In the Basement

His mother’s voice rises, finally penetrating.

            “Now, Barnaby! I’m making dinner! It’s going to wrinkle!” Barnaby pauses his video game, picturing corrugated meatloaf, furrowed potatoes. But he rouses, knowing she wants him to get the laundry out of the dryer.

            The dryer is in the basement.

            At the door to the long, steep flight of steps, Barnaby pauses. Below, the linoleum landing turns a sharp corner into a hallway, narrow and dark, leading to the basement. 

            His father will be home from work soon. 

On the fifth step from the bottom, Barnaby leans forward, grips the handrail, and swings his feet into the air, leaping the rest of the distance. His sneakers make a reassuring thud.

            “Barnaby?” calls his mother.

            “I’m fine!”

            His footsteps follow him down the hallway. The basement door creaks. Musty air seeps around Barnaby as he fumbles for the chain that hangs from the light bulb.

         He passes the ancient, thrumming water heater on his right. To his left is the raised entrance to the storeroom. He avoids looking at it. To reach the washer and dryer he has to sidle past the big chest freezer. In it rest his father’s kills: paper-wrapped packets of venison, dismembered ducks, scaled and gutted trout.

Barnaby was taken along on the last deer hunt. The rifle shook in his hands; he spurted tears when his father shot the doe, while she twitched her way to death. He vomited as his father eviscerated her in the field.

            He won’t be going this year.

Seizing the laundry basket, he scoops cooling laundry into it from the dryer, peeling socks apart as his mother has taught him. His father wants him to do different chores, but Barnaby can’t clean out the gutters without getting dizzy. His first effort with the lawnmower produced a ragged pattern of bald patches and unshorn sections until his father ordered him to stop. 

Barnaby drags wet sheets into the dryer, pulls out the lint screen, gathers its contents into a small gray wad, tosses it toward a neglected wastebasket. The fuzz rolls silently down to join the detritus on the floor.

He retrieves the laundry basket and hears a misplaced sound. Scurrying, clicking, as of small nails against a hard surface. A gray form lollops past on the edge of his vision. Whipping his head around, Barnaby catches a glimpse — long rear feet scrabbling underneath a tuft of tail?  It scoots away from the freezer and up the uneven steps into the storeroom.

Barnaby drops the basket, swearing shakily. He wrenches open the door to the chest freezer, adrenaline magnifying his movements.

In the top freezer drawer lie cellophane-wrapped packages of skinned and cleaned rabbit parts. Last week his mother served a pie made from the hares his father bagged in Colorado. Barnaby’s mouth dried at the thought of the lop-eared bunny he and his classmates had treasured in fifth grade.

“Eat what’s put in front of you,” his father said.

Barnaby reaches out to poke at the meat glistening under the plastic. The package shifts, revealing underneath it a butcher-paper shrouded lump labeled Mallard breasts.

Something brushes his cheek.

He jumps, toppling backward over the laundry basket, blinking as something flaps over his head. He looks past the ceiling-mounted hook where his father hangs deer carcasses. A feathery shape torpedoes above him, banks, and flies through the storeroom entrance.

Barnaby struggles to his feet, chest heaving. The freezer lid won’t close. He shoves packets back and forth to make them fit, his hands growing numb. He squints in the cold breath of the freezer, surveying packets labeled venison – roast, venison – kidneys, venison – tongue.

  Images flash in his memory. The beautiful creature hanging by its rear feet from the hook, antlers grazing the floor, tongue lolling from its mouth. The cold, metallic smell as his father yanks the hide away from the muscles underneath.

At last the packages of meat align. He slams the lid down. Catching his breath, he rubs feeling back into his hands.

A movement of air at his back. Something large steps behind him, its sharp four-beat footfall click-clacking on the concrete. It mounts the steps into the storeroom. The footfalls tip-tap into the distance.

The storeroom is only a glorified crawlspace, a cobwebby chamber tucked between the basement wall and the outer foundation. He turns toward it. Nothing stirs in its gloom. Another light with a pull chain is mounted on the storeroom’s low ceiling, but he’ll have to climb the steps and stoop through the doorway to reach it.

“Barnaby? What’s taking you?” His mother’s voice from the top of the stairway, flooding him with relief.

Then a heavier step joins hers.

“Dinner’s waiting!” yells Barnaby’s father. “Get up here, now.” His footsteps, thudding downstairs.

Barnaby reaches for the basement door and heaves it shut.

“For Chrissake!” His father’s voice is muffled by the closed door. “What’s the matter with you?”

Barnaby ducks into the storeroom.

The light bulb flickers, then dies. Thick darkness surrounds him, until he glimpses a dull glow off to his left. He sidesteps the Coleman lantern and cooler, a wicker fishing creel. The glow brightens.

Drafts of fresh air draw him onwards. He moves fluidly, his muscles alive under his skin, until something stands in his way — a clothes rack, dusty with his father’s old uniforms, his mother’s outdated gowns. He shoves aside the suffocating cloth, using his head and shoulders.

His father’s voice: remote thunder. “Barnaby! Get out here now, or I’ll give you something to be scared of!”

Barnaby pushes on, emerging on the other side. Stone steps lead down into a sunlit glade. A stream ripples at the edge of a meadow. His shoulders twitch with excitement, powering his long, strong legs as he picks his way through sedges to drink from the stream.

“Barnaby?”  His father’s voice, faint now.

Barnaby lifts his head, his new antlers still furred with velvet, and bounds away.

***

 Jan M. Flynn’s short fiction has won both First Place and Honorable Mentions in Writer’s Digest annual competitions and appears in literary journals including Midnight Circus, The Binnacle, Noyo River Review, and Far Side Review as well as anthologies. An excerpt from her novel THE MOON RAN AFTER HER won First Place at the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. She is represented by Helen Adams of Zimmermann Literary Agency in New York. Find her on Facebook and Twitter, @JanMFlynnAuthor; her website and blog at JanMFlynn.net, or on Medium.com, @janmflynn1537.