Brainstorm#4

She jumped thinking it was a rat but in reality it wasn’t. It might have been a shadow cast across the floor – like a falling leaf or something of that nature. Regardless of what it was Shelly was white with fear as if a tiny little rodent would somehow change into a giant, hairy monster and consume her whole. She was eleven so her phobia of rats, as is with most females, is justifiable. Mother came in the room – the scene of the crime – because her beloved daughter hollered alert making a peaceful afternoon chaotic if only for an instant.


Really the mouse event was the single most dramatic thing that happened that day. We were, all three of us, mother, daughter, and me, the college –bound big brother, sharing a fall day before my departure in one week. I was not to return home until the holidays so I gathered each minute like a forty-niners gathered gold in the west. The only females in my world: Shelly and Olga, my overly protective single mother.

It wasn’t that my father left us for a young beauty; it was because he died of cancer, lung cancer, after years of nicotine abuse. It was hard at first to deal with my dad’s death…especially for me his boy, his good-old boy. He was always so proud of me, always. He use to tell me Roy, that’s me, sock-it to them son! You can do it boy! Then, when I scored a run, or batted a run in for the score, he, so I was told, elbowed his neighbor sitting next to him and exclaimed with a Fred Flintstone tone, that there is my boy!!

Everyone knew I was his son. I was always introduced as Roy, Hank’s, that’s my father, college-boy Roy Henders. My family was well known in our parts for some time. We ran a family business making custom cannons for the big wheels of the world. Yes the world. We were International and my father a proud man in that reality. You see he worked hard since he was sixteen in learning his tread. He swept floors at first, and then got an offer once one of the hands moved south. He continue to work hard until one day, forty plus years later, the owner left him the business and went into retirement. That’s when the enter family, minus Shelly, she was too young then, took over the business. Soon we found ourselves hiring more workers and opening new shops across the state. Then, for what seemed a blink of an eye, we were dealing with overseas clients. Everything changed dramatically then…for the better of course.