I park my truck across the street from Julie’s house most nights. She’s not there anymore, not since graduation. But I sit in the cab anyway with my pistol — the snub nose .38 I saved three months to buy — riding shotgun. The gun isn’t loaded. Yet. Julie’s dad doesn’t know about the pistol. He doesn’t know how close I’d have to stand to use it. Fred, the big, bald mountain of flesh at E-Z Pawn explained the short barrel doesn’t do well at a distance. “That’s fine,” I said. When I decide it’s time for the gun, I want to be close. I want Julie’s dad to know who shot him. I’d like him to know why.
Julie and I have been close since we were four, back when our moms job-shared their fifth-grade classroom. Her mom watched us in the morning. Mine took over in the afternoon. Those were our “salad days,” Julie once said. We dug canals through my sandbox, covered our faces with rain-puddle mud, and trapped beetles in glass jam jars. Once, while we played around stack of bricks on their patio, a mouse squirmed through a crack in the foundation. Julie squealed. I crushed it with my shoe. Blood squirted across the rust-colored bricks. I became her hero and a villain: the savior of the scared little girl and the brute who killed the fuzzy critter.
Julie lived in a world of opposites. Her mother, the angel. Her father…
But I loved Julie. I still love her even though she’s left for college and I doubt she’ll ever come home. Her dad doesn’t know how much I love her. Not yet.
There are many things her dad doesn’t know, like how much she cried after they found her mom in the car with the engine running and the garage door closed. He doesn’t know that, even as children, we could hear the arguments and shouting and understood the ruddy, flushed look on his face. I doubt he can understand how hard it was for Julie, only thirteen years old, to wrap her young brain around the word suicide. He doesn’t know about the nights Julie snuck from her house and climbed through my bedroom window so we could talk past the witching hour because Julie feared her mother’s ghost.
No. That’s not right. She never feared the ghost. She feared her father. She showed me the bruises. I witnessed the poison from his mouth first hand. We should have told someone, but we were stuck and scared and thirteen. He’d hurt her for so long, I suppose we thought it was normal.
He doesn’t know how hard I raged inside when we went to high school and the girl I knew sloughed away. He hurt her so much, she stopped caring about herself. He will never understand how much I loved her then, even as she found other friends and explored the dark halls of school dances or back country roads with zit-faced monsters from the football team. He can’t possibly comprehend what drove a sixteen-year-old boy to punch the headliner of his truck until the skin of his knuckles ripped away and left raw, bloody meat. All those nights—those dark, lonesome nights when I laid awake, listening for a stone against my window. And Julie would show, sometimes. On those nights, she crawled through my window and told me about how the ape-man quarterback pawed her in the backseat of his car. She told me, still reeking, of the pot and the booze and the parties. She told me because I listened.
He doesn’t know how those talks cut me into tiny pieces. Julie threw herself at the world, hoping to immolate in a quick but glorious inferno. The hurt was always there, wavering underneath her quick-fired gossip. He will never know how much I wanted to lock his daughter in my closet and keep her there, safe, so she didn’t flame out like her mother. Julie destroyed herself by degrees every day. He will never know just how broken his little girl was. Still is, I suppose.
Julie feared she’d follow her mother’s fate. When a father tears a little girl down for years, how else could she feel?
He will never know about prom night our senior year. How Julie and I kissed and explored each other’s bodies, the only time we ever had, but she broke off and cried.
“It’s not you,” she said.
The scars on my knuckles ached. “Of course,” I said.
She looked at me, eyes heavy and wet. “If I could love anyone, it’d be you,” she said.
“Of course.”
Julie’s dad doesn’t know about the promise I made on prom night, half-naked in my bed with a girl I loved most of my life, a girl who he’d robbed from me. He doesn’t know his little girl will never come home again. She told me the morning she left, and I believed her. I still do because it hurts like the truth.
It’s for Julie I sit in my truck most nights, watching the lights click off inside her house. He climbs to his bedroom after a six pack each evening. I’ve counted the empties in his garbage in the morning. Six isn’t enough to wipe away old memories. It isn’t enough to quiet the ghosts of his dead wife and broken daughter. I watch her father’s shadow as it moves to the upstairs window. I imagine he’s looking for me or someone like me. A man who spread so much hate has to know it’s coming.
Maybe, in the end, that’s better than a bullet in the gut.
Aaron Polson was born on the Ides of March: a good day for him, unlucky for Julius Caesar. He currently lives and writes in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, two sons, and a tattooed rabbit. To pay the bills, Aaron attempts to teach high school students the difference between irony and coincidence. His stories have featured magic goldfish, monstrous beetles, and a book of lullabies for baby vampires.
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25 Responses to “WHAT JULIE’S DAD DOESN’T KNOW • by Aaron Polson”
Comments
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June 28th, 2011 at 1:19 am
A strong voice and an engaging story that captures the characters’ personalities perfectly.
Good job.
June 28th, 2011 at 2:26 am
Oh Man! This story’s like a hard fist in the jaw! Five hard stars Aaron!
June 28th, 2011 at 2:43 am
Excellent
Solid writing
Disturbing tale
Truer than most want to admit
Five starry bloodstains on the chest of
Julies’ dad
June 28th, 2011 at 3:48 am
excellent! 5 stars.
June 28th, 2011 at 5:07 am
Powerful and moving. A sympathetic narrator and a strong and steady voice drive this tragedy forward.
I liked how the killing of the mouse as children sets the role of the narrator and foreshadows the killing of the father that the reader is left expecting. I also like how it is left unresolved — will he go through with it?
