Short Story - Poison When Consumed
Part 1 – Welcome to Mitown
We had only been in the house
for thirty minutes when the man walked up the front steps to the house we had
just that morning rented, opened the screen door, and let himself in. As Mother told the story, she was in the
living room sweeping dirt encrusted on the floor, spider webs and filth off the
walls and ceiling when she turned around to find a stranger towering over her,
a giant of a man standing at least seven feet tall, she said. My father was in the back
of the house standing on a foot stool attempting to rid the kitchen sink drain
of grease balls and grime from years of abuse by prior renters. My sister was in the bathroom, and I was in the backyard looking for
earthworms, because we’d heard that after a rain the fishing for carp was good
in the creek behind our house.
My father had lost his job
working in agriculture in Cottontown, Mississippi, during the recession, and he
had read in the local paper, The Confederate Gazette, they were hiring in
Mitown, a city up north. My mother, an intelligent, inquisitive woman who
always wants to know the who, what, how, when, and why of everything that
affects her and her family asked my father, “Who is hiring? What will your job
be? How much money will you make? When are we leaving?’ She did not ask why
because she knew we had to go where the money was. I don’t remember what my
father said about the who, what or how, but I soon knew the when. We left
Cottontown two days after Father heard of the opportunity for work north of the
Mason-Dixon line.
Mitown, population 1,278, was
fifty miles from the nearest town and one hundred and thirty miles from a city
of any significant size. The trains were long gone, but they left their tracks
behind just south of Main Street. The
houses north of Main were where those people who worked in air-conditioned
offices lived. The dwellings south of Main, on the other side of the train
tracks, is where people who worked outside lived.
The man who walked into our
house that first day and startled Mother was the Mayor of Mitown, Aric Magnus.
He was not seven feet tall as Mother had claimed. He stood one-fourth inches
under six feet, seven inches. It’s easy to see how Mother made that mistake
considering she measures six inches under five feet.
Mr. Magnus, as the mayor preferred
to be called, was delivering a “Welcome to Mitown” message to the outsiders
coming to his town, but there was nothing welcoming about his message. Mother
has a photogenic and auditory memory--she remembers everything in minute detail--and
after Magnus took the broom out of Mother’s hand and dropped it on the floor,
he said this: “Just so you know, just so there is no confusion ever, Mitown is
my town. My word is the final word. You
and your kind are guests in my town. As long as you abide by the rules and
norms, you will be fine. Break the rules and suffer the consequences.”
The dropping of the broom
brought my father out of the kitchen just as the mayor was leaving. Mr. Magnus
turned to my mother and said, “Pass the word on to your little man there and whoever
else you brought with you. Remember: Mitown is My Town!”
Part 2 - Closed
My father was a small, gentle,
kind, and soft-spoken man who gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. In all of
my eleven years, I had never once seen him upset or angry. He ran all of his
and his family’s experiences through a filter that sorted out negativity, so
when Mother told him what Mayor Magnus had said, Father chose to believe that Mother
must have misunderstood. It did not make
sense that someone, on our first day to a new town, would stop by just to be
rude. Father was not a man who spent any
time on the why in life events. He
refused to burden himself with the mental and often emotional turmoil that can
come from going down the rabbit hole to uncomfortable places in an attempt to
understand them. He focused only on the
good and left the bad for others to battle.
Two days after arriving in
Mitown, one day after the mayor’s visit, Father found work. It just happened to be the last Friday of the
month, the day my parents, for as long as I could remember, set aside for our
family to eat out at a restaurant.
We walked the two blocks from our house on
Lincoln Street to Main Street where we anticipated finding that quaint
hole-in-the-wall café that my parents were always searching for when traveling
through small towns. We passed one café
before we realized it was a place to eat, so we turned around to check it out,
but in the seconds it took to get to the door, someone who looked like a giant
from inside put the CLOSED sign in the window.
Mother looked at her watch and seemed puzzled that the café would close
at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday night. We continued walking down Main Street, and
surprisingly all the cafes and restaurants had just minutes before put closed
signs in their windows. Father told my mother to make a mental note that if we
want to eat downtown Mitown, we have to come before six next time.
