Clipped

Airbrush

Earlier that morning, Jacob Hollingsway heard what he at first thought were the low rumbles of thunder. He became curious when they continued on throughout the day. Looking for the source of the noise, he poked his head outside of his family's summer home, toothbrush resting between his lips. He quickly traced the racket to the lighthouse that lay a half-mile down the beach.

Jacob was lollygagging as he approached the lighthouse in the summer twilight. From afar, heat waves distorted the image in front of him. He casually ran the toothbrush back and forth along his teeth as he walked toward what he discovered was a hastily setup outdoor arena.

There were collapsible metal bleachers surrounding a mud pit that was filled with several junked cars. Around the perimeter of the circle were several tables under tented roofs supported by metal poles, which were staked into the ground with thick braided ropes. Jacob began to work on the insides of his upper teeth and increased his brushing speed.

He walked up to the waist-high barrier that encircled the pit and ran his free hand alongside the rail as he followed the circle. There were a smattering of people in the stands, mostly teenage guys and their bored girlfriends. An overweight single mother was slouched in the second row, smoking a cigarette and keeping a lazy eye on the boy and a girl running around in the general area in front of her.

She took a long pull, turned her head to the side and blew the smoke out in a long stream. She looked down between her legs and ashed her cigarette, and when she looked up her eyes met with Jacob's for a moment. She offered a smile that was beaten by life. Jacob stopped brushing for a second and acknowledged her with a raise of the toothbrush before resuming, brushing the bottom teeth double time.

He took a spot in a relatively densely populated section of the bleachers three rows and slightly to the left of a couple that was necking. The guy kept pawing at the girl's chest and she kept fending him off. Coming up for air after a few minutes, he noticed Jacob.

“The fuck you looking at?”

The toothbrush stopped moving and Jacob's face went slack. His mouth hung open, forming an “o” shape. A long strand of toothpaste drool dripped out and landed on the metal with a plop. The male necker's face contorted in disgust.

“Weirdo.”

He resumed his prior activity. Jacob wiped the side of his mouth with the back of one hand and then began slowly brushing, ten times on each face of his teeth. He decided to move to another section. As Jacob walked back in the direction he originally came from, the little boy darted just past him, causing him to stumble and temporarily choke on toothpaste that had gone farther back in his throat than it was meant to.

The kid's mother looked up at Jacob again, this time with a wide-eyed curiosity, almost as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing. Jacob clenched the toothbrush between his teeth and gave an open-palmed shrug, but the woman kept staring. He grabbed the toothbrush out of his mouth and scratched his neck with it.

He had gotten used to the sound of the engines so quickly that he didn't realize how close this one sounded. The woman began to scramble out of the way as the truck slammed through the barrier and barreled toward them. The impact knocked Jacob outside the confines of the arena. His toothbrush sailed in the opposite direction, ending a high arc by landing in the wet sand where the tide was receding.

Jacob lay on the ground, staring at the sky, seeing stars that were both real and imagined.

"Gee," he thought. "That was some toothbrush."