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Brydon Caldwell

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Trapped

It was one of the last times that I saw my mother truly irate.

Standing in the middle of the driveway, wrapped in her blue terry housecoat, in full volume against the animal control officer.  She’d forgone her wig, so lonely wisps of hair clung to her bare scalp with the raised half moon of medical staples over her left ear clearly visible for all to see.

We kept our garbage cans on the back deck in those days, lined up next to each other, ready for use. We’d woken up that morning to find that not only was one garbage can now inside another, but that both were rocking back and forth, with the top can sometimes being pushed up a few inches.

Approaching the cans did no good; we were met with hissing and agitation.  There was one obvious culprit: a raccoon. We lived in a dense urban area; the raccoons were larger than many of the dogs nearby.  This was not something we could deal with safely, especially as it got more and more agitated.

We called animal control and waited, keeping out of the back yard, watching the cans from inside the kitchen. My mother didn’t have radiation that day, so all we could do was sit and wait.  I don’t remember it taking long for animal control to arrive, backing up their van into the driveway, cages clearly visibly through the back window.  I do remember that it didn’t take him long to go around back, confirm the situation, and decide that he couldn’t do anything about it. He came to the front door to tell us.

“It’s mating season,” he said, and animal control couldn’t interfere during that time. My mother was aghast; even at 16, I was shocked. How were we going to deal with this? My mother posed the question directly.

“Just wait it out,” he responded, “given enough time it should get out on its own.”

My mother, once a calm and understanding woman, had found new depths of strength and intensity in her fight against terminal cancer. She insisted that he take action but he refused, mostly repeating the same excuses.

When he backed up, she advanced out the door, across the porch, down the steps, and finally into the driveway, picking up volume as she went.  “I’m dying of cancer, I have three children, and I’m not going to risk letting them get attacked by a rabid raccoon!”

She cornered him between her and the van, trapped against the intensity of her emotion. I doubt he would have admitted to being overwhelmed, but in my mind’s eye there was a definite tilt in his body away from her and towards his van.

Ultimately and perhaps unsurprisingly, my mother won out. He grabbed his equipment, separated the garbage cans, and took away one large unhappy raccoon.  

But that image of my mother raging in her disappearing dignity in the driveway is one that I’ll never forget.

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Quick Decision

The shoe hung in the air.

My father was crouched down by the front door, picking up random shoes and throwing them at me. So far, none had come close to making contact.  This one, if I allowed it, was on track to hit me in the arm or shoulder.

The fight had begun at the dinner table, a result of my father’s increasing unhappiness being in the house and my frustration with his frequent absence. Mom had been gone for months and life was moving on, however slowly.

My younger siblings remained at the table; my sister, 13, almost gleeful at my discomfort, and my brother, 9, struggling to understand.

I don’t remember the specifics, but I do know that it was one of the rare times that I didn’t hold back. Even watching my father pass his boiling point and lash out, I went toe for toe in terms of volume and verbal violence.

He got up from the table first; I just followed him down the hallway, comment by comment and blow by blow. At 17 and trying to raise my brother and sister in the face of his increasing absence, I can’t say that I was entirely innocent of all of the criticisms he threw my way. Still, I had more than my fair share of accusations to lay at his feet in return.

When we reached the door, he stopped. Volumes rose again, and then as if crossing some invisible breaking point, he crouched down and picked up a shoe, looking at it briefly before whipping it in my direction.

Again and again and again, he threw shoes in my direction, almost as if they could be a replacement for some deep desire to put his hands on me himself. Sensing an encroaching point of no return in our relationship, I began holding back while I dodged the various shoes.

Finally, the shoe in question was launched.  Was it one of mine? If not mine, then one of his as it was twice the size of any of the other shoes in the house. I had a split second to decide: did I allow it to him and try to use that as a transition in this argument, or dodge yet again and hope that any future shoes (his supply was decreasing but not exhausted) didn’t do worse.

What was I hoping to achieve from any of this? Was continuing to fight going to actually make Dad want to be around more? What was best for my brother and sister?

Tensing, I allowed the shoe to ricochet off my left arm, leaving a bruise and bringing an end, at least temporarily, to our hostilities.

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Brydon Caldwell is a long time teacher and emerging writer from the western edge of the Canadian Shield. A lifetime of creativity and flirtation with the written word has finally coalesced into writing that he’s proud to put out into the world. His writing can also be found in The Ekphrastic Review, The Fib Review, and the upcoming Soul Cleanse and Still From Somewhere anthologies.

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