Flip Flops

Miah Arnold
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I told Scheff, “We’re not going away.” I had James with me, in the stroller, whimpering because his daddy scared him.
Scheff was a loud, mean man.

James feared him, but right then, I felt safe enough. It was the later part of lunchtime, and Scheff was sitting on a stool out front of the Grill, drinking a warm Hi-C with his work buddies.

I told him, “We’re going to be a birthmark on your ass.”

See, you can try to laser a birthmark off, but it always comes back; it never goes away. And I told him, “We’re never going away.”

He picked at his boot like he wasn’t listening, didn’t even look me in the face, but I watched my words crowding into his shoulders and neck. Because I said what I said, and I done it slowly. One word at a time, and loud, like a news announcer. I saw them work their way inside him and I knew he heard me. And I could feel my words stuck hard there, behind me, when I started away.

I listened to the sound of my flip flops flapping as I left. Sounded good to me, final and a little uppity. I knew Scheff watched my ass swing as I walked away, but I knew he took me for serious, too.

It’s important, because Scheff always told me I was useless and stupid and simple. And usually, I am. But that time I won, that once. When it really counted for me to make things to work right, I did.

He took his dog with him. He left everything else, even the car. Must’ve hitched on out of town, up to the city. Took a month, a year, for me to be certain, though. To feel sure.

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Miah Arnold is from rural Utah. A PhD student at the University of Houston, she has worked as an editor for Gulf Coast and Lyric Poetry Review. She has taught at the University of Houston, Writers in the Schools, and Inprint. This year her fiction has appeared in The Painted Bride Quarterly and The South Dakota Review. She was awarded a Barthleme Prize for Nonfiction in 2005 and the Inprint/Diana P. Hobby Prize for Fiction in 2007.