American Flags
a short story
American Flags
by Bud Smith
My family ate American flags for two years. Twenty four full moons, and then Mom walked back into town and got a job again. She’d bring us cans of soup. Red cabbage. Butter pickles. Dad held out longer, he kept eating American flags, saying, “Yum.” And he’d still feed them to me and my brother whenever Mom wasn’t around. We had a crate packed with American flags. We were near the edge of the ravine, beside a cold river. Nothing could be done or undone. We sat around the woods stinking, chewing the stars and stripes like moo cows.
And we were homeschooled so Dad would point at the letter ‘A’ and say, ‘The letter A is a lie.”
I’d nod. Because I was older and understood these things, I’d say, “Of course.”
My brother Sonny’d say, “Well what’s the truth about the letter ‘A’?”
Dad would say, “Sonny, that’s a personal decision. That’s up to you.”
And then Dad would say the letter B is a lie, and the letter C is too, and so on.
I don’t personally know very many individuals. But that’s just because they weren’t raised explicitly to be so. My brother, Sonny is himself, and no one else. Beat that.
I like to think I’m myself, too.
Dad had this great story he used to tell before he was killed, he told us his own father had had a beautiful gold dust-colored car. But this one particular fat bird kept shitting on the car. So grandpa climbed the tree and caught the bird with his bare hands. And do you know what he did to the bird? Well, I’m not going to tell you. What you think my grandfather did with the bird will tell you more about yourself than it ever could tell you about anyone, anything, anywhere, for all time.
We had a family game where we made movies with a broken camera, though we had no film, and Mom said, Good, we were learning the importance of impermanence; of the absurdity of life, or death, or well, fill in the blank.
Sometimes wild dogs would creep into camp, but they were shaky leaf little things. I went pow pow with my toy gun and the dog just blinked, and I told the dog, “This is a life gun, it doesn’t kill, I just gave you thirty extra years!”
The next day thirty inches of snow fell all at once and we had to burn six hundred flags to survive. We were lucky, we weren’t cursed to live like other people.
My mother saved us in the spring. She made our lives fuller. She pretended to go to work one afternoon but instead, she crept to the edge of the ravine and gathered the hundreds of flags we ate to survive, the ones that were left anyway—she carried them to the ridiculous river. Whoosh. Away the flags went.
She threw them in without us knowing, and the morning seemed normal at first. But the beavers knew right away. All the Old Glorys got stuck in their dam and made the river rise rise rise, pretty soon the river flooded over and the dam was destroyed and the water surged up the banks and broke apart our camp.
That’s how we were woken up.
Our family fled to the government assistance office and got vouchers for food and housing and my brother got a scoliosis test and failed, and I got a rabies shot and laughed. Dad joined a demolition crew, arguing that if you are not comfortable with the way society structures its boons, you’re more suited to smash things with a sledgehammer. Common sense.
I was raised with this philosophy and I still partially believe it: When the institutions climb inside the meager house that is your humble body, and claim your body as their property, all you have to do is show no pain, and puke them back up, send them flying.
I don’t know what you were like when you were a kid, but I was raised eating American flags, and it made me tough, and my dreams were fireworks, and my compromises were never with anybody else in mind, just the elements. I believe if you were to rip my guts from my body and spread them out on the street in the center of my hometown, some diviner would spy something down there in the mess of me akin to The Declaration of Independence.
—This story, “American Flags” was published in a story collection called, Double Bird.
—My memoir, Work, is coming back into print from Perfect Day and can be pre-ordered (or if you’re reading this in the future [what IS the future?]) here.
"Berlin tanguero, first post today. Your dad saying 'A is a lie' — that's how I learned tango."