My Son, My Hero

The following is a piece of flash fiction for Daniel O’Shea’s contest at Going Ballistic.     Follow the links if you want to learn more about the contest.  The short version is this: John Hornor went to a Jason Isbell show and posted a review on his blog.  Apparently someone didn’t like John’s review and posted an anonymous comment (maybe it was Isbell himself?).  In honor of that anonymous commenter, Dan launched this contest.  Here is my entry:

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David Burkhart was buried on a sunny Thursday afternoon with only seven witnesses.  The rector from the family’s church cast a final benediction  into the still air while silent streams cascaded down Joyce Burkhart’s face. The hydraulics sighed as her son was lowered into the ground.

Davey was still and would always be her baby.  Her mind slid back through the internal film reel she had replayed countless times since Davey’s death.  He was only twenty-three.  The boy was her life.  She vaguely felt Howie squeeze her left hand as the machinery stopped. She knew that Howie loved him too, but Davey was her boy.

Even when he withdrew into the world of his computer, Joyce was still devoted to her boy.  She brought him snacks and juice, or sodas, whenever he wanted them.   Davey had always been a frail boy, so Joyce did everything in her power to protect and care for him.  When he fell asleep at the keyboard, as he often did, she lovingly eased him into his bed.  Joyce thought it was cute that he still wore underwear with superheroes on them.  His favorite was the Hulk, but he had about a half-dozen of the colorful cotton homages that his mother washed and folded neatly in his sock drawer every week.  Davey was buried wearing the Hulk’s green face over his crotch.

For three weeks after her son was buried, Joyce couldn’t bring herself to go near his room.  For some reason, this afternoon was different.  Joyce crept up the stairs like she was sneaking into a forbidden temple.  Howie was at work.  She was alone.  She had to look.

The door slid silently inward and Joyce made a tiny sound when she saw the room where her son spent most of his time.  It was darker than the rest of the house.  Davey had always wanted it that way.  She could almost see him sitting there.  Everything else was exactly as it had always been.  It was neat, but only because Joyce kept it that way.  Davey was a special boy, so she never made him clean up after himself.  Keeping a clean house was one of the ways Joyce showed her love for the men in her life.

Joyce slowly made the rounds of the room, taking in every detail.  She stopped at the dresser and slowly ran her hand across the plastic model of one of those giant robot things Davey loved.  Her eyes moved down the dresser and the handle of her son’s sock drawer caught her eye.  She knew that the Hulk would be missing, but the rest of his heroes would be in there.  She slid open the drawer and lifted the pair off the top of the neat stack.  It was Spider-Man.  She gently unfolded the soft cloth and held it in front of her face.  How many times had she washed these for her boy?  She couldn’t even guess.  Of course, there had been many pairs over the years, not just those current residents of the drawer.  Whenever a pair wore out or was outgrown, Joyce would buy her son a new pair to replace it.  When Davey was about twelve, it had been impossible to find the Hulk anywhere, but she found a set with Thor in it and he had loved that.  Thor wasn’t in the drawer now, as he had been replaced by someone else long ago.

Joyce was so lost in her reverie that she almost didn’t hear the garage door open.  She glanced out the window to see Howie’s car pulling up the drive.  She quickly but carefully folded Spider-Man, set him down atop his peers and slid the drawer closed.  By the time her husband entered the house, Joyce was feigning sleep in their bed.

That was Joyce’s first post-mortem visit to Davey’s lair, as he liked to call it, but it wasn’t her last.  She visited every day.  She started setting up a routine so that she could be out in plenty of time before Howie got home.  After about a week, she started cooking dinner again.  Howie showered her with affection for that.  To him, it was a sign that his wife was coming out of the deep depression she had sunk into when Davey died.  He didn’t know that she’d taken to wearing his underwear.

Joyce Burkhart was wearing Spider-Man when, almost on a whim, she decided to unfold the piece of notebook paper where she had handwritten all of Davey’s codes and passwords.  She didn’t want her boy to forget any of them, so she had written them on the notebook paper and laminated it.  She could’ve typed them and printed them out, but writing them by hand was, to Joyce, the more loving way to do it.

When Joyce touched the little button on the front of the machine, it hummed to life.   For her, it was like bringing back a part of her boy.  Over the next two weeks, she studied everything on the machine.  Davey never cleared his browsing history.  She haunted Davey’s favorite places online.  She learned to play his favorite online games.  She used his characters, of course.  It was only fitting.  She also started posting in the forums he always frequented.

Joyce was reading a discussion board about Davey’s favorite singer when she saw it.  There on the board, some asshole had posted his ill-informed opinion of a performance of her boy’s favorite song.  Joyce’s blood boiled.  How dare this old ex-hippie wahoo think a performance of Davey’s favorite song could ever be “listless.”  Joyce knew how to write a flame on the net.  She had read every post her son had ever cast out into cyberspace and many, many of them were flames.  Davey did not tolerate things he loved being insulted by know-it-all bastards.  How dare he tarnish her son’s memory with such rubbish?  Joyce’s fingers shook with righteous fury as she started to type.