Incineration

Ben met his dad on his fifth birthday. When Ben was born, his dad had been at sea. Ben learned about his father from letters his mother would read to Ben and his sister, Kim. Domestic peace was not something Ben encountered very often, however, as his sister Kim was very disruptive and his life was hectic as a result. Ben didn't mind though, he just enjoyed sitting under the register while the shop was open and the staff treated him like a sweet but inconvenient cat. 

    The day of his birthday, Ben and his family and all of his friends and neighbors were waiting patiently in the front yard for his father to arrive. It was a gusty day, but the sky was only a little cloudy and there was no rain atall, which was fairly unusual for the season. Kim was kicking at the tattered purple azalea with her sneakers, like she was trying to kick the thing over very slowly from the roots. The adults ignored her, as did most of the other children except for Ben. Ben was picking his nose and idly sniffling as he watched his sister. 

    "So can we still write him letters?" Kim abruptly turned from the bush and stabbed her finger at Ben, as she did. Ben, pleased to note that his big sister hadn't actually poked him this time, shrugged, "Dunno." 

    Ben's favorite song started playing on the radio — a blob of multilobed. injection-molded plastic on the festively overburdened card table, so Ben had to do his dance. He began to wiggle slowly like a fat, elderly dog getting excited, Kim shouted "EXASPERATION!" and bolted for their mother at the other end of the garden. Some of the parents began to notice as all of the children began shrieking 

            all the boys are stomping womping Fiddle stomping fiddle! 

            all the girls are womping stomping Fiddle stomping fiddle! 

            all the thems are romping stomping 

    to the mesmerizing production values and carefully-planned hooks. The whole affair turned instantly into a terrible re-enactment of a commercial which every one of Ben's friends had memorized the choreography of. All two moves, the wiggle part and the stomping bit. 

    It was an absolute delight for the more soulless of the adults, but a few of the children and most of the parents still had enough humanity in them that they felt a tiny piece of their selves slip away as the tinny music replaced it with the superliminal intent of twisting them all into predictably neurotic worker drones. Or at least that was the intent of the faceless dollar sign men, in reality it simply drove most people to gibbering insanity or complete catatonia. Ben LOVED The Stomping Fiddle. 

            We all are going womping stomping romping and we'll FIDDLE! stomping    

            FIDDLE stomping FIDDLE FIDDLE FIDDLE FIDDLE!

                            *flute solo*

    The song had long ended, but the banners were drooping and the cake looked wet and even the grass seemed a bit wilted as an aftereffect. It was less catharsis and more a shared state of feeling of being simultaneously violated when Ben's dad got off at the bus stop across the street. The children, demonically resilient as they are, seemed completely unafeected, except for Kim, who was  lowering at the neighbor's dog and whispering nasty things at the severely pregnant bitch. The dog just lay there in the patchy lawn, panting and swearing to herself she'd never mate again.

    Ben, having resumed picking his nose, turned his round little head, finger firmly jammed in place, to stare goggle-eyed across the street as the bus made a series of creaking sounds and rocked about until finally, a pair of enormous rubber boots hit the chip seal street with a damp splat. As the bus pulled away, Ben's dad turned around and did a strange shuffle with his feet, and then began to steam across the street. 

    Ben's finger remained firmly plugged in his nose as he ran into the small house, faster than anyone had seen the sedentary lad move in his life before. Ben's dad, not even recognizing his son, paid the child no mind as he rolled in a strange fisherman's gait to sweep up his wife like a tsunami engulfing her into its roiling belly to be battered around by whatever detritus had come from the deeps to travel with Ben's dad to his home in the city. He absolutely reeked of rotten fish guts and Ripley knows what else. along with a noxious fug of rancid tobacco breath and tea-stained everything. Ben's mom, of course, adored the odor, and returned her prodigal husband's hugs with equal vigor. Shawnda, her sister, teared up with overwhelming sentiment, the fever of interrupted love returning briefly what the marketing ghouls had exacted with their stomping and their fiddling. 

    Kim thought she had won her battle with the dog as she went upstairs after the party broke up. The dog had waddled away after gathering the strength to follow her human next door. No point in a birthday party if fat little Ben went and hid under the counter like a cat again, now was there? She sighed and then decided to piss on his pillow. Having made up her mind, Kim hiked up the burlap sack she had insisted on wearing as a dress and began stomping up the stairs as loudly as she could. Her room was smaller than Ben's, but she had tricked him into taking the bigger one because the smaller one had direct access to the crawlspace, and Kim collected secrets like a completely mad hoarder collected mummified cats. That's how she knew where their dad had REALLY been for the last two years, but she wasn't sure how to pronounce it. That was fine, Kim thought, as Ben clearly didn't need any help being terrified of their father. 

    Kim stopped just as her head crested the second floor and picked at a little spot on the wall until a tiny little piece of wood fell out of a Kim-eye-sized hole in the faux-wood wallpaper. She peeked through the hole into her room, as she always did, and seeing no Dastardly Ambushes, she carefully replaced the wooden plug and stomped to her brother's door and banged loudly on it. 

    Expecting no answer, she was halfway through the door when Ben said "Who is it? Hi Kim!" Ben was lying on his bed on his belly with a crayon and a large piece of paper in front of him on the spread. there was some blue scribbling on the page, which Kim immediately snatched and read.

    "Dear Dad, Hi this is Ben Im yor son! I met you to... what?" Kim read out loud, glaring at Ben with her ferocious scowl.

    "today!" Said Ben. "I'm writing dad a letter." Ben beached his compact, portly torso on the bed and reached his arms out with his hands making grasping motions at Kim, "Gimme it back!"

