1. Tuesday
Seeing what he thinks is a basketball rolling across the road at night, and then a boy in a pair of nylon gym shorts following it, Storn swerves. The Taurus veers off the asphalt and plunges into a bog. The headlights submerge into murky ink. The engine floods and the intake and transmission die. Splosh. Storn had left the window open to allow the July breeze to touch his bare elbow, but now shock-cold water and little blood-red balls dribble and then pour in. His office shirt clings to his chest. He reaches for the knob on the already-dead radio. The air intake takes in water and the battery short circuits.
It lasts one depressing moment for Storn’s mind to sweep through his life’s accomplishments. The birth of his sons, the Reliable Hero plaque in high school jazz band, a Mover and Shaker nod at Stockley. The dashboard burbles from a plastic seam. He unclips his seatbelt, shaking off one thousand childhood summers gripping the burning metal after leaving church with his dad. He retracts the seatbelt across his waist and it snags. He grips the window, slipping at first, but finally gets it, and pushes himself out; he kicks against the door near the scratched-up lock panel and finally the door opens and he propels himself free.
Storn watches his baby—his model SHO—tip and sink, trunk first. Cold, slick orbs like slugs wind in his Oxford. Something stringy coils around his wedding ring and he gasps, shakes it away. Then a slurping sound of the bog swallowing his car silences the crickets. Storn crawls onto the gravelly, then grassy coast on his belly and lays his forehead against the dirt. He laughs against the ground and dirt bursts into his mouth and nose. He pushes himself up, feeling a drunk, racing need to urinate and he lumbers to a tree and unleashes. His phone is waterlogged probably. Telese will be furious, especially now. But tonight was supposed to be “Old English lessons”—maybe he’s safe. Who was that boy in the road? Storn slaps his hands to his squelchy hips, then reaches into his pocket to pinch out one of the cold red globes. He squishes it and he licks the oozing liquid. It’s salty and floral. —Cranberries?! he shouts.
Passing headlights outline his wet, baggy body, then cast onto the white street signs as, walking on the road’s shoulder, he slogs toward a train station. A massive arch of concrete hangs over dark train tracks. A lone taxi parked outside. Storn lowers himself into a clean, vanilla-smelling backseat. But the driver gets out, disappears around the station, and returns with a short stack of newspapers. The driver, a bald man with a thin mustache, motions for Storn to lift his feet and then shakes out the paper, laying it on the taxi floor; he motions for Storn to do the same with his butt and the driver puts down another few copies on the seat.
With wet keys, Storn lets himself into his house and tiptoes inside. He peels off his soaked clothes down to his black briefs. Lays the clothes on the couch arm. Telese knows he must go to what he tells his sons are Old English lessons on Tuesday, so maybe she wouldn’t have been waiting up. Storn falls asleep on the couch.
2. Next Morning
His eyes blink open to Telese holding the steaming, earthy mug of coffee in front of his face.
—What happened to you? asks Telese.
She sets the coffee onto a Nature magazine with a Komodo dragon on the cover. With the other hand she closes the neck of her violet bathrobe, catching her husband’s creeping eyes. She frowns.
—Mmm, says Storn, rubbing sleep with his knuckles.
—Didn’t hear you come in.
Storn reaches for the coffee. He’ll tell her now. She probably thinks he’s hungover anyway.
Then a scream expels from their sons’ room.
Tired Telese holds up one finger and Storn watches her reflection in the turned off TV as she shrinks up the steps. He follows her up to Dennis and Robin’s room, watching her ass pitta-pat with each step.
His sons’ room seems smaller because Robin’s beige mattress has been shoved against the closet; the ribs of the bare metal bedframe are exposed.
Dennis, aged eleven, stands near the door in his cactus-print boxers. —Goddamn Robin wet the bed again!
—Language! Storn says. Another for the counter swear jar.
—Where’s your brother? says Telese.
—Under the bed. Yeah I flipped the mattress, what?
