I was convinced my heart was going to rip out of my chest and fall to the green grass beneath my feet, that’s how hard it was beating. It was beating in that impossible way where you can hear it in your ears, like there’s something banging on a drum in your torso. I held the tiny silver key in my hand, my fingers slick with sweat which had run down from my palm. The key was attached to a small brown cord which had been tied in a loop. My father usually wore the key around his neck.
It wasn’t much of a neck, my father was a large man, beefy and wide, like me. He had played football in highschool, and I got that question a lot to. “Why don’t you play football?” That’s what people always ask fat kids. “Hey, you should play football.” They don’t finish with ‘because you’re fat,’ but they might as well.
I’m not into sports, not like my dad. He’s still into it, watches games every Sunday, bitches and moans for hours after the Bengals lose. He’s unpleasant to be around on those sundays, the games given up in the last quarter, the final moments, or the games where they’re blown out the whole time. My dad hates to lose, and he hates for his team to lose.
I remember one time we were playing Monopoloy. My dad, my mother, and me. It was a few years ago, so I was ten I think. He had been winning, had more things bought up than my mom or I, but he had a bad stretch two times around the board, where he simply couldn’t avoid landing on the spaces my mom or me had managed to snatch up.
He saw his money going, and after he handed me a big stack of the multicolored paper cash he flicked his wrist suddenly and sent the pieces flying off the board. “Fuck this,” he had said, and he stood from the dining room table, his impressive gut jamming into it and knocking our game into further array. I was used to his outbursts, over something so stupid as a board game. My mother was too, but it didn’t keep her from crying that day.
My mother is shorter than my father, and much skinnier. She bent over, right there, so low and forward her forehead almost sat on the table. And she cried. I didn’t know what to do. Dad had gone upstairs, mom was crying. I slowly worked around her, putting the game back in the box. I took it down to the basement and placed it on the old bookcase down there, where we kept the rest of our games.
Before I went back upstairs I paused at the foot of the stairs and balled a fist, my fingers curling tightly against my palm. I wanted to scream, I wanted to yell at my father, I wanted to hit him. We were sick of his shit, I knew that even at ten. I couldn’t hit him though, so I hit the wall instead.
The basement wall is gray and stone and uneven, and when I punched it the skin on my knuckle split and I bled. I didn’t tell my mom or father.
I stood three years and some months later in the back yard, with the key, facing the small brown and yellow shed that sat in the far corner of our backyard. My dad never left the key at home when he went to work. I had come home from school, had run upstairs to drop my backpack in my room before I went to pee. My parents bedroom door was open, and as I passed it on the way to the bathroom I just happened to glance in. There it was, I saw it immediately, pretty impressive for such a small key. I think the Sun was streaming in through the window to the right of the bed there, and maybe the silver key was glinting, and that helped it catch my eye. Somehow though, I was drawn to it.
I knew what the key went to. The shed. My father’s space. “Don’t go into the shed,” he had said, a million times. My best friend Mason and I talked about the shed a lot. If you sat on the edge of my bed and looked out of my window you had a good view down to the back yard. The green grass, the cement patio with the weathered iron patio furniture, and of course, the shed.
“It’s porn,” Mason would say. “I’m telling you Davey, it’s porn.” My father was David. I was Davey. I’ve never liked it, but if it was between Davey and Junior, I guess I’m glad my parents fell into calling me Davey as a baby.
And I had to agree with Mason. His dad had porn magazines and a few DVD’s in a box in the back of the closet in the basement room that he used as a study. We had seen them. Everyone’s dad had porn.
Last year I was in sixth grade, and every boy in my class knew about the hidden stash Justin Benner found. His parents were divorced, and had been since he was three. He lived with his dad because his mom had some sort of crazy job where she had to travel a lot, and they all just seemed to think it was better if he stay with him. Justin had been going through his dads stuff one night when his old man was at his bowling league, and he found a shoebox stuffed under the bed. Inside the box was a bunch of polaroids. Porn, but with real women. Real naked women. Some of the pictures even had Justin’s dad in them.
The best part though, was the fact that five other kid’s moms were in some of the pictures. Most of the fifty or so pictures were random chicks none of us knew. But some of them… well one was Kelly Nelson’s mom. Kelly was the cutest girl in town, she was a sophmore in highschool last year, and her brother had already graduated and gone to college, but every guy from fifth grade up knew who she was. And we all knew her mom too. Mrs. Nelson was hot. A total MILF. Her husband, Kelly’s step dad, had bought her new boobs for Christmas five years ago.
And in the shoebox Justin found, there was a picture of Kelly’s mom sitting on the edge of a bed, with her new boobs, and she was smiling, looking right at the camera, just a big goofy grin on her face.
Of course Justin showed the pictures to as many guys in the grade as he could. I saw them with Mason, when we went over after school one day while Mr. Benner was still at work. It was pretty amazing.
And so that’s why I half expected to just find porn in my dad’s shed. No one was married to a woman who let you keep it out, right? Every dad had to hide it.
But I only half expected to find that. Maybe some beers, things like that. I had asked my mom about the shed a lot over the years. “It’s your dad’s space,” she said simply. It’s all she ever said about it. I knew better than to ask dad about it.
