The Tent in the Gymnasium Read online

Chapter 3 - Mocking Blackbirds...

  “Hudson, promise me you’ll never speak of your uncle again.”

  Hudson almost lost his cherished pocketknife the day his mother forced him to make that vow. A wailing phone had roused him from bed that morning just before dawn. Hudson had walked silently across the hall’s carpet and had peeked upon his mother, her forehead crumpled atop the kitchen table, a shaking hand pressing the phone receiver to her head.

  “Hudson, your uncle has done a terrible thing.”

  But Hudson’s mother finished preparing breakfast before she told her son what Uncle Mark had done, and she dropped the news upon her boy’s plate much as she might a burned slice of toast. Hudson listened in silent shock as his mother told him that Uncle Mark had risen in the middle of the night and gathered Aunt Margie and cousins Mallory and Mandy in their home’s basement. Hudson trembled as mother told him that Uncle Mark had loaded a shotgun and leveled its barrel upon each member of his family, screaming that dirt and grime had turned his loved ones into monsters he no longer recognized. Hudson cried when his mother told him Uncle Mark had threatened to kill his family. The uncle Hudson knew, who treated him with such respect, who taught him how to operate power tools, who gifted him a pocketknife, would never have done such a thing. Hudson shook his head and screamed. His mother told him Uncle Mark had set the shotgun down and promised to never return before driving away in the night.

  Hudson feared that the monsters that lurked in Uncle Mark’s dreams had slithered into the world.

  “Hudson, I never trusted your uncle.”

  Hudson cried as his mother gathered his unfinished plate from the table. She did not offer Hudson a hug. She only vanished before leaving Hudson alone to swallow his hurt however best he might.

  Hudson almost lost his cherished pocketknife later that afternoon. He drifted about the house all day searching for some good reason to use the blade his uncle had gifted him. He failed to find any boxes that needed to be sliced open. He dared not attempt to carve owls from his mother’s scented soap. He could not find knots to feed to his sharp blade.

  Hudson drifted outside his apartment and skulked to the empty lot on the corner of the block in search of an activity that required a pocketknife. The lot’s tall weeds and grasses had just been mowed, and clusters of blackbirds hopped across cut clippings in search of spider and worm. Hudson held little regard for ugly blackbirds, and he desperately on that day needed to find some purpose for his knife. So Hudson unfolded the blade from its handle, and with visions of spearing a dirty blackbird in the eye, hurled the pocketknife at a bird and smiled at the whistling noise the blade made as it whirled towards its target.

  The pocketknife failed to slice a single feather, and the blackbirds were hardly disturbed by Hudson’s clumsy effort to harm them. Disappointed, but not yet defeated, Hudson bounded into the lot to retrieve his prized knife. Only he had not paid enough attention to where, precisely, the blade had landed. Piles of cut grass seemed to rest everywhere his knife may have been. Hudson panicked as he kicked through the lot, praying that he might catch a glimmer of his blade out of the corner of his eye. Blackbirds mocked him with their song, whistled in response to Hudson’s curses as dusk fell into night.

  Hudson was crying again when he felt something at the bottom of his step. Hudson found his pocketknife buried beneath a pile of grass. He would never have seen it had he not stepped directly upon it. He was lucky to have found it, and he had been foolish to have thrown it.

  Hudson sprinted back to his apartment and cleaned the blade in his bedroom’s dark. His mother did not knock on his bedroom door to offer him any dinner, and though he went to sleep hungry, his dreams after such a terrible day did not brood so terrible for the presence of that pocketknife he on that night kept beneath his pillow.

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