Telese, in a glass-sharp voice, tells Dennis to go downstairs to the kitchen. Then her voice softens. —Baby, why don’t you come out? Tell us what happened?
—He wet the bed, Tee, says Storn.
Into Storn she burns such a glare!
Robin’s voice quivers from the mattress. —I had the beach dream again. We were on the beach and the green bird flies over and I go everywhere. That’s what happened. Yes sir.
—What dream baby boy? asks Telese.
—There’s a big shadow over our heads and we looked up and it was a plane ….
Storn’s never heard this dream. He still has to tell Telese about the car. A shock surges in his forehead; the veins of some new anger branch behind his eyes.
Storn is on the phone with the insurance company. Telese is most upset that —You had to go and wreck the car before we go to your Dad’s for July fourth? They will have to buy, or at least lease, a new car in three days.
They take a Lyft to a dealership in Norristown. The dealership layout communicates a constant state of winter, and seeing so many vehicles parked inside rather than outside of a large showroom makes him feel faint and unsteady. Robin brings along his stuffed-animal dragon, Pooka, and cradles its head in his arms as they walk, its green body turning against the boy’s rib. Storn and Telese had to drive his SHO all the way to the next county to get it last Christmas. When they found the store only one dragon—a girl—was left pushed to the right of the empty blue rack. Storn convinced Telese to tell Robin it was a boy. But Telese told Robin that —Pooka’s a girl dragon, not a boy. And there’s nothing wrong with that! At this news, his elfin son was unphased, happy, even. The family passes a greeter, who scoots them toward a man in black slacks and a crisp white shirt. His nametag reads: Lee. Storn offers his hand. As the man squeezes, the knuckle skin at Storn’s pinky and ring finger wilts. Storn’s hand has become an empty glove.
—Ackh! Storn yelps, jerking his shoulder from the pain. When Storn writes with his hand pressed to a page tomorrow for more insurance claims it will hurt. Lee releases his hand and apologizes. —I just banged up my hand yesterday on the car door, says Storn.
Lee leads Telese and Storn toward a jade Toyota hatchback with Robin and Dennis behind them.
The seats inside the jade hatchback squeal; the boys are inside.
Telese steps toward Lee. —Those little windows in the back, she begins. —Can’t someone just punch their way in? Reach in? Pull the lock up?
She wraps her knuckles against the tinted glass, plink plunk. —In my old hood there used to be lots of smash and grabs.
—That’s a great question, says Lee. —These windows are double-paned locked.
Then Telese marches to the trunk of the jade hatchback. —Is there any sort of covering for the trunk to the hatch? The back of the hatch? What’s it called?
—The hatch, Lee says.
—I don’t want everyone seeing all our business back there. Is there a way to … cover it? Telese says.
—There’s a cover you can purchase, yeah. I may be able to throw it in for you gratis.
Storn knows he needs to spear himself into this. But they buy the jade hatchback with Storn’s minimal input, his mere collection of nods.
On the ride home, Storn remembers Dad in their cramped wood-paneled kitchen, leaning over the sink, ashing a Parliament and recounting a new applicant’s interview at Stockley. Upon shaking the interviewee’s hand, Dad remarked that the man possessed a wet noodle shake. The phantom of the handshake stayed with Storn’s father long after he’d passed over that softie. Storn had already told Dennis this story walking back from a Phillies game. Storn must share this story with Robin tomorrow on the car ride to Grandpa’s.
Telese is talking. Roars from the traffic amplifies and Telese chastises, says, —Too loud.
Storn puts the window up.
Telese says, —Had I known you weren’t going to say anything I would’ve had more things to say.
—I did have more things to say, says Storn.
—Then why didn’t you say anything?
—Well he wasn’t saying anything, says Storn, meaning Lee.
—That irks me, says Telese.
—What?
— Little things that irk me with you you’d think a normal person would pick up on.
—I am a normal person! says normal Storn.
3. Breakfast
Dennis wears a light pastel Oxford and khakis and Robin is dressed in a sports polo with a smudge on the collar. The family sink forks into four plates of scrambled eggs.
