On a hot Sunday afternoon in July my father is out in the backyard listening to a baseball game on the radio. The announcer’s voice drones in the thick summer air, punctuated by the occasional crack of a bat amidst the relentless din of the crowd in the bleachers. If the White Sox win, it will make my dad’s day.
In the freshly hewn Chicago suburb where we live, rows of ranch houses line up along tidy asphalt streets that shimmer in the heat. The sun bakes our already dry lawn, insects buzz and rasp, and a hot breeze stirs my mother’s petunias and nasturtiums in half wilted flower beds.
I’m not sure where she is on this sweltering afternoon – inside starting dinner, most likely – and the house is so quiet I know my sister and baby brother are taking a nap. It’s just me outside with my father.
He sits in a lawn chair on the patio, so absorbed in the Sunday Tribune I don’t even think he knows I’m here. I watch the crabapple tree he planted in the yard. A slender sapling with stakes to prop it up, it trembles when the air moves. Then I stare out at the open field behind our house.
It’s a stretch of tall grass and weeds that runs the length of the block but for the kids in the neighborhood it’s our own personal playground. When the weeds are mowed down, the hay-like piles are soft as cushions. Sometimes I throw an old bed sheet over them for a comfy place to play dolls or read a book. Most days I find refuge there but today I’m too restless.
I sit on the lawn with paper and crayons, trying to draw a picture of the petunias. I tear up the page in frustration. Next I try to draw my father but I don’t like how this one turns out either. I throw the crayons on the grass.
My father is only a few feet away but it seems like a hundred miles – he doesn’t even notice me.
I feel so isolated and cut off from everything, light years away from the rest of the world. Something about the tinny sound of that ballgame . . . it’s as if time is suspended in the still suburban air.
My father finishes the sports section and picks up the classifieds as a breeze snaps the plastic flags back and forth on the house for sale next door. Somewhere in the neighborhood a screen door slams and a lawn mower buzzes to life.
There’s a hunger inside me; I ache with a longing I can’t articulate. Will my life always be this uneventful, this ordinary?
I can’t see what lies in the future. On this hot July afternoon, I can’t see any farther than the empty field behind our house.
Published in Midwestern Gothic, Issue 8, Winter 2013 • Flash fiction