"Car Ride To The Clinic" by Dan Pinkerton

In the upstairs hallway, I struggle

with the intruder while downstairs the boys

try to figure out the rotary phone

to dial the authorities. Just kidding,

the boys play Mario Kart in the rumpus

room, oblivious to my struggles. Bowser

tosses a banana peel to elude

a pursuer. Not a bad strategy.

I start eating more bananas, shoring up

my potassium levels, stashing

peelings under the bed. The boys wrestle

atop the garage until one is tossed off,

landing on a garbage bin or the frozen

ground. Walk-in clinics abound. People will

always mysteriously slip on

banana peels. The boys don’t know squat

about the previous millennium

where we feared different saber rattlers

and a different set of refugees crossing

different borders. Fear tasted much

the same as it does now, but the carpeting

was shaggier. The cars had more sharp metal,

fewer safety features. There were more

opportunities for death, yet fewer

people died. The cars filled with billows

of cigarette smoke. We grew fat on

secondhand smoke. The cars were great metal

torpedoes that only rarely exploded.

The boys toss lit firecrackers at each other

just as we did forty years ago.

The wait times at the walk-in clinic

are as long as ever. x-rays of broken

arms look pretty much the same. So few people

died way back when that we invented nonsense

worries: razor blades in candy, poisoned Aspirin

in grocery stores, guys in dark alleyways

selling cocaine to eight-year-olds, pedophile

kidnapping rings. Actually, there were

pedophile kidnapping rings back then

but no more than today. Just say no.

Just look over there while I perform

my trick over here, the magician’s art

of deception. Don’t check the neighborhood

registry if you hope to sleep soundly

at night. Don’t let your pets share your bed.

I wake with a dog sprawled across my chest

and another asleep on my face,

elbow on my trachea. My life flashes

before my fur-covered eyes. I rise to walk

the dark midnight sidewalks, dispensing

banana peels. I recall what my father

used to say, pushing away from the table

and belching after a full meal: not bad

manners, just good food. What he meant was:

every ripple through the window bends

in the cold light of day. Every story

worth telling ends with teeth at someone’s throat,

hungry, prehistoric teeth. Every

story intrudes on every other story.

I miss my father. What would he make of me,

in slippers and robe, overcoat stuffed

with bananas? He might possibly be

turning over in his grave. More likely,

he’s just shrugging. After long-ago dinners

I would excuse myself, dry swallow

a couple Aspirin, throw a brick of lit

firecrackers at my brother, then throw myself

from the garage, necessitating

a car ride to the clinic in the long

metal missile thick with cigarette smoke.

I waited beside a kid in a costume

with a bag of Halloween candy

and a smile full of razor blades. He offered

me a couple fun-sized Milky Ways

but was clearly saving the full-sized bars

for himself. I couldn’t blame him. His brother

offered me a toot from his baggie of coke.

The x-rays came back negative this time.

None of us truly own the old stories.

We merely rent the shovels and dig the holes.

Dan Pinkerton lives in Urbandale, Iowa. His stories and poems have appeared in Chicago Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, Subtropics, North American Review, Boulevard, New Orleans Review, and Pleiades, among others. His first book of poetry, Democracy of Noise, is forthcoming.