The X-Ray Machine at the Buster Brown Shoe Store
By Timothy Reilly
For Jo-Anne
Eight-year-old Larry Nolan decided to secretly stay up all night and watch the sun rise from his east-facing bedroom window. He devised a few activities to keep from nodding-off. In the dim moonlight, he gazed into his fishbowl: watching the otherworldly neon tetras swim in and out a submerged shipwreck. He used a flashlight to read from a book of heavily-illustrated ghost stories. With the same flashlight, he charged a walnut-sized glow-in-the-dark human skull and also a 5x3 glow-in-the-dark likeness of Christ’s face: whose eyes would open or close when tilted. With his Lone Ranger Binoculars, he looked out the window at the pockmarked face of the waning gibbus moon.
Sometime after midnight, Larry snuck out to the backyard to find where the moon had gone. He found the moon clinging to the top branches of an Italian cypress. He then aimed his binoculars at a large oak and caught sight of a Great Horned owl. The owl hooted but Larry wasn’t scared. He felt privileged to be part of the night.
Back in his room he struggled to stay awake, until he heard the clinking of milk bottles. He opened the window and felt a soft breeze rising in direct proportion to an orange glow. He saw the sun rise. It was miraculous. Now he could sleep.
His parents woke him three hours later. They had promised to buy him Buster Brown shoes for his First Communion.
The shoe store smelled of shoe polish and cigarette smoke. Larry was groggy. The poster of Buster Brown gave him the willies. Buster had hair like Prince Valiant and a weird, turn-of-the-century sailor’s outfit. Who was this ancient child?
When the shoe salesman went to get shoe boxes, Larry went to the foot x-ray machine and pondered the bones of his feet. This is my skeleton, he thought. This is what I’ll look like when I’m dead.
![Timothy Reilly [2019].JPG](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5577a12ae4b053a499f459d5/1574795404161-LBAYPTR5B5A9UGYWHJ9C/Timothy+Reilly+%5B2019%5D.JPG)
About the Author:
Timothy Reilly had been a professional tubaist (including a stint with the Teatro Regio of Torino, Italy) until around 1980, when a condition called “Embouchure Dystonia” put an end to his music career. He gratefully retired from substitute teaching in 2014. He has published widely, including works in The Citron Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Iron Horse Literary Review, Zone 3, Fictive Dream, Grey Sparrow, and Superstition Review. He has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Timothy Reilly lives in Southern California with his wife, Jo-Anne Cappeluti: a poet and scholar.
About Weekly Flash Prose and Poetry:
CutBank Online features one work of flash prose or prose poetry every Monday. Submissions are free and open year-round. Send us your best work of 750 words or less at https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit.