Daren Dean

Editor’s Note: Due to scheduling conflicts, this piece had to be moved to Issue 37.2 (out in September), but until then we are proud to offer it here as our very first Online Feature.

The blue-eyed boy leaned on the top rail of his crib as the dappled sunlight peaked its way above and below the American flag his mother used for a curtain over the picture window. The boy was too tall and too old for the crib, but he was content to stand in the sunlight transfixed by the swirling dust motes. He remembered as his mother crushed the carefully folded triangle of fabric against her skirt and wiped her tears there, but he did not understand. He slapped his left hand over and over with his right in a rhythm only he could hear.  

    President Nixon was on the evening news with the sound turned low.  

    In his cage the parrot reiterated: “Walter Cronkite. Walter Cronkite. Walter Cronkite.”  It sounded vaguely like an accusation. 

    The boy gritted his teeth together and hummed or moaned in harmony with the sound of the electrons coming from the cathode ray tube in the TV set. His mother did not notice the humming, but it sounded like a tsunami wave in his consciousness where there were few words though he discerned many sounds and visions. He puffed his cheeks like Louis Armstrong and gave the world raspberries. Saliva puffed through his thick lips into the air each time he spat into the void as he continued to slap the back of his left hand: bad hand, bad hand, hand, bad.  

     It has a good beat and you can dance to it.

    A parade of coffins came off the plane draped in the stars and stripes on the small screen in black and white images. Nixon’s face magnified upon the screen. The Government. The boy huffed and puffed. Kennedy, King, and another Kennedy. He knew the names though he could not speak them. The ears of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Men in green with machine guns jumped out of helicopters to the jungle below. The sounds of war. The boy slapped the callous on the back of his hand in time with CCR spinning on the record player. Star Spangled Eyes. Thomas Jefferson on the obverse. The President’s enigmatic head Scotch-taped on the arm, just above the needle.      

 “And that’s the way it was . . .”

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Daren Dean is the author of the novel Far Beyond the Pale. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Maryland Literary Review, Red Dirt Forum, BULL (Men’s Fiction), Midwestern Gothic, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Oklahoma Review, Fiction Southeast, StorySouth, and elsewhere. His story “Bring Your Sorrow Over Here” was selected as Runner-up by Judge George Singleton in Yemassee‘s William Richey Short Fiction contest. His favorite unofficial title comes from Robert Olen Butler who wrote, “Dean writes like the laureate of fallen angels.” He holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. In the past, he’s worked in academic publishing at the University of Missouri Press, and taught in the English department at LSU for several years. Currently,  he’s an Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing Specialist-Fiction) at Lincoln University of Missouri.