FICTION

Scenario

By Scott Gloden     VOLUME 55.1

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One of the pranks we play on our daughter is called Watershed. Truthfully, it’s less a prank and more hide-and-seek for the grown-up imagination. Emergency preparedness for the child imagination. Who’s to say, though, because the second Amelia was born, age became a concept we folded up neatly and dumped into a suitcase in the hall closet. Age doesn’t have any bearing on survival, the same way trauma doesn’t have any consideration for existence. So, no, Amelia isn’t any age, and we’re not any age, and disaster is never caught off-guard by the sight of the moon. All this to say, in our house, we all play Watershed, adults and child alike.

The goal of the game is twofold: navigate from Point A to Point B, and do not be seen, and it was brought to us by a community center workshop called “It Could Happen to You.” “It Could Happen to You” was advertised heavily for several weeks, its cost made free and open to the public.

The cohosts of the sessions were two former emergency response officers reputed to have been everywhere, from mine fallouts to active shooters to the standing waters in the Gulf: Barney and Maxine, polar opposites in approach and physique. Barney was lanky and tender, glasses as tight as goggles; he was borderline praying mantis. While Maxine was considerably more filled out in ways you could feel confident about: a mop of brown chain-link trusses atop a jukebox of muscle, and she smiled endlessly. Together, they had chiseled out a routine that worked its way from library basements to city halls across the country, all in the name of what public safety could look like. In uncertain terms, they were less fear-mongers and more safety-mongers.

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Ahead of the workshop, Court and I sat in bed watching old YouTube videos of the pair. The videos were mostly testimonials, where tearful family members recounted how their instincts targeted in the sessions had been completely remade, pulverized, and polished. From the queue came enumerations as far-reaching as preventing the spread of campfires, thwarting rabid animals, sidestepping gas station hold-ups—even some quick thinking during a PG-13 sexcapade from two paled parents.

“Fight or flight is the most identifiable concept for people in the cross-hairs of a situation,” said Max during the talking head of one video. From stage right, Barney entered the frame and the camera pulled back: “Let us teach you how to monopolize that instinct and not rely on panic to make your decisions.”

Court paused there on the laptop.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Too paranoid?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t seem like something we’d have done before Amelia,”

“Obviously. But we’re sort of in a new era.”

“It’s not a new era. It was a singular event, a freak moment. Not an era.”

Court rolled her eyes at my attempt to pacify, and therefore belittle, the fact that two weeks before the workshop flyers started showing up on car windows, two weeks before the Hesses and the Flemings called to tell us they’d already signed up for the classes—two weeks before all of that—a letter was sent home from Amelia’s school explaining a student, unnamed but whose name we all eventually discovered, had brought an unloaded firearm to school. “No ammunition, the safety on,” the letter said, an attempt to frame how little risk it had posed. Only, we knew the safety could be released, we understood that ammunition could be loaded in, the same way we could fill a high schooler with vodka sodas and send their car in the direction of our enemies. No matter how we classified it, it cut us all the same length.

Court looked back to the screen and hit play, a quick crossfade to a woman sitting on her front porch with a young boy, maybe ten or twelve years old. The woman was clearly the mother, and the boy had his eyes trained into the porch boards.

“It was a year ago last month,” she began. “Todd here had been at karate. I’d just dropped him off and was headed back home when our neighbor called to tell me about it. I was still around the corner, but as soon as I looked out the window, I could see the smoke.” The woman blinked hard, then recovered.

“I knew my husband had gotten up that morning wanting to make a big breakfast. And Adam, our youngest, was going to help out. My husband went to check on the dryer in the basement, which had been making a loud noise the past few days. The basement door was right off the kitchen, and when he opened it—or what they believe happened—is when he opened it, gas that had been leaking was freed into the house. Adam lit the burner on the stove, and it all—” she said, pausing with a harder wince than before, while Todd’s hand awkwardly consoled her shoulder. Court and I both sat upright, alert.

“Adam wasn’t knocked out. He went for the living room and found a blanket on the couch and pulled it over himself. He crawled like that all the way to the front door, and made it into the yard.” The mother completed her sentence, but again her voice caught, and, this time, Todd aimed his face away where the small veins of his forehead rushed out in anguish.

“My husband recovered, but Adam . . . he inhaled too much smoke,” she said. “He didn’t make it, but he knew what to do. He did just like we practiced, and all I can think now is, thanks to these classes, Adam gave himself a chan—”

I hit pause.

“Fuck,” Courtney said.

“Fuck,” I repeated, and the images poured over us. If a workshop designed to help save lives couldn’t even save lives, we thought, then surely no workshop at all was not tempting fate but providing it a roadmap.

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Point B in watershed represented safety, or its closest approximation. Many times Point B was the shed in the backyard, a tire swing at the park around the corner, which had been Amelia’s stomping ground since she could walk.

Point A, on the other hand, was a living variable. This was the Origin of Danger, the unpredictable, which made it our responsibility to chart and path the radius of Amelia’s life to keep the Origin current: trips to the bank with her grandmother; the few minutes a day of outdoor fun where we watched her anxiously from the kitchen window; the Mezzanine Street Bridge, which was probably the most formidable bridge in the whole state, except for the fact that it crossed the Mississippi and was a suspension bridge, meaning our car during rush hour was just a trapeze artist out there in one of those daring free-falls with wrists extended hoping someone strong enough was on the other end—so yes, fuck yes even, we made the Mezzanine Street Bridge and its legendary sturdiness a Point A.

Other conditions of the game are a bit more restrained. Barney and Maxine advised using obstacles and instruments in the boundaries of everyday use: a straw can be a snorkel; a pocket Bible can stop an arrow. In light of this, we appealed the game to Amelia by allowing her more freedoms. From longer ventures away from the house to using the scissors we keep in the high cupboards—essentially, within the construct of the game, she was exempt from limitation. If she figured out how to drive the car with a pogo stick, the only consequence was our admiration.



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SCOTT GLODEN lives and works in Memphis. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Glimmer Train, StoryQuarterly, and the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Awards. Occasional updates at scottgloden.com.


VOLUME 55.1