Mary Sauer: THE MONARCH • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Mary Sauer
THE MONARCH

Cutting around and behind the main drag in Excelsior Springs, we choose the road often used to bypass the lights and traffic with two sharp, blind curves one after the other. Dad takes each turn recklessly, at a speed that pushes me right, into the passenger door, then left, leaning toward him over the middle console.

Newly nine years old, I find myself bored with the tracks in my brain, worn into canyons by countless laps taken each night before falling asleep. Having memorized, in alphabetical order, the entire manifest of the Titanic, having become quite certain of what had gone wrong (“even God cannot sink this ship”), I feel I can now take the necessary precautions required for avoiding an icy death in the North Atlantic.

Unprompted, Dad asks:

“Have I ever told you about the walkway collapse at the Hyatt Regency in 1982? Cokeheads. Fucking millionaires,” he says, laughing and asking me to pardon his French. He tells me there was so much money to be made. He tells me they were rolling in it, all of them, but no one could be bothered to consider the architecture.

“It couldn’t bear the weight of all those dancing bodies.”

“Did anyone die?”

“Lots,” he says, pivoting at the waist, reaching into the floorboard of the middle seat—the van he sells cable out of— and I take hold of the steering wheel. Pushing back and forth the yellow middle sheets of carbonless order form paper, yanked from their pink and white counterparts and tossed into one clear plastic bin, he triumphantly holds one up in the air and then hands it over to me.

“This guy,” he says, nodding at the paper in my hand. “I think he knows something.”

Behind the desk at the library, a small woman in a yellow linen dress looks up from her book and smiles at me. She says they’ve just gotten a new book in about the Titanic but pushes her lips together in one thin line when I ask:

“How many people died when the walkway at the Hyatt Regency collapsed? Exactly.”

Dad and I buy a box of King Vitamin cereal for dinner with birthday money sent by my grandfather, who included in his card an inquiry about the status of my tan. We share it for dinner, and the palisades of each bite-sized crown scrape the roof of my mouth raw. When we finish eating, I lie out on the porch of our apartment in a Little Mermaid swimsuit, reading aloud names printed on an accordion of perforated paper, while Dad paces the living room floor. The sliding glass door is open between us, and flies circle shallow puddles of sticky milk left on the bar of the kitchenette. Having brought the tub from the van inside, he fishes a yellow sheet with Miller scribbled in the first field and says, “I knew it. I knew that one was familiar.”

“Are they related?” I ask, drawing a star next to Miller on the list.

“We could find their families,” he says. “You could write down their stories.”

“Do you think they want to tell their stories?” I stand up and fold my beach towel, the sun is going down. I follow him into the kitchen, where he starts a pot of coffee. “What do you think the architects, the builders, did wrong? Exactly.”

And he says, “Did I tell you about the time I tackled a shoplifter outside of Walmart?”

Mary Sauer is a writer and mother living in Kansas City, Missouri, and the managing editor of Salt Tooth Press. She is a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She has published or has upcoming work in SWWIM, Glassworks Magazine, MER Literary, Arc Poetry, The Washington Post, and Popula.