     Kim looked baffled for a moment, which made Ben as happy as a mole with a full grown earthworm, and threw the paper as hard as she could at him. As it wafted gently towards the floor, Ben snatched it and rolled back over, crayon in hand. He proceeded to gently scribble so as not to poke through the paper. Kim sat on the corner of his bed and started staring at a corner of the room intently. 

    Ben babbled as he wrote. "I didn't know my dad was that scary!" 

    "our."

    "I didn't know our dad was that scary!" Ben happily repeated. Kim thought she could see the corner... moving? Where the three lines intersected at the other frame's Origin was where she had been focusing, but then the walls had started rippling in from the periphery of her vision. She was trying to focus. 

    "He looked like a wet dog. A BIG wet dog." Ben barked the word big like a very loud dog. 

    Kim didn't hear him, she could only see about half of the corner now as the walls were all shattering into red wisps and tendrils of crimson smoke, and some red so dark it was darker than black but still very much red. The color made Kim feel like her bowels were exiting her in a rush. 

    Ben hummed to himself as he finished the letter, licked the envelope, threw out the envelope he had moistened until it fell apart, carefully licked another two envelopes just to make sure, and then folded and neatly placed the letter in the envelope and failed to seal it as the glue had dried again.

    Eventually, Ben managed to get the envelope together, he had written his return address as he always did, and then, after his father's name, he thought for a moment and, very deliberately, wrote down the same address as the return address. All in very faint blue crayon.  He then stood up, noticed his sister sitting there with her eyes rolled back in her head and her neck at a funny angle, hopped up and down for a few seconds in indecision, and then scuttled out of the room like a pillbug. 

    Ben hastily attempted to dash past his parents without them seeing him as he came down the stairs. Ben tripped, fell down the last step, barely caught himself, and accidentally slammed the door on his way out. Unnoticed by him, his mom's hand was gripping his dad's sleeve with an iron grip as she winked at the boy's father and he smiled at his first time recognizing his son, a tear welling in his eyes to match the ones tattooed on his cheeks. The content couple continued to whisper and giggle to each other on the couch. 

    Ben made it to the mailbox, put the letter in, and raised the little metal red flag up, as he had done what seemed to be thousands of times before. (It had been three times, in fact, but Ben's memory was double the already-unfortunate whimsy of his young mind.) Wild-eyed and flushed with excitement, the chunky little fellow rammed his finger firmly into his right nostril and proceeded to walk around the whole house to the back yard, where he slipped in through the mud room and back up to his own room, where he proudly plopped down on a milk crate and started making up nonsense words to fit along to the tune of The Stomping Fiddle. Essentially reducing the song from nonsense to semi-compelling gibberish mockeries of human speech as uttered by an odd young boy. 

    Kim snapped her head around to glare at her annoying brat brother. He smiled, his round cheeks rising like little muffin-rockets to nearly make him appear eyeless. 

    "I mailed the letter to OUR dad!" He howled gleefully. 

    "Did you send it to the dockmaster?" A wicked cardinal light had erupted behind Kim's bright eyes. Ben knew that look, that was the look the sky had right before it splintered and charred and twisted a massive tree into a debris field with a smoking stump and a bizarre organic alien pattern where the needle-talons of the strike had spent their last fire in a mockery of the greatest works of the most artistically gifted spiders in the history of life on the planet. There was no mistaking the warning signs of a sudden, elemental catastrophe's approach, but just because Ben knew the strike was coming didn't mean he'd get out from under the tree fast enough. Ben slowly and carefully shook his head. 

    "Where did you send it then, Big Ben?" Kim grinned, her teeth somehow seeming pointed and... did her teeth have tiny teeth too? Ben wasn't sure, but either way he knew he was as helpless as a newborn puppy in a dark alley behind a fish market right as the infinite clowder slunk into existence from the shadow dimension they inhabited when the barrels were empty. 

    "Home. Here, to the house." Ben gulped. 

    Kim smiled. "Because your dad is here now, right? He's here, home?" Kim stood up and began dancing as if to an orchestra only she could hear. Her words punctuating her movements.  

    "dad. is. here. now. Ben. He... was at sea!" Kim danced around the bed in her burlap dress, trying to scare Ben. Ben looked terrified. 

    Kim leapt onto the bed and pointed at Ben's nose, her own forehead bumping his... "But was he, RILLY?" She shouted in her brother's face. She smiled then, as Ben stared back at her face, confused. 

    "What?" 

    "He was in----sin---er-------ated!" Kim waggled her arms up and down dramatically. 

    Ben stopped looking confused and smiled. Kim stared back at him, taken aback by his lack of reaction. She looked down and kicked at the little round throw rug just to rumple it. 

    "I said he was incinerated! Like, in the Big House!" Kim waggled her arms again, staring at her dummy of a brother, who started giggling like a toddler who just heard his mom fart in an elevator before a rush of people got on. He backed off the bed and stood up, tiny chest puffed out. "No he wasn't, Kim," Ben said, shaking his round little head. 

    Kim was taken sharply aback, gobsmacked at her dumb fat little brother's impertinence. She was his big sister! 

    Ben, full of himself with pride, continued, "He was wet! ....insinrater is where put Gramma she burned up! You're a dummy!" Ben started dancing now, his fat little body slowly beginning to wiggle, his little feet beginning to lightly stomp on the bare painted floorboards, as he was starting to turn around and do a fancy finger wiggle as well, he saw a blinding flash, felt an immense sharp blow hit the back of his head, and fell to the ground, his brain wasn't working and all he could think was screaming and light and a deep, compelling red so dark it made Ben feel like he was floating in a soothing bath of his own arterial blood as Kim brought the radio back up above her flashing mad eyes for another swing.