JR Nichols

J.R. Nichols is a co-host of the Christian Indie Writers' Podcast. Her work has appeared in two editions of Indie's Unlimited Flash Fiction Anthology and has been featured on the No Extra Words podcast. She has two novellas and two short stories available for purchase on Amazon.com.

Summer of the Acrostic

J.R. Nichols

Issue 57, Summer 2019

The glue stick was dried out, but Betty scratched it hopefully across the surface of her masterpiece, anyway. She had one last thing to adhere to the cover of the birthday card she’d made for her favorite aunt, a picture of them together at the annual family picnic taken when Betty was only a baby. In the picture, Betty was pig-tailed and scowling, while her Aunt was beaming at back at her. Betty’s Mom had snapped the pic the moment aunt and niece had met for the first time. Baby Betty had been napping just before the shot, which explained her sour look. Her Dad’s oldest sister, Sue, who lived in Florida and only got up to Michigan a couple times a year, had been so excited about having become an Aunt that her smile practically leapt from the photo, even in this grainy black and white version spit out by Betty’s family’s bargain printer.

The picture stuck to the card alright, but it was a bit crooked, and curled around the edges almost immediately. Betty sighed but decided not to worry too much about it. After all, it was the inside of the card that held the true present - Betty’s teacher had taught the class how to make acrostic poetry, and she had composed just such a piece to honor her aunt, and printed it painstakingly inside of the folded piece of pink construction paper.

It’s going to be a wonderful day, Betty told herself. She always loved the reunion picnic, held each year at the pavilion in a tiny park on the shore of beautiful, breezy Lake Huron. But this year would be extra special - for the first time, the reunion picnic was being held on her favorite aunt’s birthday. As Betty lay on her bedroom floor, feet kicking, flipping the card open and closed, she imagined herself, standing next to Aunt Sue as she blew out fifty candles, blazing brightly atop a chocolate-frosted cake. Betty knew her aunt would ignore the presents piled high on a nearby picnic bench, insisting on receiving Betty’s card before opening a single one. She would read Betty’s poem aloud for her entire family to hear, becoming so overwhelmed by the sentiments expressed therein she’d have to hand the card to Betty to finish.

Betty’s mother’s voice snapped the little girl from her reverie. “Betty, time to go.” She scooped her treasure up from the floor and skipped out to the car.

The long drive to the lakeshore was one thing Betty looked forward to most on reunion picnic day. As he’d done every year, Betty’s dad had prepared a playlist for the road trip, and, as they always did, Mom and Betty sang along to the songs they knew, adding their sweet soprano voices to his rich baritone. Even Betty’s baby sister, Clara, did her best to join in, peppering their performance with shrieks and squeals while rocking back and forth in her car seat and clapping her hands. This year, in honor of Aunt Sue’s fiftieth birthday, all of the selected tunes were from the year she’d been born - 1969. Betty knew many of the songs, but was happy enough to listen to her parents duet along with the unfamiliar ones, slower songs with a more subdued rhythm. After two such songs, Betty nodded off. She woke after what felt like only a few moments. She could still hear her parent’s voices, drifting back to her, but they were no longer singing, having turned the radio down to talk over it.

“Sue’s bringing him today, can you believe it?” her mother said.

Betty struggled to come fully awake at the sound of her favorite Aunt’s name, but the warm sun shining on her and the soft hum of the tires against the pavement made the siren song of sleep difficult to resist. She struggled against its pull and managed to catch snippets of her parents’ conversation, intermixed with dreamlike remembrances of her smiling, fun-loving aunt.

“He’s almost twice her age...”

Aunt Sue, victorious at the horseshoe pit, pumping her fist and laughing.

“Didn’t you tell me he’d been in prison?”

Aunt Sue choosing Betty to be her partner in the three-legged race, even though it meant certain defeat.

“She’s changed since they met…”

Aunt Sue helping her learn to hang upside down from the monkey bars.

“Surely, it’s a classic case of midlife crisis.”

Midlife. Betty’s parents’ voices faded away as she road this word deeper into the world of dreams. Midlife…mid...the middle. Was Aunt Sue’s life really only half over? How wonderful, Betty thought, just before she finally succumbed to sleep, that she had fifty more reunion picnics with Aunt Sue to look forward to.

When they’d reached the park, Betty burst out of the car, eager to find her beloved Aunt, but her mother called her back, needing help with the baby and with the picnic lunch. Betty ran back, took the soft-sided cooler handed to her, and lugged it to a table under the pavilion. Then Betty heard her Mother say, “Happy birthday,” and knew when she turned around she would see her Aunt Sue.

My card! Betty realized she’d set her gift down in the back seat when she’d gone back to the car to help with the picnic. She ran as fast as she could back to the parking lot. She was almost at the end of her return sprint to the gathering when she noticed a decided change in the atmosphere. Family members who had been laughing or talking as they set up their picnic lunches were suddenly silent, and had gathered in a circle around two people. As Betty drew nearer, she saw they were Aunt Sue and her dad.

