Toothbrush

If a lie is different from a secret I will never tell where the rabbit went because now that  I am five and not four I have learned to brush my teeth and know when I am unhappy. Before, I had no way of going to a happy place. My family was not the problem. My parents love me, my grandparents are doting. But the boy across the street came into my garden and hit me until I cried.

He was six. His name was Leslie Yawnton and he beat me up because he said I was a little liar who told stories.

One morning on television I saw a man in a rocket fly into the sky.

The voice on the television said, “Possibilities are now as vast our imaginations.” I asked my mother what imagination was.

“Think of pictures in your mind. Think of faraway places,” she said.

“Where is the man in the rocket going?”

“Wherever our imaginations take us.” 

“Do I have an imagination?”

“Yes, dear, you do, though sometimes you have too much.”

“Like when you don’t believe me if I tell you Leslie hit me?”

She didn’t answer. Maybe she wanted to believe me, but she never caught Leslie in the act of sitting on top of me and hitting me repeatedly in the face.

The day I saw the rocket man, Leslie appeared in my garden. He had climbed over the fence or undone the gate. I told him I had seen a man go up into the sky and fly among the stars.

Leslie said I was lying and kept punching me in the head.

In a puff of smoke the spaceman in a white helmet and silver suit who carried his air in a box made me imagine I could go somewhere else. Leslie grabbed me in a chokehold.

“You are dirty little liar who tells stories.”

 He slapped me until I couldn’t fight back the tears, insisting there was no one in the sky and if anyone went there they would fall down and die. I “needed my mouth washed out.”   

My grandmother had given me a red toothbrush with a round head and white bristles and if I stood on a wooden stool my father built so I could see myself in the bathroom mirror I could watch my mouth froth with every up and down stroke though I preferred the back and forth motion of the bristles on my teeth. The more Leslie hit me, the longer I wanted to clean my mouth.

Leslie’s mother was the social doyenne of the street. She would tell all the mothers in the neighborhood that her son was a perfect angel when they gathered at the Yawnton house for afternoon coffee parties. She told the other mothers I was disturbed.

I knew a secret about their house. Beneath the back bedroom was a crawl space with a dirt floor where Leslie’s father kept old lumber. Leslie called it his gold mine and had once dragged me in there by the hair to beat me up.

The day after the rocket man’s flight, when Leslie thought I had surrendered, he’d tried to enter his house but his mother was asleep and wouldn’t answer the door. I followed him to his backyard and hid in the bushes until he vanished in the crawl space where he beat the dirt with a spade. When I was certain he’d gone in too far to catch me, I shut the door and snapped the padlock in the latch. Then I went home and brushed my teeth because I knew I would have to lie if anyone asked where Leslie had gone.

The red plastic handle in my hand foamed with white froth. The taste of mint from Dr. Soane’s Dental Cream for Children made my teeth whiter with every stroke until I was certain they shone like the rocket man’s helmet as he climbed into his tiny room and a man in a white coat handed him his box of air so he could breathe when he touched the stars.

By the next evening Leslie’s mother was frantic. She appeared at our door just after I had been put to bed. I heard her downstairs weeping and asking if anyone had seen Leslie..

“He said he was going out to play with your son, that dirty little liar of yours.”

My mother came into my room and asked if I knew where Leslie had gone.

I said I had. Leslie had gone someplace to find happiness but I could not imagine where.

“Try harder,” my mother said.

I shut my eyes and pictured a morning in my garden. The sun was shining. A grey rabbit hopped across the lawn and made a “Shush” with is forefoot then waved “So long!”

Bruce Meyer is author of 64 books with eight more signed and forthcoming. His stories have won or been finalists for prizes in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, and India. He lives in Barrie, Ontario.