The Unnaming
Her father called her Lou Anne, but that was not her real name, and she was tired of his presumed right in naming her. He stopped by her house most mornings for his coffee and skilleted eggs and pork chops. He ate slowly, barking orders between bites: Fill my cup, Lou Anne. Get me a napkin, Lou Anne. Lou Anne, sit on my lap. He left the fat to the end and he liked to stick the soft, white morsels in his mouth and let them slowly dissolve at the back of his tongue. In one way she was glad he called her Lou Anne. She could pretend that he wasn’t her father, that she was his mistreated wife or mistress. She had put up with his shit for years, but she had never said anything to his face. Nothing would change. When her mother was alive, and they lived in the double-wide on the edge of town, they had talked about his strange behavior. She watched her mother massage her sore wrists and look through the screen door at the dark fields. They had once planned to escape together. Perhaps move a state over. But then her mother was gone and Lou Anne was born—a figment of her father’s imagination. He hacked up the name from the back of his throat and spat it at her each day until she fled the trailer. Even when she disappeared to the other side of town, he found her and knocked at her door: Lou Anne, Lou Anne, Lou Anne. She had thought it best to let him have his fantasy, at least till she could work out what to do. Now it struck her to call her father Lover and Killer and shout those names everywhere in town until he could no longer take it.
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War Story
The day of the storm, a red cardinal landed on the top of our father’s flagpole. It ignored our shouts and sang out to the pale brown cardinals in the hedgerow. We shook the aluminum flagpole as best we could, but the cardinal stayed on the finial, unheeding our cries. Then the wind whipped the flag up and around the bird, snatching it from its perch. The bird struggled inside its fabric prison. Squawks rang out across our yard. We could not tell the difference between the red feathers and the red stripes, or the blood that seeped into the cotton. A vortex of air had trapped the bird within the flag — the same flag our mother received after our father died in that faraway country. She had unfurled the flag after the ceremony was over; she wanted us to see what our father had died for. The pattern looked flat and lifeless to us. Once we were home, we raised the flag, let it flutter and swirl in the sky above us. We would never draw it down. Now the storm clouds drifted away. The air stilled and the flag fell limp: the red cardinal plunged to the ground, where we buried it with all the others.