Last Kiss

SHF_RE_LastKiss - 1994 // 01_initial

The birds he had seen no longer had the mosquito craziness; they were sitting on the wires now, looking like clothespins on a backyard clothesline. The sky was a brilliant and fierce orange. The tractor blew a thin smoke into the cooling air, sometimes drifting visibly one direction, sometimes another, sometimes coming straight back at him as a hot, stinking, soft punch. 

Wayne loved the smell of his tractor’s exhaust. His arms prickled in the breeze and so did his face, with its colorless fuzz, the tender whiskers. The tractor breathing on him hot and work-smelling and the prickling of whiskers, made him feel glad and at the same time vaguely embarrassed, and all at once he knew why.

It was like that last unwanted kiss of his father, a couple of years before. When he had pushed himself away from his father to declare the time for those bedtime kisses was past, that he was a grown boy, now, too, like his brother. The only way he could make such a declaration had been to muster one of his hates. But even in that dizziness of hate he had felt the hurting wound of his father. To salve that wound a little he had walked past his mother and her kiss, too, though he had not in his planning thought it necessary to go that far. Not yet. The room behind him as he went up the stairs from them — his father and mother and sisters, who had noticed it, too — the room was hot with feeling, like a room full of fire. He felt it on his back, the strong feeling he had created so quickly, so easily after all, and his back stopping it felt large and strong. But in his bed he had cried hard, hurting his ears with keeping the crying inside him, silent.

He throttled the tractor faster, going at full throttle the way his father told him he should never do. In high gear at full throttle he drove the little tractor toward the darkening sky, into the cold air.