Cherry
By J. Matthew Gottwig
Dad was always a body man. He liked Mom for her body and would laugh his smoker’s laugh and spit in the dirt and kick more dirt over his spit, but he wasn’t my dad—just my sister’s dad, and I hated when he came home after drinking and told Mom to get her ass in bed, and after he was done, he’d go back out to his Stingray and wax and stroke it down like it was a sweeter woman. Mom said calling him dad would bring us closer, and she was right. I loved Dad for his car, and after Mom died and Dad ended up in County, I wanted to drive that car into the ground, but my sister wouldn’t have it. She quit school and took a job at the service station and made enough money to keep us eating but not much more than that, and I started taking Dad’s cherry Stingray out drag racing and helped bring in a little more, but when my sister asked where I was getting the money and found the fenders beat up, she hit me hard and wouldn’t stop until I swore I wouldn’t bring it out again, and every day after that, every goddamn day, she checked that car, and I called her a bitch for not trusting me, but she was right, because Jimmy from school… yeah! Jimmy Deffès! He’d say, Bring that car out again and race with us, and he wanted to lay some cash down on Dad’s Stingray, and I kept telling him, Yeah, Jimmy—I’ll bring it! Just tell me the time and the place, but I wouldn’t show. He’d smack me around the next day and say, What you think I’m messing around here? Car like that can make us some easy money, and you sure as shit ain’t doing anything with it, but Jimmy quit asking, quit talking to me at all, when I figured out I could hit back.
Most nights after that, I’d hear my sister out working on Dad’s car with the crickets and coyotes, you know, working the engine, swapping out parts and doing a bad job of it, and she’d swear at that car, call it a bastard, but she got better, and one day, I saw she’d painted it bright white, and after she’d waxed and stroked it down, it glowed like a cloud in a sunburned sky. I kept calling it Dad’s car, and she hit my shoulder and said, Like hell. It’s mine now, and we argued about that. Sometimes I still thought about taking it out drag racing and making some easy money, but I didn’t want to run it into the ground, not anymore, and one night after she was done with work, I heard the garage door go up and the engine rumble, and that engine shook the whole house, but I was playing XBOX and kept playing but could hear her car on the highway and go further than I’d ever heard her go before. It made me think of thunder rolling from far away.
THE END
About the Author:
J. Matthew Gottwig is a programmer and librarian for the University of Maryland system. His work has appeared in such publications as Nature, sub-Q, and the CutBank, which awarded his story "Tether" 2018 Montana Fiction Prize. Although a parent of two young kids, he somehow manages to maintain a semi-regular writing schedule.
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.