Home Front
by Charles Holdefer
Dan opened the front door with his elbow, balancing a beverage tray and easing into the living room where he avoided a tusk. “I’m back!”
In the kitchen, Paula finished her drink and threw the ice in the sink. She picked her way toward the living room and met him with a smile, lowering herself onto the couch. “What took you so long?”
“Traffic was nuts.”
“It’s only four blocks.”
“A supra double-skinny for you.” He tightened the lid and held out her cup. “And a mega mocha for me. Where’s Serena?”
“In her room. Watching TV I think.”
“Sweeties!” he called.
A five-year old girl with a page-boy haircut trotted in. Dan held out a juice box. “Here you go. Mango-boysenberry-grape.”
“I asked for a cupcake. I don’t want juice.”
“Listen, we already discussed that. You can’t just lick the frosting off the top. You have to eat entire cupcakes. That’s life.”
He ripped the wrapper from a straw and impaled the juice box for her. He offered it again. Serena crossed her arms and refused to take it.
“Can you handle this?” he asked Paula. “I’m gonna get a shower,”
“But you had a shower before you went out. Drink your coffee. Sit down.”
Dan looked at them and wished he was somewhere else.
Paula looked at him and wished he was someone else.
On the other side of town, C.C. swished mouthwash in the back of a van and spat it out on the parking lot, squinting into the sun.
There was a trumpeting, and suddenly Serena seized the juice box and started sucking, sucking, sucking. Her cheeks contracted, her eyes widened.
“Honey, take time to breathe!”
The juice box gurgled, then Serena let go, gasping. She dropped the juice box on the rug and clutched at her round belly.
Dan shook his head. “That’s one way.”
Paula bent to pick up the juice box but she missed it and fell off the couch and rolled on the floor. “Ow!”
“You all right?”
She held the box up to him and then climbed back onto the cushions. “Yeah. Just a little accident.” She rubbed her elbow.
Serena flittered her fingers and hopped toward Dan on one foot. “Let’s see you hop on one foot, Daddy.” She turned and hopped to her mother, sticking out her purple tongue. “Mommy couldn’t do it no way.” She pivoted and hopped back to her father.
“Listen Sweeties,” Dan reproved. “We have to speak nicely to each other.”
On the other side of town, C.C. told a man who approached the van: “Fifty bucks.”
“Dan,” Paula said. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Can’t it wait?” he asked. “I’m gonna get that shower.”
Serena began to chant: “Daddy’s dirty! Daddy’s dirty!” She hesitated before an enormous turd on the floor. “Watch me fly!” She planted both feet, crouched, then launched herself into the air.
Charles Holdefer is an American writer based in Brussels. His collection Agitprop for Bedtime (2020) includes work that first appeared in the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and his next book, Don’t Look at Me, will be published in 2022. Visit Charles at www.charlesholdefer.com.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Home Front”? The early drafting of “Home Front” started as an experiment in taking a figurative expression literally. Here: “the elephant in the room.” What if, in a situation rife with the unspoken, there actually was an elephant in the room? And, more than a distraction or a source of carpet stains, could its presence also contribute to the story’s tension? The unexpectedly literal has intrigued me since I was a kid, finding it in Beatles’ songs like “Come Together” with phrases like “Got to be good looking ’cause he’s so hard to see.” Or in the mock-interview in A Hard Day’s Night, where a reporter asks, “How did you find America?” and Lennon replies, “Turn left at Greenland.” Comedians have been using this literalist stratagem since, well, forever. Henny Youngman: “Take my wife, please.” Groucho Marx: “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.” The list is long… Fiction isn’t stand-up, of course. It can include jokes (I like it when it does) but it respects a different linguistic economy. It has a different pace. Jokes aside, a literalist usage can provide a situation. And this is interesting for a fiction writer, because once you have a situation, possibilities emerge for plot. The first time I attempted this was accidental, with a story I wrote in Dick Cheney in Shorts. A sentence popped into my head, out of nowhere: “Like many people, Herb had his demons, but what set him apart was that he kept them in a pen in his back yard.” If the sentence had stopped with “demons” I would’ve crossed it out as a cliché. But the subsequent words, which literalized it, took me into new territory. How could I depict that? How would such a situation affect his family and neighbors? It required multiple drafts, but that one sentence eventually generated everything that followed. And that’s what I tried to do with “Home Front.” The final draft eliminates some elephant references, only a few remain, but even the bits that got cut were necessary for me in the process of finding the beats for the story. It’s counter-intuitive, moving from the figurative to the literal, but it’s a way to jolt my noggin in the hope of reverse-engineering something potentially interesting, about a family dealing with a lot of unsaid trouble.
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