Rise and Fall
by Justin Herrmann
The summer of my tenth birthday was spent in cabs of semi-trucks with an ex stepfather, Cotton. Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri. One time we made it to Florida. He’d give me twenty-dollar bills at truck stops. When he was married to my mother I didn’t get allowance. Sometimes while he rested, I’d spend hours playing arcade games shooting cowboys with plastic pistols. Once a man played alongside me with the other pistol, placed an entire roll of quarters on the machine, said a girl as pretty as me could help myself. That I was a boy didn’t stop me from spending those quarters. Another time, at the counter of a Huddle House, a waitress with rainbow-shaped tears tattooed on her face brought me three plates of fries, only charged me for a Pepsi. She wrote a phone number on the back of the grease-stained receipt. Some nights Cotton would park in rows alongside other trucks, climb behind the seats into the sleeper cab. I’d stay up front, listen to the crackle of conversations on the CB. The thick curtain to the sleeper remained unfastened and in moonlight or white glow of fluorescent tubes, a wool blanket would rise and fall, rise and fall, till sometime before dawn. Sometimes, too cold to sleep, too weary to fight the cold, I’d climb in the sleeper, pull a wool corner around myself. Other nights no one slept.
Justin Herrmann is the author of the short fiction collection Highway One, Antarctica (MadHat Press 2014). His stories have appeared in Best Small Fictions, as well as journals including River Styx, Mid-American Review, Fourth River, and New World Writing. He lives with his family in Alaska.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Rise & Fall”? A friend of mine recently published a story that contained a couple details from my brother’s childhood, which, for the most part, is my childhood too. She wrote a great story. She said my family has a childhood ripe with story material. It’s rare that I’ve written stories about children, so I haven’t tapped much into my childhood for material. Her story inspired me to write this.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
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