However, some elements of the girl’s trauma; the father’s malevolent abusiveness, and the narrator’s unrequited love feel maybe just a little too familiar, and perhaps a little too over-emphasized. Also, when the mouse was killed, it was done to ‘protect’ the girl, but in killing the father, it is too late for protection and would be purely revenge because the girl is long-gone — it might have had more impact to have her still at home, still suffering. Just a thought…
All-in-all, a strong, 4-star story, IMO. Nice job, Aaron!
June 28th, 2011 at 5:17 am
Sad about Julie. Disturbing about the N. Tad obsessed. He’s letting the father ruin his life also. But by the end I’m pretty sure the young man realizes the gun isn’t the answer.
Great writing when the reader cares so much about the characters.
“I still do because it hurts like the truth.” Great line. Five stars.
June 28th, 2011 at 5:59 am
Very good storytelling and very moving. The only part of the story that made me question it (if only slightly) was that the girl, who turned to drugs, alcohol and sex to medicate herself, ended up in college. I know some girls (and boys) like that do, but the majority find other, darker, ways out, which may have fit the story better. Even so, this was a really engaging story, very well written and moving as well.
June 28th, 2011 at 6:24 am
“…it hurts like the truth.” That line is among the most perfect things I’ve ever read.
A superb tale, Aaron. It feels like a privilege to read something this good.
June 28th, 2011 at 6:56 am
Enough twists on a familiar battered-daughter story to make this interesting. The writing is outstanding. Nicely done. Four big ones from me….
June 28th, 2011 at 7:00 am
You dragged me along from start to finish, Aaron; I couldn’t stop reading. A well-told tale!
June 28th, 2011 at 8:18 am
What a creepy tale. To me, the narrator shared some of the same traits as Julie’s dad. The killing of the mouse foreshadows that he might be controlling too, just like the dad. Julie’s better off without either of them. Great writing!
June 28th, 2011 at 11:53 am
I really liked this well told story. The characters were well developed.It had a great moodiness to it.
Nice job. One of the best I’ve read so far.
June 28th, 2011 at 12:21 pm
I’ve only been frequenting this blog for about a month now, but I have to say this is the best piece I’ve read yet.
I think the revenge is for both of them. The father hurt Julie directly, but he hurt the MC too, by hurting Julie. In essence, he took her away from the MC. And his decision-making shows so many different elements of who he is: passion, love, anger – but also fortitude and an ability to really think about what he’s doing and why. A strong, hurt man.
I liked all the elements of Julie’s relationship with him, too. She obviously loves him, but she’s a very broken girl. Very confused. I hurt for her, too.
June 28th, 2011 at 12:22 pm
** The MC’s decision making, not the father’s. I guess I didn’t make that very clear. I’s a writer
June 28th, 2011 at 2:34 pm
Strong and true, this is a good one. And not unnoticed is the title – perfect.
June 28th, 2011 at 3:19 pm
“Julie threw herself at the world, hoping to immolate in a quick but glorious inferno.”
That line is so gorgeous.
I would have liked to know the main character’s name, but otherwise, a fantastic story. I only want to read more.
June 28th, 2011 at 3:26 pm
Strong hook and an ending that keeps us wondering. A great variation on how abuse affects more than the abused.
June 28th, 2011 at 4:07 pm
This story had me on the edge of my seat. The writing for me was flawless. 5 stars.
June 28th, 2011 at 5:37 pm
Five stars, Aaron. A very disturbing story. Well written.
June 28th, 2011 at 7:25 pm
Powerful stuff, Aaron. A lot of tension packed in this story, and up until the very end I waited for the gun to go off. That it didn’t speaks to your mastery of the story. Peace…
June 29th, 2011 at 12:14 am
A lot of things in this story didn’t work for me. And also the repetition got wearing after a while.
June 30th, 2011 at 9:07 am
This story “hurt like the truth.” 5 stars from me. I was Julie once upon a time, and I ran from love for the same reason, I was afraid I would break it. Very well done. I was relieved by the ending and the MC’s choice. No better revenge, leave the old man to his misery. Nice work.
July 2nd, 2011 at 5:30 pm
The story is about 90% telling, which is not a bad thing since it is also 90% interior monologue. It is well done and I would say that it works because it is voice driven. Of course, the real motive of the protagonist is revenge. This is very understandable. I think the real beauty of the story is the open-ended ending. But if the protagonist does shot the father he will be destroying one life, ruinning his own life and adding more not less pain to the life of the woman he loves. As a teenager, I came close to killing my father in his sleep because he was a wife beater, but I lost my courage. It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I realized if I had killed my father my mother would have never forgiven me. Her husband would have ended up dead and her son would have ended up in jail. As things turned out I left home as soon as I could, 18, and joined the army. The beatings stopped and my parents stayed together for another 50 years before my father died of natural causes. Hopefully, your protagonist will gain some wisedom before he does something that will not help anyone.
July 2nd, 2011 at 10:21 pm
This story was well written, but to me it just reeks of the tired trope of weak damsel in distress and irritating male characters with too much power and ego. The father has power over her physically and also mentally; The friend exhibits benevolent sexism by wishing so hard to be her “protector.” If the daughter had been a son, there would be no “protector” to be found. The female character is only in the story to be battered so that male protagonist can have a story.
I know my comment may seem harsh, but it bothers me to see this treatment of femininity so often in fiction.
July 14th, 2011 at 12:09 pm
Powerful story!