Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“Sometimes,” his mother said, “I can’t help but think it was my fault. That he wasn’t holding on properly because he was distracted by—” She began to cry, but Aaron was relieved that she did not make the low moans he heard coming from her bedroom at night. Gloria tucked the afghan more tightly around his mother’s legs.

“Well?” Clarence demanded as Aaron crept in and closed the door.

“They’re eating walnuts,” Aaron said.

“Where are they sitting?” Clarence asked. “How would you describe their body language?”

“They’re sitting on the couch,” Aaron said. He had never heard of body language.

“Together?” Clarence cackled, and Aaron nodded miserably.

“Talking?”

Aaron nodded again.

“About what?”

“About my father.”

“What about your father?” Clarence asked greedily.

“My father was going to take me,” he said. He looked up at Clarence. “My mother said they were arguing because he wanted me with him.”

Clarence sniffed. “Would you like to see the wasps now?” he asked, as though seeing the wasps had already been discussed.

Aaron knocked his shoe against one of Clarence’s wheels.

“Stop that god-awful kicking,” Clarence said, and Aaron turned away. “Fine, if you don’t want to see the wasps, then you shall not.”

“I do want to see the wasps,” Aaron said in a low voice.

“Well, you mustn’t be petulant, or I can assure you that the wasps will not want to see you. Now, slide open that door and see that my ramp is clear. Sister’s troublesome dogs are fond of sitting on it whilst gnawing bones.”

Aaron went over to the drab white drapes that covered one wall and managed to open them, revealing a sliding glass door. On the other side of it, a ramp sloped gently to the ground. It was covered with leaves and several well-chewed bones. Aaron walked down the ramp, kicking it clean, then back up to where Clarence waited, a pair of oversize sunglasses perched on his nose.

The wasps, it turned out, lodged in the school bus. “I’ve seen them only once,” Clarence explained as Aaron pushed him along a path beside the driveway. “Sister carried me inside.”

Aaron listened at the open door of the bus. “They’re at the back,” Clarence called. “Be sure not to rile them.”

Aaron climbed the steps and sat in the driver’s seat. The steering wheel was covered with cobwebs and desiccated insect husks. He pretended to drive, using both hands to flip out the sign that said STOP FOR CHILDREN . Mainly, he was thinking about what he had heard his mother telling Gloria.

“What are you doing in there?” Clarence asked fretfully, but instead of replying, Aaron walked to the back of the bus, where the wasp nest hung from the emergency door. He listened for the wasps again, but all he heard was Clarence calling to him from outside. He reached up and shook the nest, hard.

The wasps were on him instantly. As he ran back down the aisle of the bus, he felt small explosions of pain, first on his arms and legs and then across his entire body. He stumbled down the steps of the bus and fell to the ground.

“Sister,” Clarence called weakly. “Sister, come at once.”

The dogs came first. They circled Aaron, howling. When he opened his eyes next, his mother and Gloria were there. Gloria pulled the afghan from Clarence’s legs and began swatting Aaron with it. She stripped away his clothes, shaking out the sluggish wasps lodged in the folds of his shirt and stomping them into the ground with her boots.

“Vile creatures,” Clarence announced.

Aaron lay on the ground in his underwear, his body covered with red welts. This time when his mother cried, she did make the low moans.

“This will require poultices, Sister,” Clarence declared, the last thing Aaron heard before he passed out.

* * *

He opened his right eye. The left was swollen shut. His mother was there beside him, Gloria behind her, Clarence at his feet, head tipped back so that he seemed to be sighting Aaron along his tusks. Aaron sniffed, aware of an odor that was coming from him, a combination of grass and mustard. He did not like mustard because it reminded him of hotdogs.

“Do you like hotdogs?” he asked Clarence. His mother sniffled.

“Certainly not,” Clarence said. “I dislike hotdogs in all of their permutations, though I particularly despise the bratwurst.” Something about Clarence’s response, the way he said “permutations,” calmed Aaron, and he closed his good eye again. Soon, he heard his mother and Gloria stand and leave the room.

“Your mother was quite hysterical,” Clarence whispered. “She seemed to think you were hallucinating because you kept crying out that you were”—he paused dramatically—“the king of pain.”

Aaron did not remember calling out, nor how he had come to be on the sofa, but he knew he had never experienced pain like this, pain that was everywhere, burning and throbbing and itching. He fell back into a sweaty, listless sleep in which he dreamed that he was on a parade float, calling, “I’m the King of Pain” as he rolled down the street, waving to the people below. He could hear Gloria, Clarence, and his mother talking, their voices blending with his dream, their conversation punctuated by a clinking sound that he later realized was the repetition of cup meeting saucer but in his dream became the steady tapping of a pair of cumbersome tusks that collided with everything in their path. When he awoke, he studied Clarence, relieved to find him still in possession of his small, elegant tusks and not the monstrosities of his dream. Only then did he realize that the tusks in the dream had belonged not to Clarence but to him.

“Where are we?” he asked, looking around the small, sunny room.

“We’re at the Bjorklunds, Aaron,” his mother said. She glanced at Gloria, who prodded one of his poultices.

“I know that,” Aaron said. “I mean this room.”

“This is the sunroom,” Clarence announced grandly. “As you may know from your studies, the sun has tremendous curative powers.”

Gloria and his mother rose and gathered the cups. Once they had disappeared into the kitchen, Clarence wheeled closer. “You provoked them, didn’t you?” he said.

“Who?” Aaron asked. He sat up.

“The wasps,” Clarence said impatiently. “You must have provoked them.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Aaron said. In fact, he did know, but he did not want to talk, not even to Clarence, about the clarity he had felt as he reached toward the wasps intending to do just that— provoke .

“Do you like rabbits?” Clarence asked after a moment.

Aaron recalled the rabbit at the petting zoo at the first Paul Bunyan Park, the sleekness of its ears and the way it trembled when he held it. “Yes,” he said.

“Splendid,” Clarence shrieked. “Sister is preparing one of the little rascals for our supper.”

He did not look at Clarence because he knew that Clarence was waiting for him to respond, that Clarence was upset with him for refusing to discuss the wasps. Though his mother had said he was to rest, Aaron stood up. He felt weak, but he took a step and then another, keeping his hand on the couch. He noticed a pile of newspapers, stacked in a beam of sunlight. Atop it was a cat, gray with white-tipped ears.

“May I pet the cat?” Aaron asked.

“Indeed you may, ” Clarence said. “Nothing gives me more pleasure than a child who has learned to use the English language properly, except for an adult who has done so. That, of course, is a good deal rarer.”

Aaron let go of the couch and took several slow steps toward the cat. Though it hurt to do so, he crouched beside it, wanting to appear less threatening. He whispered, “Hello, cat,” and then, more loudly, “Do you have a name?”