Modern Flash Fiction

“Everything was okay before they took David in for those tests,” said Edna, his mother with a vacant, regretful gaze, all the muscles in her face were slack. Paul, adopted by Edna and her husband George listened quietly. George was respected, the band leader for the Hinton brass band and the Jasper Marching Band. They played marching and swing pieces.

Hinton was in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The windows of the house framed the Rockies to the west and the treed foothills to the north, with the houses of the town in the south window. There were forests, cliffs above gravel slopes that could break the falls of those who stepped or jumped off them.

When marching, the band played pieces by John Philip Sousa. Paul heard titles like, “Fairest of the Fair,” “The Thunderer,” “Manhattan Beach,” “Washington Post March,” and “Liberty Bell March.” But the band was muted in Paul’s memory as he listened to his brothers, Edna and George’s sons Jonas and David being instructed by their father. He yelled instructions over the Tuba, “No, no, no, why can’t you get this?”

He would point at the music and bang his hand on the table keeping time, but neither of them could play. Paul thought the two could not read the music, as their faces were pale without marks of straining as they looked at the music. When the two read each page of their homework, creases appeared between their eyes, eyelids narrowed, but none of these features appeared when they had sheets of music in front of them. They would make each note, trying to copy the sounds their father made on his trumpet, but never quite making the right note.

Paul remembered the howling screeching sound of Julie, his adoptive parents’ daughter, playing her clarinet, but there was a recognizable tune. Kate, Julie’s sister, played trumpet at an introductory level but learned it at school. There were no lessons or instrument for Paul.

Kate looked at him, horrified when he asked, as he often did, “When can I start playing an instrument?”

She shook her head and said, “You do everything. Why should we let you play an instrument too? You’ll just learn it easily and march in the band and we’ll all be on the sides watching again.”

The tests showed that David and Jonas had Autism. Both were called “slow” and had a reputation for being difficult. Both Julie and Kate were never tested, even though Julie, the oldest, was socially odd, screeching at her schoolmates and quick with critiques of others’ clothing choices, their way of speaking, or telling others she knew about them. Kate remained in the background with a few friends.

Edna’s four children looked alike: slim—willows, expressionless. They had heart problems and would sit down to rest wherever they were, beside the sidewalk, on the rocks near the playground, on logs in the woods.

The continuous fights and outbursts David and Jonas found themselves in didn’t matter at first: Jonas was a problem from an early age as he had outbursts everywhere he went from shopping trips with their mother, around the neighbourhood and in school. “He’s crazy,” said the boys Paul played with on the playground, and the boys he met on the streets between home and school. “You never know what’s he’s going to do.”

There was no warning when Jonas would lose it and someone got hit. He appeared vacant, but there were no body language or words that warned of an impending attack. Once he hit someone, he would rub his chest and sit down on the ground.

Sometimes he would look at the boys around him, turn and walk away. No one wanted to stay around too long, and he was often seen walking alone or slipping into the woods by himself. Sometimes he would return, scrapped up, clothes ripped, but didn’t remember what happened.

Paul was energetic, running, playing and laughing with kids in the neighbourhood. Paul climbed trees on the way to the playground, splashed though Happy Creek, lifted logs to see what was under them.

“Can’t you try to be like us more?” asked Kate. Paul looked at the creases appearing between her eyes, the words were not tired, the tone was like a stick hit against a large rock.

Paul shrugged.

“People notice and it’s embarrassing,” she continued. “I was asked where you came from.”

Paul’s eyes widened. “What did you say?”

“We’re not allowed to say that Mom and Dad just brought you home after five days away. I told them that you just turned out like that.”

“What did they say?”

“They just nod their heads, and we talk about something else.”

When the boys from town who were the same age as Jonas had enough, they turned on Paul. Running fast and jumping over the precipices of steep inclines was Paul’s escape. The boys would point, and one would call, “It’s Jonas’s brother.” Many were four years older, and Paul didn’t know what they would do to him if they caught him. Paul learned early to jump over what they thought was a cliff to land in a loose fall of gravel that would break his fall. Paul would always roll to the bottom and rush to his feet and run, never looking back.

Edna finished her work and followed her husband into the living room. Paul waited in the silent darkness at the hallway to the bedrooms.

“I am buying the farmland in the Peace River region,” Paul heard George say to Edna.

“That place along Alder Ridge Road,” she relied.

“Things will be better there. They will work and get stronger, and there will be no one around to see what is happening.”

Peter C. Conrad has been a teacher, editor, instructional designer, has published articles, written lectures for multiple art history and design courses for the Art Institute Online, and published three Canadian histories. He was a finalist in the My Dream Writing Contest 2024, appeared in Wingless Dreamer Publisher’s 2024 anthology Summer Fireflies 2. His work appears in over forty literary journals worldwide. When Peter is not writing he is painting and drawing. He now lives in Calgary.