Fresh off the Starship

Matt pulls the pickup into a driveway of a rundown, ramshackle home. An equally ramshackle barn sits about a hundred yards from the house.

“Your parents live here?”

“Yep. Try to contain yer excitement. Gets worse. Way worse.”

Way worse starts as soon as they climb out of the truck, and the smell of animal excrement reaches her nose.

“That’s from the pigs. We’d always complain, ‘Dad, it stinks around here!’ And he’d always say, ‘Smells like money to me.’” When Missy’s expression shows him she doesn’t understand, he adds, “Pigs are big money.”

And as bad as that is, the inside is even worse—definitely “way worse.” Just about every square inch of the house has something filling it, and even if no object fills the space, dust does. And while the outside smells like the pigs, the inside smells like…well, she’s not sure what it smells like. Nasty, whatever it is.

Sitting in the middle of the mess makes Missy want to run screaming from the house. She’s afraid to ask to use the bathroom, but the need finally grows too urgent.

After Rita directs her, Missy slinks down the hall, trying not to touch anything. She passes two bedrooms, also filled to overflowing. Both beds are unmade and look recently used.

Missy’d lost her appetite as soon as they’d walked into the house. But she makes herself eat the hamburgers along with French fries and corn on the cob (both from bags from the freezer; the bags still sit on the counter forming little pools around them).

☼

“Does someone live with your parents?” she asks Matt on the way home.

“Nope.”

“There are two bedrooms and they both look like they’re being used.”

She looks at him until he finally sighs.

“They haven’t slept in the same room in many years. One night Mom woke up because Dad was stranglin’ her.”

“What?”

“He wasn’t awake. He was havin’ a flashback from the war.”

“A flashback? From what war?”

“Viet Nam. He woke up one night to someone trying to strangle him, so he killed him.”

Tears sting Missy’s eyes once again.

“You people have so much to handle,” she mutters.

“How’s that?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry that happened to him and then to her.”

“Yep.”

They drive the rest of the way home in silence… although she notices that he looks over at her several times with a quizzical look on his face.