New flash fiction: Hat Party

‘Hat Party’

It will start with the madness of the Hat Party.

Parents and kids pile inside their town’s old community hall. The one that bursts with the click clack of salsa dancing on Tuesdays, and the ghoulish howls of a haunted house at Halloween.

They’ve come to get hats. Folding tables are lined with tablecloths and balloons in each Little League team’s color. Meet your new teams! the flyers read in the entryway. Get your team hats at Hat Party!

A long line of hungry people waits to be dished up with $20 per person of pasta, bread rolls, and iceberg lettuce swimming in ranch dressing. Each person in line holds raffle tickets, in hopes of winning a bright blue Little League sweatshirt.

A choice is made to play country music over the loudspeakers during the dinner. Quiet parents like Mrs. Buttermilk wonder at the price to pay for not having to make dinner for one night.

She sits at a table with her five-year-old son Harry. Their last name is Broderick, but the woman writing name tags at the door can’t hear over the noise.

A little boy with close-cropped blond hair and eyes as blue as the sea sits across from Mrs. Buttermilk.

“Do you know what horses smell like?” he says.

“Hay?” Mrs. Buttermilk suggests.

“When you walk past a house, and it smells bad you think they must have a horse because it smells like poop!” He laughs.

“Actually, it smells like hay after it is DIGESTED and pooped out,” a girl yells over the music.

“Well, if a dog eats hay will it smell like a horse?” the first boy asks.

“I wonder what you would smell like if you ate hay,” Harry yells back.

The children laugh. It is now children vs. parents. They try without success to saw plastic knives and forks into their bread rolls. Mrs. Buttermilk catches another woman’s eyes, and they smile.

Moms cram food into their children’s mouths, wiping napkins over tomato-sauce-splattered faces, and the children assault rock-hard blocks of butter, trying to spread it on bread rolls that won’t open.

Dads stand, hovering near the tables, glad not to be participating in the butter struggle. They wait for their turn to carry paper plates full of salad dressing and uneaten food to the trash cans for their wives.

Mrs. Buttermilk carries Harry’s plate to the trash herself and returns to the table. The parents are mostly strangers, waiting for the baseball hats. They are starting their first little league team, with some dread after seeing the weekly schedule.

They don’t know that just weeks later, after a dozen games, a dozen practices, a dozen parents’ turn to work the snack shack, a dozen ballpark hot dogs, a dozen times packing up mitts and hats and helmets and bats, and a dozen children alternating meltdowns with dirty faces and dusty cleats, that something unexpected will happen.

Read the rest of this story at The Wild Word.