“All I’m saying is that there are children around,” Betty’s dad said, in his “I’m trying very hard to be patient” voice, “so it would be nice if you could take it easy with the foul language.”

Foul language? Betty wondered what she had missed in the few moments it had taken her to go to the car and back.

“Don’t bother, Peter, she’s drunk,” Betty’s Mother called from the perimeter of the circle, in a voice that telegraphed absolute disgust. Except for on television, Betty had never seen a drunk person before. She scrutinized her aunt, and noticed now how she swayed a bit where she stood - like the plastic seaweed in the fish tank in the waiting room of her dentist’s office - but otherwise noticed nothing unusual. Then Aunt Sue opened her mouth to speak.

“You think you’re so smart,” she said, and the words came out all squished together, the “s” sounds reminding Betty of a snake’s hiss. “But you can’t tell me what to do.” She pointed and stumbled a bit in her brother’s direction, as though intending to stab him with her long red fingernail. An older man took a few staggering steps of his own into the circle, standing between Betty’s dad and aunt.

“He’s almost twice her age...” Betty’s mom’s voice said in her head, and she knew then this was the man her mother had been talking about in the car - the one she said had caused her aunt Sue to change, the man she blamed for aunt Sue’s “midlife crisis.”

Crisis. Betty had thought a lot about the word “midlife,” but hadn’t considered the foreboding word that had followed it. Was Aunt Sue in danger?

“Look man, we came here to have a good time. Let’s not have a scene, okay?” the stranger said, holding his hands up as though asking Betty’s Dad to count his ten extended fingers.

The two men stared at each other for what seemed like several minutes. Betty’s heart pounded out the word, “crisis,” on repeat in response to the escalating, palpable tension. Finally, Betty’s mom walked over and put a hand on her husband’s arm.

“Come on, Peter,” she said. “Why don’t you help me get the grill fired up, and we’ll start the burgers.” Betty’s dad did not move, at first, but then his wife murmured, “it’s not worth it.” The crowd, including Betty’s parents, dispersed then, and moments later the pavilion was filled with low chatter, laughter, and the smell of lit charcoal. Betty didn’t move, but stood staring at her aunt and the stranger she’d brought to their reunion picnic.

“Hey Buzzy,” Aunt Sue said. Her mouth seemed to work hard to produce the pet name as her eyes finally drifted to where Betty stood. She stumbled over to the girl and squatted down to hug her. “I’ve missed you so much,” Sue said. She pushed Betty back to arms-length and noticed the card. “Is that for me?”

Betty nodded. She wanted to tell her Aunt that the card was meant to be opened at cake and birthday song time, but she had never dealt with her aunt in this condition.

Changed. It was just as Betty’s Mother had said. The strange man had taken her favorite aunt and hid her away, killed her, maybe, and had brought along this imposter aunt Sue to their special reunion picnic.

No, not killed, Betty corrected herself, Aunt Sue is in crisis. And in her innocence, the little girl believed that the love and care she had put into crafting the acrostic poem would work some magic of its own, would help to heal her aunt - to make her whole. Betty pushed the card into her hands and watched as she stood to read it.

Aunt Sue cooed with delight as she fingered the picture glued to the front, then her eyes traveled down to where Betty had written in her most careful, curly script, “For Ant Sue.”

Sue’s eyes flicked up from the card and met Betty’s. “Ant? Ant Sue?” Betty did not know how to respond. Sue fumed, obviously angered further by Betty’s apparent confusion and ignorance. “A-N-T spells ‘ant,’ like the bug. I’m not your A-N-T!”

Betty was still confused, not remembering the accidental misspelling of the word. As if realizing this, Sue shoved the card closer to Betty’s face and screamed, “Do I look like an insect to you?”

Betty’s mind whirled, but she was both too stunned and too immature to articulate what she was thinking. She thought how much she hated the man who had done this to her aunt - her A-U-N-T, of course, she now saw the error, a careless one. At the same time, she thought, why won’t you open the card, and read the wonderful things I’ve written there. And immediately after, because you don’t care about that, only that I’ve made a mistake.

But mostly, she felt, more than she thought, You have changed. Maybe you are an insect, an A-N-T now, and not my A-U-N-T. Maybe that is what the crisis is doing to you. Her favorite aunt, once larger than life, now a small, pitiful creature. Overwrought and overwhelmed, Betty burst into tears.

“That’s it!” yelled Betty’s dad’s “I’m done being patient” voice. Betty was scooped up and carried away. She wriggled in her Father’s arms to look over his shoulder at the pavilion and the diminishing figure of her expletive-spewing aunt, the stranger’s arm draped casually over her shoulders, his body joining hers in its seaweed sway.

Betty reached toward her and screamed through her sobs, “Open the card, read the poem!” over and again, but the words came out even more unrecognizable than those of her drunken aunt.