“Uncle Pete Doesn’t,” by Erin Osborne (Fiction ’20)
“Uncle Pete Doesn’t,” a short story by 2020 fiction graduate Erin Osborne, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt below:
Uncle Pete Doesn’t
Uncle Pete tells the story about his mother, my grandma, how when she was a kid, she climbed through her bedroom window with her little brother in tow to escape their father as he held a knife to their mother’s throat. Pete tells the story while grazing through the pickle tray at Christmas, while lighting the kids’ sparklers on the Fourth, while crossing his arms over his full belly after pie at Thanksgiving.
Uncle Pete provides no details. The house Grandma Donna and Great-Uncle Warren live in is not a gray cabin. It is not small and drafty. There are no spaces between the floorboards. There are no threadbare, once cheerful curtains hanging in Donna’s bedroom window. She does not squint at them to see the finch printed on the fabric perched in the only tree behind the house. There’s no mention of her maneuvering her body inches away from Warren’s warm, small back, stretching her arms above her head, grasping the white, cold metal bed frame, and wondering if tonight her mother will part the hair on her forehead and kiss it, or if the night air will part it as she runs.
Uncle Pete never asked about the children’s hygienic state. Donna’s fingernails, is there dirt underneath them? Are they left to grow long and sharp? Warren’s nose, small and bulbous, whose task is it to keep clean? What is the snot to dirt ratio on his face? Donna begrudgingly wipes his nose with the hem of her skirt, or the handkerchief with the pink embroidery floss coming loose around the edges, and stands, half-aware, biting at the hangnail on her thumb. Or, has Great-grandma Myrna set the routine? A good wash three times a day: morning, lunch, and bedtime. Noses are to be wiped, faces wiped, hair is to be combed and re-combed. The rags are to be rinsed out at the hand pump in the back.
Uncle Pete doesn’t consider the season of the year. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that it would happen more often in the swampy summer months, the air thick with gnats and moisture, the haze of pollen and sweat and heat threatening a kind of drowning that doesn’t come. Inside is stifling; outside is sweltering. The compromise, to sit underneath the tree in the shade with a pencil and paper, or a picnic of soda crackers and chokecherry jam, or the paper cut-out animals at the elaborately imagined zoo. The monkey rides the tiger again, to visit the penguin who’s called out to them from atop his snowy, snowy hill, through the jungle filled with giant beetles and worms, across the desert with the giant ants, until they reach each other and jump and dance excitedly.
The mosquitoes take off from the small, muddy puddles in the back field. The horsemint Donna had crushed and rubbed onto their skin wears off. A mosquito lands on Warren’s sweaty forearm, Donna careful not to slap, instead presses down with her thumb to flick it away. They dash for the back door of the house, up the wooden steps and over the narrow threshold.
Read the story in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-7-erin-osborne/