But a part of me wasn’t convinced there was porn in there, or beers, or anything like that. For one dad rarely went in. Some evenings he would go in, but he would go weeks, if not months without going in. And what was the use of having porn if you didn’t look at it a bunch?
But if it wasn’t magazines with naked chicks, or polaroids of other kids moms, why have the shed at all? And the lock? And the key that I held in my hand, that day after school. I knew I needed to hurry up, if I was going to do it.
I had paused and stared at the key for a long time in my parents bedroom doorway. It was there, on the small nightstand that was beside the bed on my father’s side. The table had the key, an alarm clock, and the end of a cell phone charger, the white cord going back behind the table and disappearing towards the outlet that sat a bit behind the bed itself.
My mother worked, and my father worked. Mom was a nurse, an RN. She hadn’t worked when I was younger, but five years ago she decided she needed to get out of the house. I didn’t need her as much, and I’m an only child, so she decided on nursing, and she went to school for it.
Dad was annoyed by it all, he didn’t see why she needed to work. He made plenty of money, and he always told my mom that. He’s an accountant. It’s maybe the most boring job in the world. He runs a small team at a pretty big company based out of Cincinnati, some trucking thing. I guess companies rent big trucks from them to haul their goods. I’ve never been exactly sure of what he does. I just know he works at the trucking place, he’s an accountant with people beneath him, and he makes plenty of money. My dad was a guarded guy. He didn’t talk much, even to his own child.
Mom was usually home around four thirty. I got home at three forty five on a school day. I knew it was after four by the time I got out to the shed. Dad wouldn’t be home until after six, but I knew my mom would be just as mad if she caught me in the shed. A part of me wanted to call Mason, to see if he could come over in time, but I knew I couldn’t. My father never forgot to slip the key around his neck each morning. In my thirteen years, I had never seen it happen. This was going to be my only chance. I took a deep breath and slid the key into the lock.
I turned it to the right, and the deadbolt slid open with a satisfying click. Sweat formed at my hairline and ran down into my eyes. I used the back of my hand to wipe it away, blinking as the salty water stung me like an angry miniature jellyfish.
My hand went from the key, leaving it in the lock and down to the small brass knob. It was round, with a dent on one side that my middle finger fit perfectly into. I gripped the handle and turned it. The door swung open, and I stepped inside.
For a minute I was sure I was going to hyperventilate. I was in the shed. We had lived in the same house my whole life, with the same shed in the backyard. I had always wanted to see inside it, but I never had. Sometimes when I knew dad was heading out this way I would watch from my bedroom window. He would walk slowly across the lawn, pulling the key from his neck and over his head as he did so, so that by the time he stopped in front of the shed door he was ready to unlock it. He stood close to the door, and I couldn’t see anything from his large frame as he unlocked the door. He would push it open, just wide enough for him to enter, and then as soon as he went in the door was shutting. All I ever saw was the dirty snow gray color of the cement floor. Sometimes dad would come out minutes later, and I would still be at my window, and I would see the same floor, or he would come out hours later and I had long given up my secret position. Either way it had been a lifetime of disappointment when it came to seeing what was inside the shed. Until the day my father had left the key.
The shed had no windows, so as the door swung shut behind me it got darker and darker, and then the door closed with a slam that seemed to shake the four walls, and I was left to grope for a lightswitch. I didn’t find one as I moved to the right, so I went forward and felt something slap lightly against my face. I grabbed it with my fingers, it was a string. I pulled and a light came blaring to life, a single bulb worked by the string situated in the center of the low ceiling. I took in the shed.
It was small, but I knew that from the outside. It would only take me a few steps to cross the whole thing. The floor was cement, but I knew that too. To the right was a long wooden board bolted into the wall, a work bench of sorts. Underneath it were some tool boxes. At the far end, tucked under the board was a mini-fridge, like you would see in a frat room. I made my way to it and pulled it open. There were a few beers in there, nothing else. I closed it. When I closed it the whole thing rocked a bit. I opened the door and closed it again, and it rocked once more. The fridge wasn’t on even ground. I bent and grabbed the little brown fridge with both hands and pulled it toward me. It slid across the cement easily. I pulled it as far as the cord that connected it to an outlet in the wall would allow, and then I leaned forward so I could see behind it. The ground in the shed was all smooth concrete, but directly under the refrigerator there was a dark line, running in a lipside square. It looked as though someone had cut out a piece of the cement, but left it in the floor. I dug into the groove with my fingers and indeed the piece came up easily.
I set the piece of cement aside and leaned back over the fridge. I peered at the section of missing floor. It was about a foot deep, and inside was a small box made of stained wood. I pulled the box out and looked at it. The lid was shit, but there was nothing keeping it so. I took the lid within my fingers and started to pull it upwards. Before I could open it I heard something that made the blood in my veins to to ice water. Someone, somewhere behind me, in the direction of the door to the shack that I was never supposed to enter, said my name.
Submitted November 07, 2015 at 08:03PM by Iwritewordsformoney http://ift.tt/1NioYAj WritingPrompts
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