The Prodigals

By Jacob Wrich

In these eleven beautifully crafted stories, Jacob Wrich cuts right to the heart. Set in the Midwest over the course of one year, The Prodigals takes us deep into the lives of its interrelated characters as they endure both tragedy and triumph. From a young Japanese-American girl growing up in postWorld War II Minnesota to a famous playwrights attempt to write one last play after being diagnosed with Alzheimers disease, Mr. Wrich finds both humanity and humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524658366

Jacob Wrich

Jacob Wrich received his MA in English from the University of St. Thomas. He lives in Minnesota. The Prodigals is his first book.

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© 2017 Jacob Wrich. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/13/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5246-5837-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-5836-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017900176

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Flyover Country

Phobia

Boom Site

A Letter To Sarah

The Easy Way Out

Night Drive

When Characters Lose Their Author

In The Shadow Of The Monster

Maggot Fields

…And Then Came The Wolves

Reincarnation And The Chained Elephant

FLYOVER COUNTRY

On a rolling hill in the middle of Wisconsin, a simple white house glows yellow with the fading colors of sunrise. Two wicker rockers rest on the front porch, overlooking forty acres of spring sweetcorn sprouts. This is where Raymond has sat nearly every morning for the past fifty years. On this particular morning, Raymond sets his newspaper down on the empty rocker beside him, squints up into the blue sky and watches the vapor trail of some large jet plane flying coast to coast. Here, the planes fly so high that you can’t even see them, just the thin white cloud of vapor that hangs in the air like a thought and then dissolves. Raymond sips his orange juice, lights a match and puffs his pipe. When he sets down his pipe, Raymond finds his eyes drawn to his wrinkled hand. He studies the yellowing fingernails, the occasional liver spot, the shrapnel scars running up his right forearm. He slides a rough fingertip across his tongue and rubs a wrinkled scar as though the past is somehow erasable. Behind him, in the upstairs bedroom that overlooks the cornfields, Raymond’s wife sleeps restlessly, the effects of the morphine beginning to fade and the ache of her bone cancer rising to the surface.

Raymond puffs his pipe one last time and walks into the house, the screen door thudding behind him. He digs around in the hall closet, pushing winter jackets and work boots aside until he grips the cold steel of his shotgun. Raymond opens the gun, slides two shells into the barrels and snaps it closed, then walks silently up the stairs. Sunlight streams through the doorway, lighting a brilliant path to the bedroom where his wife sleeps. Raymond holds the shotgun to the floor, leaning on it like a crutch. He stands in the doorway, holding the gun behind the wall as he watches his wife’s listless movements, her hands treading across the blue sheets as though she were falling through the sky. He closes his eyes, tilts his head back and inhales deeply through his nose. When he opens his eyes, he can see Margie’s eyelids flutter and strain open.

Margie sees her husband standing in the doorway surrounded by a halo of sunlight like some angel coming to rescue her. For a moment she wonders if she is in Heaven. Raymond leans the gun out of sight against the outside wall and walks over to her bed. He takes a small hand towel off the bedside table and wipes the sweat from her brow, then leans over and kisses her forehead, letting his lips linger there, relishing her touch and the smell of her fine white hair. Raymond savors the salty taste of her sweaty skin on his lips and whispers into her ear to ask if she would like some water. Margie shakes her head, though her mouth has turned white with dryness. Raymond dips the corner of a towel into a glass of water anyway and rubs it across her lips. Margie’s eyes close for a brief moment, her body electric with the flicker of nourishment the water provides. Raymond leans in and whispers again, asking her if she is in pain. Margie nods. Raymond holds up the bottle of liquid morphine as Margie blinks away tears and nods again. Raymond fills the dropper, places it in her mouth and squeezes the bulb. He wrings a little more water from the towel into her mouth to wash down the medicine. Then Raymond sits on the side of Margie’s bed studying her, trying to understand how the face that he has seen every day for most of his life suddenly looks so different, how the color of her skin has changed to some shade of white that he no longer recognizes, how the stoutness of her cheeks has surrendered to gravity. Raymond becomes acutely aware that there is a skeleton beneath her skin. The morphine takes ahold of Margie, and she falls into a deep sleep.

Raymond walks to the bedroom doorway, reaches around the corner for the shotgun, and returns to the side of Margie’s bed. He stands, frozen in the sunlight, staring out the window over the perfect rows of sprouting cornstalks. In her white nightgown and gaunt, pale frame, Raymond pictures Margie as a vapor trail across the blue sky of the cotton sheets, slowly fading away into nothing but a memory. He knows that her peaceful sleep will not last. By this afternoon the effects of the morphine will wear off, and he will need to wash her and change her sheets while she winces in pain. He will have to be extra careful not to break another bone.

Raymond leans over and kisses her forehead again, sliding the back of his wrinkled hand across her cheek. The wedding photograph on the wall catches his eye. How fresh and strong they both once looked. The face from the photograph is the one he remembers, the round, rosy face dotted with optimistic green eyes. Raymond squints down at the gun and slides the safety into the off position. He holds his breath as he cocks back the hammer. Glowing rods of sunlight stab into his watering eyes. He blinks away the tears, staring down the barrel of the gun into Margie’s vanishing face, as his finger slides across the cool metal trigger.

