m not relating that to the building of the volcano.
As a good short story should, it left me feeling uneasy and full of not quite questions, but a sense of being slightly perplexed and uncomfortable.
Dave Obee
This story starts out as a jumble of puzzle pieces, more than a little confusing. But it’s appropriate — the protagonist is more than a little confused, trying to sort out conflicting feelings, trying to work up the resolve to make a confession of feelings. The final line indicates that the confession is about to be spoken, but there’s no certainty that it will happen. Not an easy read, but a well-told tale of internal turmoil.
This story did not connect for me the way that the other three did. Yes, all of the required elements are there, but in the end I was left with a feeling that I had missed something — even though it was clear that the important pronouncement was finally going to be made. Maybe.
In a successful story, the reader has to like someone, or hate someone. I have no emotions about any of these people. That is bad.
D.W. Wilson
In general, a very tight story with strong, attentive language, though sometimes it relies too heavily on sentence fragments which, in close proximity, reduce the effectiveness of each other. There are some repetitions throughout, too: fixed, for example, and “the way.”
But it’s also got excellent verbs and nouns, and the result is something like the emergence of a narrative voice. We don’t know the narrator’s name or even the narrator’s gender, but the attention to how he/she speaks, and how he/she observes, goes a long way toward making him/her an authentic, multifaceted character. This is a mature, complex piece, and a real feat for such a small word count: It manages to weave historical events naturally into the narrative, and to use those events to build change and uncertainty into its characters. A teenager struggling with sexual identity and attraction. An Olympic gold medallist reduced to babysitting.
It is quick with history and sharp with observation. A few truly great lines. “… rechristened athletes like gods,” for example. I’m also impressed by the way the story expands, however briefly, into the world outside the immediate events: We get a sense of the narrator’s father (both from the colloquial “old man” and from “bad habits”) and mother (these men think they love other men). The implication, I suspect, is that the narrator is a boy struggling with an attraction to Parker, though this is never made explicit. That’s one of the story biggest strengths: its use of implication, its understatement, the artful way that it holds back information, just long enough, or frankly just enough to keep us guessing.
Possibly, it does this too much, to the point that it simply leaves us confused. But that’s a hard balance to strike, harder still in so few words, and harder even still given the short time frame the writer had to create this. Pretty impressive, over all.