A Gathering of Debris
by Tommy Dean
Last night, The boyfriend put another hole in the wall above her head, the drywall dust coating her hair. A crown for a queen, her mother used to say, tucking her in her throat flushed, a shared romanticism the girl never felt. She saw the texts. His friend’s plans. She wishes all guns were replaced with a chime, violence metered out in blips and bleeps.
In bed, she waits for the commotion from tonight’s anxiety—to cease, wishing she was in the pool, the water enveloping her, warm and brackish, the sting of chlorine, dissolving anything other than muscle memory. She’d tunnel ahead, puncturing pockets of air that would rise to the surface sloshed by her waves.
She dreamt of making a home at the bottom of an air-tight igloo. A room of her own. An unmarked destination.
At school, each bell the electronic starting pistol, urging her to dive, teenagers swirling around her like schools of fish, their musty and sweet scents pungent and unforgiving. Warnings never bubble out of her mouth.
Sometime after lunch, the hallways of her school are filled with rage, the rat-tat-tat of gunfire, and the creeping tendrils of smoke. The fire alarm blaze, as she races toward the gym; each corner a last breath before another plunge through the strobing lights, bodies shadowed across the pictures of celebrated athletes, smile eternal, safely captured in their youth.
She opens the gym door slowly. Sweating hands on the metal bar. A reminder of the feeling of being locked into a carnival ride when she was younger. The way her stomach would clench in anticipation. The Boyfriend stands, lone, on the edge of the swaying diving board with a pistol in his hand.
His voice echoes across the silent space. “You fucking promised.”
There’s too much gravity between them. Too many ways they can fall. She didn’t remember. All the ways she agreed. The nodding of her head to shake away the dust coming back to him in images of complicity.
“I can leave. I can walk away.” But she’s moving closer, her feet feeling foreign in her shoes, the tile dry, the pastel pinks and teals ghostly with brine from evaporated pool water.
He’s stepping down the ladder, gun clenched in his hand. She could run. Could dart. But turning her back on him feels like a different kind of death.
“If they find you,” the gun in his hand again, pointing here and there. An image of her father talking with a cigarette in his mouth. Swallowing her voice with the baritone of his importance.
The door cracks open, a rushing of boys, whooping, hopped up. The boyfriend is swinging. She’s ducking, falling, splashing into the pool, the swell of water beating at her ears, the percussion of a shot, the opaque look of his face as she cradles her legs, calcifying into rock, rolling, bumping, a stone tumulted by wave and pitch, holding this last note.
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021). Hollows, A collection of flash fiction is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press. He lives in Indiana where he currently is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fiction 2019, Monkeybicycle, and the Atticus Review. He taught writing workshops for the Gotham Writers Workshop, the Barrelhouse Conversations and Connections conference, and The Writers Workshop. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “A Gathering of Debris”? This piece, like most of my stories, spun out of the first line. As I ended the first paragraph, I knew that with this amount of potential violence that I’d need to make this piece as short as possible to contain the intimacy of building empathy for this main character as the violence happened in the white space of the story. I’m intrigued by the moments in life just before violence erupts and seeing how characters would act or react in these situations.
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