Ransom
By Andy Bodinger
It's finally summer, albeit, confined within the provincial living room where the teenage daughter diaries in lower-case, dotting her "i's" a page a time, where the son loads a retro computer game he plays online, emerging betwixt a mirage of spaceships cresting over an artificial cosmos, waning their lives away. The mother worries into the room, unfetters the blinds to look out at another apartment building, down the hill, across the way, and the trio registers wailing sirens from flanking fire trucks. She witnesses a pair of hands tossing an orange tabby cat like a pixel out a window who lands in a crowd. The mom turns her head toward her kids, conjuring a face that says, see?, but the teens have their heads turned toward the front door, under which a manilla envelope has been slid, around which a trio of cockroaches are swirling ferociously, and the three family members' thoughts align: good thing dad is away, which is true, he is lecturing in the Gulf on cultural theory, raking in Riyal, mailing remittances, whose arm hair stands at cold attention and brain depletes at the sight of even a single roach of any variety. The daughter curls on the couch, journalling in real time while the son removes his headphones, squashes a cockroach, picks up the envelope, which the mom unhands, looks inside, sees the letter inscribed in magazine cut-out font, tucks the whole thing under her arm, opens the door, yells hello?!, and the remaining cockroaches escape, and all the family can see and smell are twirls of smoke. The letter is addressed to the Clancys, which they aren't, demanding them to fork over $100k, to dump the totality of their Apple stock, and to delete certain tweets—the Clancys know the ones. That night the mom burns the note in a garbage can and doesn’t tell the dad. Instead, the daughter sends him a video she found online from a smartphone at the scene of the apartment burning. There it is: the orange tabby; it did a flip, landing in a neighbor's dirty hamper, squarely like a kitten in a catcher's mitt, and the dad, all he musters from his perch on a pro bono Qatari high-rise, is, cool, kiddo. Years later the son and daughter will be sent to a safe private university in Switzerland where whenever they face any inconvenience, like the belt loop on a pair of their pants catching on a door handle or an indelicate printer jamming, they’ll tell the offending object, delete the tweets, Mr. Clancy!! and their laughs will be mellow, and then indifferent, and the parents will divorce, but the paperwork will languish in limbo, unfiled, and they’ll still get coffee now and again at a brownstone cafe that happens to be built near the fire station and the mom will think to tell the dad about the note, but perishes the thought, snuffs it out like a pyre rollicking at sea.
About the Author
Andy Bodinger is a fiction writer, essayist, and PhD student at Ohio University. He earned his MFA from Oklahoma State University where he was an associate editor at The Cimarron Review. He is formerly an ESL teacher, having worked in the Czech Republic and China. His essays and stories have appeared in Lunch Ticket, South Dakota Review, and Bodega, among other places.
