If Wishes were Dragons

Another prompt courtesy of Be Kind Rewrite‘s fantastic Inspiration Mondays. Head on over there, read some other great pieces, or even try your hand at writing something.

 

 

If wishes were dragons this whole town would be ash and cinders and screams. But they aren’t. And I actually feel a little bad for hoping everyone in it is suddenly consumed by flames, flailing down the street as black snowflakes fall like some kind of bizarre-world winter scene.

Not that they don’t deserve it. They do. Most of them anyway. I suppose the old ladies tending their gardens in the morning and getting drunk on vodka and lemonade in the afternoon don’t. Or maybe they do, I don’t know, their freezers could be full of dead people for all I know. But they haven’t done anything directly to me, except have kids who had kids who torture me every day.

In two years I get to leave. I had to beg my parents to let me leave the province for university, made up some bullshit reason about it being the best program in the country, but really I’m going because it’s so far away I won’t ever have to come back. Sometimes I think my mom knows my plans, but she just raises an eyebrow and hides her upper lip under the bottom one and doesn’t say anything. Until hours later when she asks how I think dad would feel about that, if he were still here.

He was Captain Fucking Popular in high school. They have a goddamn shrine to him in the gym, with a big portrait of him and all his trophies and medals and shit. People crawl across the parquet floors on their knees, like some kind of holy pilgrimage to leave notes and flowers and cry and shit.

That sounds made up, but it isn’t.

He was some big shot football player, even made it to the pros, almost won the Superbowl. Blew out both knees and came back here a hero. But then seven years ago, he was driving to come get me from school, and some drunk asshole in a truck ploughed into the side of his car and killed him. Pretty much split the car in half.

Never would have happened if I hadn’t called him to come get me, because I missed the bus again. Because Andre Leblanc, some eight year old with an overactive pituitary gland, said he was going to pound the shit out of me at the bus stop. Just because the teacher said maybe he could sit next to me and maybe he might learn something.

Thanks Mrs. Morris.

So dad gets creamed and people find out he was coming to pick me up, the little sissy who hides behind his mommy’s skirt, and suddenly I’m responsible for the death of the most respected man to ever claw him way up and out of this shithole.

Almost ten years of hearing people whisper, “hero-killer, if it wasn’t for you, oh what a man he was, cut down in his prime, why couldn’t his son be more like him?” But they whisper loud enough to make sure you know they are talking about you, as if it wasn’t obvious enough. Of women looking at you cross-eyed, or with big sad eyes, which are even worse. Old men spit when they see you coming down the sidewalk. Having that big stupid picture of him in the gym, just staring down at you. And getting the shit kicked out of you almost every day.

I’m pretty sure you’d fantasize about the whole thing going up in flames too.