SPRING 2007 SHORT FICTION CONTEST

HONORABLE MENTION

The Odd Job
by Christina Hyun

Last night, Ginger slept outside in the bed of a rusty pickup truck, curled up tight in a wool Indian blanket.  Before fading into sleep under the desert sky, she recalled her last memory in the truck.  Roundy had stopped it on the dusty hillside for a rattler in the road.  He wore a bent felt hat and dryly commented that the snake was just a baby.  Ginger liked how the ancient truck idled as the snake startled into the brush.  She liked the convolutions of Roundy’s worn out knuckles as he tightened his grip on the wheel.  The truck was Roundy Ridge’s, the elderly owner of the yellow house Ginger was scraping and painting. 

In his day, Roundy was a man to be reckoned with.  But in his twilight years, he ended up living on the edge of the reservation, unconcerned with the driven pace of the world beyond Window Rock.  It was enough that he got himself out at the annual Navajo celebration, watching the parade, the rodeo, and the silver vendors. 
           
Now in the proverbial sunset of his life, he let a young vagrant woman named Ginger Ransom scrape at his house.  As she chiseled away at the peeling paint, Ginger felt she could see layers of Roundy’s life falling into the dust, in little curls and chips.  The curls struck her beautiful – small pieces of a larger, once substantial painting – now loose, light, and fragile.  Ginger had noticed earlier in the day, when the sun shone into the front room of Roundy’s house that the walls were papered in faded tea roses – the sign of a woman in the house’s past.

When Roundy asked if she’d like to get a bite to eat at Smitty’s, Ginger quickly said yes, her stomach feeling a pang that was as much from her life as a physical hunger.  But lunch was no more revealing than the paint curls and paper, mere hints at a life long gone.  Roundy ordered black coffee and blatantly watched Ginger’s hands as she ate her sandwich.  Ginger never had a person sit and eat with her like that.  She wondered if Roundy had children.  They’d all be years older than she was.  She wondered if he’d watched them eat their breakfast while he drank coffee in the kitchen. 

Ginger lived her whole life just outside Salinas.  After she turned eighteen, she began moving ever southward.  She felt if a person could keep going south and south and south, perhaps one day she’d find herself at the edge of the continent of reason, beside the sea of forgetfulness, breathing the fresh air of a one-way passage. 

Passage.  Desirable passage.  Into a place where she’d never again feel what it was to long for someone, never feel alone, never feel despair.  Roundy ordered pie.  The crust half fell off when the waitress brought it to him on a chipped beige plate.  He pushed the plate towards Ginger, ignoring her when she tried to politely give it back.  No one had ever ordered her pie.   Would it be rude and childish to cry a little because of a piece of dry fruit pie?  Ginger stopped up her throat, the achy feeling subsiding when she made herself focus intently on a lizard stuck to the window screen.

Back at the yellow house, Ginger heard the back door slap shut against the wooden frame.  Roundy came to where Ginger was almost finished scraping.  He ran his fingers down the raw plank wall.

“Cold last night?”

“Not really.”

Roundy tipped his head to one side and watched a brown hawk cross the sky.  Ginger knew she was welcome to sleep in the house by the way he inquired.  But she liked sleeping outside in the desert.  She’d done it often in her childhood.  A truck bed was as good a bed as anything.  The hawk circled again.  Roundy nodded at the wall and then ambled back inside.

Besides this peeling yellow house in the desert, Ginger felt less alone than she had her whole life.  The thought choked her like the desert dust sometimes did when it swirled in an unexpected wind gust.  She suddenly missed the father she never had, a feeling she could normally turn off as easily as the tap.  What did it mean anyway to miss someone she never had?  It was nothing.  A pointless thing.  She wiped off her cheeks with the hand that held the metal scraper.  The blade glinted in the sun.  She suddenly wished she could scrape out her heart so it would never again concede to being provoked into feeling such nonsense.  But there it was again.  And again.  She saw tears fall into the parched ground; a piece of earth that looked as thought it had never been wet.  She almost couldn’t believe they were her tears, it had been so long since she had cried, cried for anyone or anything.  The back screen door creaked open again, but didn’t slam this time.  She heard Roundy call out, “Supper, Ginger.”

Supper.  Ginger.

Being called in for supper the past two evenings had contributed to her current state.  The creamed corn and salty meats warmed up something inside her, a part of her that had been left out in the cold for as long as she could remember. 

An old man with a cast iron skillet of mystery meat had thawed some very thick ice.

Ginger wondered how she might make this odd job last forever.

Christina Hyun runs a secret society, mothers the two funniest children on Earth, and churns out zany "Beast Mom" stories for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She is called the "Beast Mom" because her son wrote her a Mother's Day card that said, "I loav you, Mom. You're the beast!"
Christina currently lives in the Seattle, Washington area with her two brilliant children and ever patiently loving husband who puts up with her irreverence about pretty much everything. She has been published in Bellowing Ark, as well as in Hungry? Seattle: family - the Lowdown on Where Real Families Eat!