The Home Front

This post is hemi-semi-demi-fiction - that is to say more non than fiction.  The dream, the babysittter, the skates, and the scream were mine; the grandfather was not.  It was my first new submission to a fiction class.

            Susie had the dream again last night.  Her babysitter had warned her not to touch big rocks on the way to kindergarten - they might be mines. The Germans had surrendered but we were still at war with Japan.  The Sunday funny papers pictured the Japanese with bright yellow skins and buck teeth.  Susie wondered if the Japanese were really yellow.  The Japanese were the people who left mines on the way to school. 

The dream was black and white.  In the dream, Susie found the bomb on her way home from school, a smooth, shiny black ball with a white fuse coming out of it.  She couldn’t leave it there, someone might accidentally explode it.  She lifted it; it was so heavy.  She staggered home breathless because of the bomb’s weight. 

 She tried hiding it in place after place at home.  In each place her Grandpa, her mother, her brother Sam, or sister Penny, might accidently detonate the bomb.  The safest place would be a place where everyone would see it but no one would touch it.  The little red desk in the hallway with a fancy old chair next it - nobody ever sat there, everyone would see that bomb.  She carefully lifted the bomb onto the little red desk, wound a sweater around its base to keep it from rolling off, and went to her room.

When she came out, she saw her mother sitting in the chair by the little red desk, smoking.  Her mother bent her elbow and held the cigarette up – its glowing tip right by the bomb’s fuse – lighting the bomb’s fuse.  Susie shouted “No!“ and saw the bright orange, yellow, and red explosion.

Susie woke up.  She realized that in the dream, the bomb had exploded and killed them all.

Susie sat in her shorts on the bench by the laundry shed.  Juice dripped down her forearm from the orange her mother had given her.  A couple of flies buzzed around the orange.  She picked at the scab on her knee.  It bled.  She wiped her hands on the grass, then washed the sticky juice off her arm with the hose.  She ran inside and got socks, shoes, and roller skates. Back on the bench she turned the key that loosened the skates.  She put on her shoes and adjusted the skates.  The rough wood of the bench scratched her thighs. 

 She skated down the driveway to the sidewalk.  Old eucalyptus roots had buckled the sidewalk in front of her house, making an abrupt hill broken on one side.  She liked this hill though it had given her most of her scabs.  She got up speed and sailed over the sidewalk break and kept her balance.  She skated back to the hill and skate-walked over the weedy lawn to the other side of it.  She sailed over her hill again.  Gregory and Mike, big boys, came down the sidewalk in front of the Golden’s house.  Gregory said, “Get off my sidewalk, brat!” 

 Susie said, “It’s my sidewalk.  Go away, Gregory.”

Gregory and Mike started to run at Susie.  Susie skated up her driveway and yelled, “You dumb-dopes get off my property or Sam and Penny will beat you up!” 

 Gregory and Mike ran away.

Screeching sirens hurt Susie’s ears.  She ran into the house.  “Mother, is that an air raid warning?” 

 "I don’t know, Susie, I hope it’s the end of the war.” 

That night, as they did every night after dinner, Susie’s family gathered around the wooden radio in the living room; the radio was almost as tall as Susie, with wooden pillars on either side of the cloth where the sound came out.  They listened to H. V. Kaltenborn announce in a fast, high pitched voice, “The war is over.  The war is over. The war is over.”

The whole family cheered.  The men would come home from war soon. 

 A few months later, her mother said, “There’s no school tomorrow – there’s a parade to honor and thank the soldiers who spent years in a very nasty war.”

The next morning, Susie put on her favorite school dress, white socks and Mary Janes – hand-me-downs from Penny.  Sam wore a tie.  Penny dressed up too.  Grandpa drove them downtown to the parade - you could get coupons for gas to drive places these days. 

Grandpa held Susie up on his shoulders so that she could see the parade.  Tanks came first, then a long line of hundreds of men in rows, all wearing the same clothes, all walking the same way to a relentless drum beat.  Each man carried a rifle over his shoulder.  Susie screamed.  Her grandfather took her off his shoulders and walked a little away with her, holding her hand.  He asked her why she had screamed.  Susie, unable to say anything at all, just shook her head.