HENRY SAT AT HIS GOSSIPY neighbor Mrs. Whitney’s dining room table having a tuna fish sandwich after cutting her grass and with his finger traced the craggy scar that started near his hairline and zigzagged along the side of his skull, a road map pattern that ended at the corner of his eye, Frankenstein, the kids in high school said when he came back from the hospital, which he didn’t mind because he liked monster movies, and sometimes, over the years, when looking in the mirror as he brushed or shaved, he wasn’t even conscious of the scar’s origin, like accepting a birthmark and never thinking about it, until Mrs. Whitney told him that Jimmy Gray got divorced and moved back home with his parents, down the street, I don’t trust him, she said, he kills things for a living now, got a pest control van, see, he’s still a bully, and oh, my God, what he did to you, but Henry focused on her glass animals displayed in a cabinet, frogs and turtles, and the dialogue from an old movie on TV in the den, a melodramatic death scene between a man and woman like the ones he watched with his mother, thinking that they were gone forever because dying in black and white felt more real, you poor thing, Mrs. Whitney said, hearing about the bully reviving her surrogate mother instinct, the name conjuring up the bogeyman, taking Henry back to the drive-in where Jimmy dropped a brick on him from the steel ladder that ran up the back of the movie screen when Henry circled around after jumping over the small bumpy hills between the speaker poles, leaving him lying on a bed of gravel, the sun a million bees stinging his eyes, Jimmy later claiming to police and parents he was aiming for a mouse eating remnants of a hot dog, then being sent somewhere, a special school or institution for analysis, never to be seen again, the final bit of violence against Henry after years of leaving his blood fossilized in the cracked granite crevices of school bathrooms, an injury that made him foggy and kept him stocking shelves at a hardware store where he’d arrange paint cans in the color of the spectrum, RoyGBiv, the acronym a teacher taught them to remember and the question on a test he prevented Jimmy from cheating on, and he asked Mrs. Whitney if she still vacuumed rooms she didn’t use, yes, old habits, she said, and Henry said, me, too, and thought of Psycho when Norman Bates tells the woman he’s going to kill in the shower that his motel doesn’t get any business anymore but he still changes the sheets and turns on the lights and keeps up with formalities, that was the word he used, like him and Mrs. Whitney, the unmarried spinster and the handyman living in his dead parents’ house, and Henry thanked her for lunch and walked into a street that was preternaturally quiet, no squawking birds, no children playing, no rhythmic ticking of sprinklers, utter stillness, a setting for a High Noon showdown, his father’s favorite western because the good guys always won, and he picked up a wooden baseball bat that lay on a front lawn, baseball bat against pest control spray gun, and he advanced towards the van parked down the street, the neighborhood drained of RoyGBiv color, the vibrance of suburban sheen replaced by Hollywood’s muted blacks and grays, the perfect setting for paying tribute to his father’s favorite movie. •





Peter DeMarco is a retired New York City high school English and film teacher. Before teaching, Peter spent a considerable amount of time acting in regional theater and attempting to be funny on the stand-up comedy amateur circuit. He also has good stories from his career in book publishing. His writing has appeared in The New York Times “Modern Love,” Rejection Letters, New World Writing, trampset, Maudlin House, Literary Garage, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Bottle Rocket, BULL, Hawkeye, Does It Have Pockets (Best Microfiction nominee), SmokeLong Quarterly, and Pithead Chapel. 

Website | Twitter | Instagram