Travis Flatt
Almanac
It’s dark. The wind’s roaring. Mom and I argue at the threshold of the basement.
“Levi, you march yourself down here right now,” Mom says.
I resent the way her rhetoric devolves when we argue.
I would tell her so if she wasn’t crying.
But I’m crying, too, so, admittedly, I’ve got little ground to stand on. Not to mention having to shout. This debate’s becoming silly, yelling over the stupid dang tornado sirens and wind.
Mom’s teary face is a pale, moonlike blob from the dark of the basement stairs.
I hid all the flashlights when I saw the storm warning on the Weather Channel, flipping channels up for the Discovery Channel, eating my afterschool oatmeal and relaxing my brain from the barrage of cretins who crowd fourth block gym—all that sneaker squeaking on waxed wood and metallic basketball dinging echoes around in my cranium.
From further down the basement stairs, Becca’s shouting, “Jesus, Levi, what’s wrong with you?” And she follows this up with her usual juvenile name-calling, which Mom ignores, of course.
I shout back, “Shut up, Becca, stay out of it. Airhead.”
I won’t give ground.
Dad promised to call an exterminator for the wasp nest. It’s been growing exponentially in the basement all spring. Nobody listens to me.
When I was ten, I stepped on a yellow jacket nest hiking.
The scientific name is spheksophobia.
Mom takes the last step up into the doorway and leans close to say, “Levi, please.”
“The fact remains,” I say, “More people are killed every year by wasp stings than tornados.”
It’s obvious from my mother’s exasperated scowl she doesn’t believe me.
Hoping I’m right, I run for the almanac on my bedside table. The trees are whipping back and forth outside, the sky is black, and the rain is puddling against the windows in fat splashes.
I’m wrong. The almanac says slightly more people die from tornadoes.
Mom’s out in the hall, “Levi, what the hell are you doing?”
As she rushes into my room, we accidentally collide, and I drop the almanac. She grabs my arm and tugs me for the hall, but I wrench free and retrieve the almanac.
“The almanac says a thousand more people die from wasp stings,” I lie.
“Levi, baby, we have to go down there,” she says.
I despise this patronizing tone, and I’m about to tell her when she slaps me—she slaps me—and the almanac tumbles to the carpet, tearing the front cover. We stand and stare at each other.
“You slapped me,” I say.
She’s grabbing me, hard, by the wrist and pulling me—my mother is stronger than me, I admit—hard enough to lift me off my feet.
I stomp her foot. I stomp my mother’s foot.
“I’d rather be blown away,” I scream, rushing back to barricade myself in my closet “–then get stung by a God-dang polistes dominula.”
My mother’s after me. I can hear her panting as she runs. Thunder rattles the window frames. I dive for cover beneath my bed, brave as I pretend to be, but fall short and scrabble. Mom pounces and lands on my back, us gasping on the carpet. We huddle up together, thunder and wind shivering the house, and I rub her hair like sometimes Dad does. But, not really that way. More like, “I’m sorry.”
I say, “I don’t want to go down there, Mom.”
A window breaks somewhere—the kitchen, I think. Becca pops into my doorway, screaming. Now the wind’s roaring so loud she’s just silent lips and braces. It’d be funny if the ceiling wasn’t groaning at the crown molding.
Mom and I try to stand, but we’re tangled together. Becca’s pulling us along as we limp to the basement. Becca goes down into the dark first, then Mom. I clutch the doorway and wait and take a deep breath and think, “There’s enough time for my almanac.” I got it for Christmas and read it every night until I fall asleep.
And Mom turns back to yell something up at me, but her eyes shoot open. She teeters and throws her arms out sideways. I dive forward and grab her by her shirt, her blouse, and pull her upright, grab onto the railing so hard it cracks away from the wall from our weight.
Mom almost fell down the dang stairs.
Almost.
Thousands of people die that way every year. That one I’m sure about.
You’re Going to Jail or the Hospital
4:45PM: My fiancée wakes me up and shows me my phone lit up with “Knox County Police Department” calling. I sit up in bed. An annoyed sounding woman says that earlier the police officer forgot to take my driver’s license before I got in the ambulance. I need to mail the license to this address in Nashville. I get out of bed for a pen and piece of paper. I’m still a little wobbly from the diazepam injection. She adds that I’ll get a letter to this effect sometime in the next several days. And that’s it. I’m a Sick Person now. I’m a person who walks. A person who rides the bus.
1:15PM: I see gray but hear the cop pounding his palm on my windshield. He shouts through the glass. My vision flirts and plays coy. There’s a big, white car blocking me in. I’m crying, explaining I don’t need an ambulance, my apartment’s a mile away. All they’ll do is pump an IV of the same medication sitting on my nightstand. Ambulance rides are thousand-dollar taxis.
“You hit an ambulance,” he’s saying. “You’re going to jail or to the hospital.”
1:10PM: I’m running. I must have seized on my feet, if only for seconds. I search the parking lot, head pounding, spinning. Ambulances, cop cars, pour in from the street. Did I park alongside the building or in back? My apartment should be on the other side of those woods. At the end of the row’s my red Nissan.
1:05PM: I burst awake, fighting off the stretcher. The EMT’s caught unawares. I yank the IV out and dash from the foyer and into the sunlight. The gray blind place sucks at me. Stay on your feet; find your car; don’t pass out.
12:50PM: I fill out an application in the foyer, skim past “server” and “bartender” and write in “dishwasher.” Something easy. I want the money, not the job. I turn the thing in to wait for my interview. It’s a few blocks from my apartment. I could walk here on a nice day. The manager leads me back for the interview. She’s younger than me. She sits and offers me a cold smile. The floor falls away as my aura pops like an epiphany. All the colors grow brighter. The rectangles of sunlight on the table from the slats of the window look like I could push them around with my fingertips. I’m trapped. I must tell her not to call an ambulance, ask for a moment to concentrate, to breathe, to fight off the gray blind place.
12:00PM: Mom says, “You could get a part time job?” She means I’d cope with my diagnosis better not sitting around my apartment all day. Adult-onset epilepsy. I just woke up–or, woke my fiancée up, more accurately—in the middle of the night seizing in our bed, suddenly, like food-poisoning. We still don’t know why. The doctors say I need to keep my life low stress to minimize the seizure activity. I’m thinking about what my mom said. There’s an Olive Garden about fifteen miles down the highway from my apartment, like a ten-minute drive.
Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in Fractured Lit, Bending Genres, JMWW, HAD, Maudlin House, and other places. He is a Best Small Fictions nominee. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs, often with his wife and son.