—You have to wear something clean to Grandpa’s, says Telese
—But I don’t want to go, says Robin.
—He won’t be around forever, says Telese.
Robin turns to him and says, —Dad, it’s so boring. Can’t we go to Six Flags instead?
After they’d come home from the dealership, the sun was still up for another hour. Storn had walked outside to find Telese with Robin who was letting sand leak through his fingers when the shadow of a plane passed overhead. Robin said he had summoned the plane and it would whisk them away to Six Flags. Robin’s Grandpa, Storn’s Father—the former varsity basketball star, the man who sustained in close combat a Vietnamese pen dagger to the face. The hero who survived the gooks holding him under water for the ten goddamnedest longest minutes of my life.
—Dad, his face always looks eaten, Robin says, kneading the stain on the collar of his polo.
They’re driving the jade Corolla hatchback on the highway. They got the cover for free thanks to Telese. Robin is balling up a strip of blue cellophane he claims he’d been given from the library at summer camp during a storytime or other such program. The paper snaps and crinkles. Then the little faggot cracks the window and lets the wind crash and gnaw the cellophane.
—Stop! says Dennis.
—Honey, stop that, says Telese. She suggests a Castle Critters coloring book. Storn turns to look and sees he is riding on a raised track looking over a Six Flags theme park and parking lot. They’re inside a log flume. His knuckles bump on the wet safety bar clamped over his chest. It’s gray, still wet from last riders. His ass hurts on the plastic seat. He grips the bar and his knuckles whiten and his wrist still aches. —Where? says Storn and Telese points toward the parking lot where their new hatchback idles next to two trucks. The family grips the bar and the ride creaks forward and the flume plunges down a lush green hill and then glides around stone caves and then the biscuit-brown ruins outside King Arthur’s Tintagel Castle. Water cuts across Storn’s face, strikes his Oxford and makes it turn to skin. A scream in Storn’s stomach expands. The flume rises then bucks off-track. The breeze blows back his hair, tightens and dries his shirt. A draft surges between his scalp and hair. —Fuck! he shouts, money in the swear jar. Old English lessons? Family code for anger classes at 1501 Locust Street he was supposed to attend. The log flume’s wide shadow sails over the parked purple sedans, red jeeps and gold vans and two tour buses in the lot and the landing nearly snaps his neck; now the eggs and orange juice surge up to escape his throat. Gravel and construction soot smokes around them. The flume shoots forward and barrels around cars. Three other families behind them. The flume lunges through traffic and speeding cars. Fist-sized rocks hurl into other lanes on Knights Road. One hits a school bus front window, cracking it. More black smoke from the traffic jam propels behind them. Storn’s lower jaw shakes—has he been trying to confess? He looks right, to the tinted tour bus window, and sees their blurred images strapped in. Dennis and Robin’s reflections have their arms raised over their heads. Behind them, his sons are shrieking in glee. Cars honk and then cleave out of the flume’s path. A grungy white station wagon with yellow plates hits a barrier, sparks.
Storn manages, —The hell are we going?
And Robin shouts back, —Mom says Grandpa’s is west. Robin’s volume lowers. —We’re headed west. Shade drapes over them as the shadow of a news helicopter buzzes overhead.
—My dream!
Telese slowly raises her arms to enjoy the ride and, if his wife is fine with it—he lifts his arms—he should be too.
Perry Genovesi lives in West Philadelphia, works as a public librarian, and serves his fellow workers in AFSCME District Council 47. His first book, Skintet and Other Tales of the Brassican American Experience in Philadelphia, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag. His work has won the O:JA&L Weitz Prize, and has been nominated for Best of the Net (2025), and Best Microfiction (2024). You can read him in Santa Monica Review, Bridge Eight, BOOTH, and collected on tiny.cc/PerryGenovesi. Your goal today should be having as much appreciation of what you’re writing and what you’re going to write as reading your friends’ writing. IG and Bluesky: @beerdistributor.
Image: Bystanders, commons.wikmedia.org
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