Franklin

Here is a short story I wrote when I used to live on 173rd Street. Rae and I had a pink room on the third story of an old building and sunlight used to fill that room. I have no idea what the room looks like now but I can bet that it fills with sunlight in the afternoon. Somebody has probably made that room their bedroom but when we lived in that apartment we had that as our art room. We slept in the small blue room which was more like a cave. The people who lived there before us used to put their baby in that room. But we had no baby. I was writing a longer post today about “story writing” — one of those ‘craft things’ that usually make me sick, haha, about creating, and developmental editing, and about copy editing. I’ll post that before too long and make myself and maybe you, sick. Probably next week. But while putting together that post I tried to link two stories I had written and published when we lived and did our work in that pink room, and as often happens, the stories were revealed to me as ‘gone from the internet’ and the links dead, so I thought I would post one of the stories here today, one called “Franklin.” Thanks for reading.

Franklin

by Bud Smith



My brother almost drowned in an industrial washing machine. The kind that lock from the front when you put your quarters in.

He had his own quarters, and gave them to a little girl in a powder blue jumpsuit. He was little himself. Nine, I think. Eight?

In the machine, he waved through the glass bubble, as the little girl slammed the door.

The reason he didn’t drown was because she ran away with his money and bought herself some candy at the store up the block.

Another time my brother came home soaked in diesel fuel. He’d held his nose and jumped off the hood of a dump truck, landed in an open 55 gallon drum of it behind the municipal garage. Lit match in hand.

This was that phase when he insisted I call him Human Torch, not Franklin, not Frankie, not Frank.

He didn’t want to get in trouble. And I didn’t want him to get in trouble either. So when he came to my window, reeking, I went out in the yard and helped him burn his clothes behind the trailer park, right there at the edge of the aqueduct where the coyotes howl.

When my brother shot himself, he was aiming for his heart. This was just last Christmas. Christmas Day and it was even snowing. Go figure.

He missed, thankfully, because thankfully he’s stupid and doesn’t know what side of his body his heart is on.

But I know.

And I’m still glad our parents were absent as much as they were, or else we would have been closely monitored. Taught things like right hand over left side of your body and face the flag.

In the room at the far end of the hallway, I can hear him wheeze my name through his busted lung.

And he is wild. And he has never had a chance.

And he does not know the Pledge of Allegiance.