Raymond’s muscles go slack in a wave of overwhelming failure as he closes his eyes and lowers the rifle to the floor. He uncocks the hammer and switches the safety back on before turning his back to Margie and walking out of the room with his chin on his chest. The shotgun clunks each wooden step as Raymond drags it behind him and drops it at the base of the stairs, the same place he has dropped it every morning for the past three days.

Back outside, Raymond stares into the expanse of open land and sunshine. He finishes his glass of orange juice, which now looks like fire in the sunlight, and watches another vapor trail tens of thousands of feet overhead as it fades into the blue sky. Miles off in the distance, grey mountains of clouds gather on the horizon, bringing the promise of heavy rain by late morning. The breeze blows a cyclone of dirt across the open fields, and the American flag atop the flagpole begins lapping at the air like a dog’s tongue. Raymond steps carefully between the rows of corn sprouts as he walks into the field. He stops and turns to face his house, the simple white house on the rolling green hill with the bedroom window reflected in blue sky. Raymond falls to his knees, and with his hands raised over his head, he begins to cry out into the emptiness, the sound of his voice swallowed by the immensity of open space. Then with some effort, he straightens his spine, folds his hands across his lap and does something that he hasn’t done since his landing craft vehicle dropped him at Omaha Beach in 1944.

Raymond prays.

PHOBIA

When storm clouds gather on the horizon, my big sister gets this feeling in the pit of her stomach like she just swallowed fire. When a curtain of rain sweeps forward and the sky turns black, all the muscles in her body squeeze her insides so tightly that her lungs can barely draw air. Then, when lightning draws lines in the sky and a roll of thunder rattles the window panes, her body floods with adrenaline, causing her limbs to shake uncontrollably. And when the wind bends the trees and the fat drops of rain slap the sides of the house in sheets, her shivers subside and she succumbs to soft crying, which is somehow worse than the shivering. I know this because almost every time this happened, she was in my arms. My big sister suffers from astraphobia, the fear of storms.

When people think of mental illness, they conjure up images of straight-jacketed schizophrenics or some woman with bipolar taking out her day on a Wal-Mart clerk; but in reality, the most common mental illness is anxiety, which is almost always caused by fear. Nearly every person in the world suffers from some irrational fear. For some people it’s spiders. For others it’s snakes. Some fear death. A lot of people fear public speaking. It’s a universal truth: we are all afraid. The medical community has done us the favor of putting a name to over 500 phobias. Botanophobia, as a random example, is the fear of plants. It may be hard to imagine, but some people cannot walk near a garden without slipping into trepidation.

My mother was afraid of my father. There’s no medical name for that, but I would call it Edward-o-phobia. This phobia makes sense to me, at least more sense than being afraid of plants, since there was an inherent danger in being near my dad. My father suffered from gamophobia, the fear of marriage or commitment. As much as I hate to admit it, in some ways Edward and I are the same.

Aviophobia is the fear of flying. Though the chances of dying in a plane crash are eleven million to one, it does happen. We know from watching television news that planes fall from the sky and roll into flaming piles of wreckage. Aviophobia really only lasts until take off. Once you are flying, the real fear lies in falling. That’s called basophobia. When you are soaring above the world, flying is crucial. Right now I’m at ten thousand feet over a patchwork quilt of Wisconsin farmland. Up here, the problems of the real world don’t exist. If you look at anything from far enough away it resembles something else, something small and harmless. Fear is always a result of proximity, and this airplane brings me closer to my fear at a rate of 600 miles per hour.

Not that I’m really afraid of flying, or falling for that matter. Perhaps I have nostophobia, the fear of returning home. This phobia frequently situates itself in the hearts of soldiers and is sometimes why they request to go back into combat even after they are given leave to return home. I’m no soldier, just a student. But this is how life works: time pushes us perpetually forward into the unknown. One minute I’m sitting in the library at Columbia University highlighting passages in my Abnormal Psychology textbook, and the next I’m on an airplane to St. Paul.

My sister picks me up from the airport, but I drive since she doesn’t like driving in the city. She doesn’t really care for the city at all. She could be diagnosed with a mild case of enochlophobia, the fear of crowds. I remember the roads as I drive through downtown St. Paul over to St. Joseph’s Hospital and park in the ramp. My sister hasn’t spoken much and neither have I. Maybe she’s dealing with her fears. I know how my sister feels in a thunderstorm because right now, the sky is falling on me.

It’s hard to understand how people live with certain phobias. The fear of air is anemophobia. This can be the fear of gusts of wind or just the fear of swallowing air. Fear of the very thing that sustains your life sounds utterly debilitating. Anemophobia is just the fear of regular, everyday air. The fear of airborne or noxious substances or diseases is called aerophobia, and that’s something completely different. Aerophobics also tend to fear hospitals.

Nosocomephobia is the fear of hospitals, like St. Joe’s with its bleached-out hallways. I follow the signs through the maze of hallways to the maternity ward while my sister sits in the coffee shop near the lobby reading a book of plays by her favorite playwright, A. H. Troufant. Near a window that overlooks the city, a woman wearing a blue gown rocks a purple newborn, its hair matted and its button nose buried in its mother’s chest. Down the hall a woman yells, breathes, yells louder, screams, is quiet. There are four different names for the fear of childbirth.

When I walk into the room, I see Maria lying on her back, basking in muted, blue television light. A machine near her bedside beeps and spits out