“Family Tree” by Jonah Soos, XI: flash fiction

Family Tree

The burning bag of feces rots the stoop it lays upon. Its gagging odor rivals that of the old primed wood inside, stained with Clorox, cream cheese, and Turkey Hill’s Rocky Road ice cream. The brown smudged floor used to mean something, years before the cream cheese and ice cream when it sat vacant, the sod wreaking with unsalted mashed potatoes. The house was simply a concept, a few lead stains on a navy blue graph paper with a white label hot pressed on the top left corner, an instruction book to a lego set soon to be built. It was built in a few months, once occupied by six, now only two.

The two eldest children left years ago. The oldest is a drunken nurse known solely for sleeping with half the class of ‘98 at the town high school before escaping the barred windows to college. She was a disgrace to the house, a zipper magnet in college who got drunk more than attended classes, married an older man whose house is white as cream cheese and bathes in silver water. She bought herself a Ph.D. with a bag of Benjamins. Now she plays with dolls. Her name makes the wooden stoop rot like a December pumpkin and makes the broken white house look grey in summer.

Phil’s an interesting fellow, the one marker with a missing cap, all dried up likes and paper. He was dynamic, an actor, writer, singing, and Turkey Hill ice cream enthusiast that flourished at a step-down ivy. He found his full potential, made millions in the stock market, and blew it in five years, and lives paycheck to paycheck working a fifty-two grand cubicle job, the mild crack addiction the only thing giving him a dazzle of interest. He pays for the roses caked with a dust of death that sit on the rotting pumpkin stoop below the broken white house that looks grey in the summer.

The youngest child is Danny, who molds the cream cheese on the brown smudged floor and spews a rotten yellow acid that turns brain cells to Rocky Road ice cream on impact. He’s run drugs since he was fifteen, been to Juvy twice, and makes sure to move the fire extinguisher away from the door anytime he leaves the house and cracks the concrete with his twisted tongue of lies. He’s a no-good algae that grows on anyone he gets close to until he eats them alive when they sleep. His parents kicked him out two years ago – he leaves a burning bag on the rotting stoop above the cracked concrete below the broken white house that looks grey in the summer every Sunday during church.

The remaining two are my disheveled sit-down comedian father and myself, a college drop out that took care of my mother as her dying wish. I’m the only sane human to tell the tale of our burning bag of crap of a family, our meaningless rotten stoop and white house that looks grey in summer.

— Jonah Soos, XI: flash fiction