Switch Burning: Flash Fiction -The Toast

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Home: The Toast

Every October, our father, smelling of cigarettes and Valvoline, would tell us to scour the five acres of land in front of our house for all the switches that had sliced our backsides throughout the year. They had been tossed aside like used condoms, dirty memories that needed to be cleaned up. Our fingers sifted through the damp orange leaves, searching for that cold whip of bark, until we discovered one, turning it over in our hands. One for letting the dogs out of their pen, one for stealing five dollars to buy the latest Conan the Barbarian, one for looking up Abby Reinhardt’s skirt on the bus. Like collecting scabs, we piled them into a stone pit. Later that evening our father would soak them with gasoline and massive flames would burst from the ground. We stood with hands in our pockets, watching the orange flicker reflect on the surrounding bare branches. On Sundays they told us that Jesus died for our sins, nailed to a cross at Golgotha. But nothing felt as forgiving as that moment of silence in October, the smoke of burning sins, our father poking at the flesh of trees until every ember was ash and we were saved.

Jessica Duncan is from St. Louis, Missouri and is currently an M.A. candidate at Northern Michigan University.

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