Music In The Floor
by Josh Goller
Tommy cuddles his face into the curve of Mama’s armpit, and shallow puffs of her breath, sour from drinking all that grownup juice, tickle against his nostrils. Normally, it’s a game they play, to sniff each others’ armpits and pinch their noses and stick out their tongues like it’s smelly even though Mama always smells like soap or sometimes like Windex, but she fell asleep as they lay there on the shag carpet, so Mama could get off her feet for a minute before Owen comes home from work. Tommy can hear music in the floor, from the restaurant downstairs where Mama works sometimes and where they make the biggest, juiciest hotdogs, but it’s grownups only when it gets dark, which it’s starting to do now.
When her breathing deepened, the sunlight on Mama’s face was orange and slanted and the juice glass in her hand tilted over and some got on the carpet, but it was the yellow kind, not the red, so Tommy knew it wouldn’t make a mess. Now the sun’s gone. The kitchen light is on though and shines some on Mama’s feet; he can see the red marks where her work shoes rub.
Tommy doesn’t want it to get dark. If he had Rabbit, who Mama tells him is older than he is and that’s why Rabbit is missing an eye button and his neck is so floppy, then he’d have someone to talk to while Mama sleeps, but his stuffed animal is already packed away in the boxes stacked along the wall and Tommy doesn’t know in which one.
He squeezes his eyes tight and tries to sleep too, but when he does he dreams of monsters. They hunch outside the kitchen windows in big flowing capes with burning coal eyes and teeth like kitchen knives, looking in at him and Mama. When the sky gets dark, one monster comes inside, it slips itself through the window cracks and billows and puffs like ink in water until it fills the kitchen, and Tommy can’t see through to the door where Owen will come home and he wants the monster to stop so much. He’s awake now and crying and he nuzzles into Mama’s armpit more. He can hear what she’d be telling him if she wasn’t so tired; she’d be saying “only a dream, dreams can’t hurt you my little Tommy boy.” He whispers these words so quiet he can’t hear, and lifts his head from Mama’s sleeping chest—where his tears leave a dark spot on her shirt—and sneaks a peek into the kitchen but there’s no monster. He feels safer but wants to not have any more thoughts.
But he does have thoughts. He thinks about how Mama and Owen got to yelling at each other last night while they were wrapping dishes in newspapers and taping up big boxes like the one Rabbit is in. Owen asked Mama if Tommy could start calling him “daddy” and her face got all red like Tommy’s does when he runs too much outside in the sun. “Just to get in the habit,” Owen said. “It’ll make it easier for us at the church there.” Mama said that Tommy already has a daddy even though when Tommy tries to use his imagination to see the daddy’s face it’s only a blur with hair on top, because a long time ago the daddy did a bad thing and had to get a punishment that’s longer than the longest time-out.
And then Tommy listens again to the music coming from the floor, and wonders if their new house—the one in the country, where nobody else will live in the whole building except them and where there will be a front yard and a backyard and where Owen said he tied a truck tire onto a rope and hung it from a tree for Tommy—he wonders if that house will have music in the floor too, or if the windows can shut tight to keep out all monsters, or if he can start calling Owen “daddy” there. Playing with a tangle of Mama’s black hair, Tommy decides that when they move to the country then Mama won’t have to drink so much grownup juice and her feet won’t hurt and she and Owen won’t yell when they wrap dishes, and he nods off to sleep, in the crook of Mama’s arm, and dreams of jumping from the tire swing, of grass between his toes, until Owen comes home and wakes them.
Josh Goller sprouted in Wisconsin soil but the winds carried him to the gloom and damp of the Pacific Northwest. He now resides in Portland where he earned his MFA and has taken up hipster-watching. His work has appeared online and in print and he edits the flash fiction online journal The Molotov Cocktail (http://themolotovcocktail.com/).