You can also read this flash fiction story on my Substack.
“To bury the hatchet.” It’s a phrase meaning to end a quarrel and it’s derived from the Native American practice of burying one’s weapons to signal the end of fighting.
“I’m sitting in the front,” she told me.
I was holding the doorhandle but I let it go and I gave way for her to grab the handle, pull the door open and climb into the truck’s front passenger seat next to Dad.
I sat in the back with Dad’s toolbox. The box had the width and length of a cat’s coffin. I pressed my cheek against the window to fit myself inside the cabin. Dad turned the key in the ignition, I heard the click, and I felt the engine kick a shudder through the truck’s guts and shell.
Dad drove us away from the barn. We left the farmyard and crossed into the paddock. The truck’s wheels bumped against rocks and hills and into holes and the thumps travelled up the truck’s tyres and its side and through the glass and finally into my jaw smudged against the window.
I heard her talking to me. She was telling me how to fix the barbed wire fence on the other side of the paddock. That’s where we were driving to. That’s what we were going to fix.
“I know how to fix the fence,” I said.
“Sure you do,” she said. She turned on Dad. “You didn’t fix it yesterday.”
“I had to go to the shop to get milk yesterday.”
I let my eyes slip to the side and I saw the hatchet. It was lying head down inside Dad’s toolbox. Its wooden handle curved out towards me like a hand offered by a woman on a dance floor.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you have to get milk yesterday instead of fixing the fence?”
“You wanted some.”
I looked at her neck. She kept wobbling her tongue and the rings of fat around her neck were jiggling like a rotund belly dancer. I could have reached out and touched them if I wanted to.
“You should have gotten some the day before yesterday.”
“You didn’t ask me to go and get any milk until yesterday.”
“How’s that my fault?”
I took the hatchet’s handle.
I swung its curved metal head into her neck.
Dad stopped the car.
He looked sideways.
Her jugular’s blood had splattered up the tomahawk’s head and handle and onto my fingers.
I let go of the tomahawk. It slipped from her neck and blood fell out from the smiley-faced gash I’d made in her neck and her head tipped sidewise like the Tower of Pisa. I held my hand out as far away from me as I could.
Dad and I both looked into the rear-view mirror. We saw the reflection of Mum’s empty eyes inside her fat head bobbing up and down inside the mirror and Dad said: “Thank you.”
William Barker-Writer and Philosopher 