Even though there is only
one-year difference between my sister and me, she at twelve could have passed
for an adult, and I at eleven still at times behaved like a six-year-old. The
only thing that made me happy was to run, hop, skip, jump, climb trees, fish
for carp, play, play, play. So as we
headed back to Lincoln Street without having our once-a-month eating-out treat,
I poked, prodded, pinched and punched my sister in an effort to get her to come
back down to her real age and play with me. Skipping would be so much fun, I
told her, but she wanted no part of it, so I skipped by myself all the way back
to 202 Lincoln Street. I beat my family home by five minutes and was sitting on
the front porch steps when a police car pulled up to the curb with blue lights flashing
and sirens blerp blerping.
Two extremely tall men stepped out of the car
and walked up the sidewalk towards me. I had never known fear until that
moment. They stood within a foot of me, casting a dark shadow that engulfed me.
Then one of the gigantic men said, “Are you here by yourself? Where are your
parents?” Before I could make sense of what was happening, my parents and
sister were standing behind them. They looked like miniature dolls next to the
towering men.
Inexplicably, Mr. Magnus
happened by at this very moment and within minutes, my parents were arrested
for “child endangerment” because technically I was home alone, even though it
was for only five minutes. They spent the night in the county jail, while my
sister and I were locked inside the office of the Chief of Police because there
were no foster homes in town that would take children who looked like us.
Part 3 – Beanstalk Jack Park
My
sister refused to speak to me while confined for fourteen hours together inside
the Chief of Police’s office (without food or water) because it was my fault
our parents were in jail. If only I hadn’t skipped home. If only I’d stayed
with my family. If only I acted my age. If only I wasn’t so stupid. She was right. I took the blame for my
parents’ incarceration. An
eleven-year-old brain doesn’t have the ability to use logic in an attempt to
place blame where blame should go. I rolled up in a ball and due to my tiny
size, I slept the night in the Chief of Police’s roll-about office chair.
The
owner of the company my father worked at came to the jailhouse the next morning
to bail my parents out of jail. My sister and I were sitting on the bench
across from the front door when he walked in. As he bent down to keep from
hitting his head on the top of the door, he looked over at my sister and me and
gave us a big smile. “Don’t worry, girls,” he said, “sometimes giants can be
jerks.”
My
father went back to work that morning as if nothing had happened. Mother said he thought it was a
misunderstanding, and the officers were just doing their jobs; they had no
choice but to follow the rules. The
court date for their “child endangerment” case was set for two months away and,
against Father’s wishes, Mother was determined to fight the charges.
On
Monday, six days after moving to the land of opportunity, Father was pulled
over on his way to work for not signaling a lane change. The policewoman who
stopped him gave him a $150 ticket, but what stood out most in Father’s mind
was the pleasant demeanor of the policewoman, and how tall she was. That same
night, on the way home from work, the same policewoman stopped Father again for
speeding four miles over the speed limit: Another $150 ticket. Mitown was
proving to be an expensive town to live in.
With
summer in full bloom, it meant one thing for me: lots of play and fun in the
sun. On Tuesday, I biked four blocks to Beanstalk Jack Park with every
intention of spending the day in perpetual play. At first, I was puzzled by all
the adults in the playground, but then I realized these were not adults. They
were children, just really big and tall children. Next to my diminutive body,
they were giants.
I
was spotted right away. In mass they all stopped and stared at me. Then the
chanting began, “We don’t want no midgets ‘round here. Go back to where you
came from, Midget!” As some peeled off from the group and headed my way, I
jumped on my miniature bike and pumped like hell out of the land of giants.
I’m
old now. This story happened a long time ago when, after losing his accounting
position at the Cottontown Cotton Mill in Mississippi, my father landed another
job within a week as a CPA for an accounting firm in a small town north of the
Mason-Dixon line. We lived in a big beautiful Victorian home two blocks north
of Main Street, but unfortunately my father died from a misunderstanding and
unfortunate encounter with a giant when I was twelve. We were small people—diminutives--with big
hopes and plans for lives well lived, but we were not like them. We were not
valued. We were not welcome, so we had to leave Mitown, their town.
My mother is still alive and
remembers, in vivid detail, every event in her long life, except for the six
days her family spent in the land of the giants.
Discrimination comes in many
different flavors, but all are poison when consumed.
C. Mayer 6/5/20
