Swipe

As in:

Bobby and Jill named their son Stephen but by the time he was six they only called him Swipe. In addition to his exploits as a kite flyer and a toll house cookie thief, Swipe fashioned himself a wannabe crocodile hunter.

Bone-tired from working swing shift, Bobby would come home to find Swipe decked out in Steve Irwin khakis, growling in Australian, eating Fruit Loops, and pretending a 14-foot salty was hiding from him under the couch.

Swipe eventually graduated to “Stormchasers” and Bobby would often sit with him on Saturdays, watching the Sooner scientists busting around the plains, chasing funnel clouds the colors of a black eye. Once between episodes, they used milk, chocolate syrup and crushed oreos to try to form a super cell in a blender. A brief, chocolate vortex creates a helluva mess, so it was better, then, that Jill was off with her choir in St. Paul that week.

Bobby was still wearing the same pair of jeans when a bomb shaped like an acronym separated Swipe and a young corporal Memphis from anything that could make a new memory. When the two Marines arrived, Jill ran out the kitchen door with the ghosts of the grandchildren she would never have. At the front door, he then greeted the Marines who looked too young to bring such heartbreaking news. So, he thought, bravely, just what the fuck do you do when you’re life’s broken but you still have to greet the Marines at the door, still have to pay the bills?

The sky cleared outside Othello as the van with the new, Gold-star mother crumpled in the back traveled nearly alone down the two lane highway. A full moon with a rainbow of ice crystals around it illuminated the frost on the sagebrush. Bobby drove east while licking the salted drops of tears that had dammed against his upper lip. He tried to think about something a little bit different than the white noise of the pain. So he decided to think about wrapping his arm around the memory of his only child, as if his son were still here, and they would search the moonlit horizon, the shoulders of basalt ridges exposed by ancient floods, to see if there was a storm in the still clear, silent night, and a tornado they could chase forever.