The first and only time I met the owner of Goodman\u2019s Auto Paint and Repair was Friday after school when a mockingbird was screaming like an air raid siren and the sky was ripe with blood\u2014there I saw Joe blowing all this junk around with a leaf blower in the lot all crazy-like, and when he spots me he shuts it off with shaking hands and shuffles over with something like a smile on his face; the first thing he asks me is what kind of car I drive and if I\u2019d seen his new sign out front (I hadn\u2019t; there was a layer of dust and grime caked on the glass like a blanket that covered anything worth seeing, and for all I know, twelve-year-olds can\u2019t drive cars); when I don\u2019t laugh at his joke, he steps in front of me on the sidewalk, and I step back and wrinkle my nose (there\u2019s a stench of piss or paint or something sour as he comes closer, like Nana\u2019s cat\u2019s litter box when it sits for too long); Joe says he\u2019s seen me before, that little boy walking on the street, and he points to the window again with a finger that shakes like a dying man; look, he says, look at the sign, you\u2019ll see it right there, and then I feel his hands latch tight on my belly\u2014my eyes go to the window, and for a moment the sun sprays through the glass and all I can see is a great flash of light; I blink, and when my eyes adjust, I see a girl in the window, a baby girl, watching me with beady eyes from a pink and black car seat; she\u2019s strapped in tight, lolling there as she chews on her thumb like a greasy chicken bone (I wonder if she\u2019s always propped there, like some kind of baby doll or bobblehead on a shelf); I still can\u2019t see the sign, but in the reflection I see a billboard from the church across the street, and it says God Will Wash Away All Tears, but between the dusty glass and the little girl in the window, the last word is covered, so it reads all scary-like: no tears, no tears, no tears\u2014I don\u2019t know why Joe is touching me, but there\u2019s tears in his eyes and he holds me sharp like I\u2019m about to blow down the street, and before I know it I pull away and run towards home, faster and faster than I\u2019ve ever run before, and over the trill of traffic I hear him all squeaky-like as he steps into the street and shouts for me to come back, come back, come back, his voice slick with something deep and unfamiliar, and he says that Goodman\u2019s is always open, that they\u2019re cleaning up, remodeling big-time\u2014come by tomorrow, I hear him say, where, just for me, there will be a special sale on tires.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I see a billboard from the church across the street, and it says God Will Wash Away All Tears, but between the dusty glass and the little girl in the window, the last word is covered, so it reads all scary-like: no tears, no tears, no tears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":25377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[1686,4953],"class_list":["post-24368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","tag-jesus","tag-mechanic","writer-oliver-cubillos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24368"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25379,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24368\/revisions\/25379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}