Remembering Ginger (Short Fiction with Sentences)

Karl kept one cannon on the front porch and one on the back.  




Sound like lightning boxing a tree.  



It wasn’t that her parents were particularly poor or anything, even though it was wartime, it was just that Ginger liked what she liked, even if it was old, torn up, and you could see her back through rips in a couple of spots. 



We were more interested in what Ginger would call the “art or science of warfare,” because that’s what we’d take with us when we made our own battlefields and play Beach at Normandy or Pearl Harbor, probably cause we were landlocked and the watery battles sounded extra exotic.




The Black River was the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean and our strategies and victories were more real to us than what we learned in the papers.  

Her Daddy died in Europe and looking back I think she was only trying to make sense. 



So she scoured newspapers and old books and listen to the old men gossip on the porches and in the café when she wasn’t in school; like she was looking for him, like she could answer some question she couldn’t put in words if only she knew enough.



And then, he found a pile of scrap some farmer had left behind during the 1930s, had apparently spent a fortune on setting up a farm, some important guy from some important city back East, and then the Dust Bowl settled in and he’d abandoned everything and kept heading west.  



Ginger was on his porch screaming about how irresponsible he was for making a cannon instead of sending the scrap on to the factories that made real weapons, he tried arguing he was doing the same, neither was listening, and her voice was getting shrill so he lit the cannon probably hoping the noise would shut her up.  


That explosion caused a lot of smoke and I got the taste of metal in my mouth.

I watched my kids take up their toy guns and point them at the neighbor’s kids today, and I heard lightning boxing a tree.