By J.M. Sloderbeck
© Copyright 2012 by J.M. Sloderbeck
Published at Smashwords
Cover image courtesy of user Alan/Falcon at flickr.com
© 2012 J.M. Sloderbeck
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The following story is a work of fiction. All names, people, locations and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to people, alive or dead, events, organizations or locales not otherwise acknowledged is coincidence.
My dad always told me that “good boys always keep their promises.” My older brother Eddie and I heard those words all our lives, especially when it came to our mother. “Good boys always do what their mothers tell them,” he would say. But the words I’ll always remember my father saying had nothing to do with what good boys did or didn’t do.
That was before tonight -- that’s when everything changed. Eddie shook me awake; my vision was too blurry to read the clock, and that meant it had to be late. But all it took to wake me up were seven words: “There’s a light in the upstairs window.”
We peered across the backyard strewn with pale shadows and jagged edges of black, like the dark side of the moon. The shades were pulled back and showed a glowing light -- a throbbing, pale blue-green light that I was all too familiar with.
“What do you think it is?” I asked in a whisper.
“I bet it’s a robber,” he said. “Pro’lly someone who’s hiding out and doesn’t want to be found. We could scope them out, then come back and call the cops. We’d be heroes!”
“I dunno, Ed. Why’d they pull the shades back if they wanted to hide?”
“Oh, you’re just a scaredy-cat. Are you coming or not?”
“Coming?” I’m sure my eyes nearly popped out of my head. “You can’t go sneaking out there when it’s dark out!”
Eddie could, so we did. Out into the dark he went and me with him, the two of us in flannel pajamas and hi-top tennis shoes. Carrying the flashlight was my job, while Ed had his trusty pocketknife out, blade drawn and ready to turn the tables on any villain that got in our way.
The garage in our back yard had been an actual house a long time ago. My father had converted the first floor into a workshop, and it was always full to bursting with overflowing tool benches, bicycles with flat tires, discarded paint cans, rusty tools and anything else you can imagine. There were countless boxes of old children’s clothes, too, stuff Ed and I never remembered wearing; my father just told us to be thankful for what we had. Dad even kept his gun out there too, a long, matte-black shotgun that hung high over the window, and we were told to never go near it. Eddie got his backside tanned real good one time when he tried to take it down to get a better look.
Dad was always out there working, sometimes disappearing for hours at a time, but he never told us what he was working on. Dad didn’t even have a job; he said he hurt his back, so he stayed home and took care of Ed and me. Of course, hurting his back didn’t stop him from leaving late at night after my mother came home from work. On some nights I’d spy him out of my bedroom window carrying heavy bags into the garage when he thought the rest of the family was asleep, but I saw him. Those were the first times I saw the light on in the upstairs window, but I never talked about it or asked Dad what he was doing; he went to so much trouble to hide that it didn’t seem right to bring it up.