Free A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel

with.
    “Do you See that Little Child standing in the yard watching you, You Stupid Son-of-a-Bitch?!?” When pressed, Dad had a way of emphasizing certain words that was like Winnie-the-Pooh gone bad.
    John was grinning in his shifty way, the way men smile at each other when one has a hatchet and the other doesn’t.
    “I sure didn’t see her there, Bob,” he croaked out around Dad’s arm.
    “You’ve got to Butcher your Rabbits on a summer afternoon when there are Children Outside Playing?!” Dad was spitting out every word.
    “Now, I—” John started, but Dad stopped him.
    “I’ve put up with enough out of you in the past two years, John, and now I’m going to draw the line: If you ever. Do anything like this again. I will tear off your arm. And shove it down your throat. Until you choke to death. Are we clear?”
    John smiled stupidly. My dad was exactly the kind of man who made idle threats and then randomly acted on one. He had been known to raise a rifle, and to make peace over a bottle of whiskey. John knew better than to try to predict which he might do. He raised his hands in surrender.
    “Sorry!” He called out to me. “Didn’t see ya there! Won’t happen again!” He looked like a clown.
    Dad walked away quickly, and led me back into the house, roughly. “Go wash your hands,” he said, as we went through the front door.
    “But, Daddy, I didn’t get—”
    “Go wash them, I said.” His fist was clenched tight on the doorknob. I washed my hands.
     
    IT TOOK US LONGER than usual to get to Tall Trees, because twice I fell out of the top bunk with such a crash that Dad pulled over on the side of the road to make sure I wasn’t broken, and then before we could pull back onto the highway we had to test the lights.
    By the time we arrived I already had on my bathing suit, my floppy shoes, and my Mickey Mouse sunglasses. My rubber nose-plug was hanging expectantly around my neck. We pulled into our favorite campsite and as soon as Dad shut off the engine I hopped out of the camper.
    “Hey! Look! I’m all ready to go to the lake! Let’s just all head down to the lake!”
    But I ended up sitting on the picnic bench for the next hour picking scabs, as Dad planted us firmly and safely in our temporary home. Before I got anywhere near that bacteria-filled water he had built a fire ring, hooked us up to electricity, strung up the fishlights, smoked sixteen unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and made friends with the family at the next site. When he and I finally left for the lake, he had Mom going through everything in the camper, looking for the toothache kit he’d gotten in the Navy, back in 1954: just in case.

----
    THE KINDNESS
OF STRANGERS
    O ur neighbor, Reed Ball, who never ever left his front porch, was a big old man who stood crooked, like maybe one of his legs was longer than the other. One day he wobbled down to the fence that separated our two yards and called out to my dad, who was working in our garden, that he was going to poison our dogs if they kept barking at night.
    “Is that right?” Dad said, looking at Reed in an interested way.
    “Damn right that’s right!” Reed bellowed. He was another example of an old man who could barely contain his fury but also could never let it out.
    “Keep you awake at night, do they?” Dad asked, leaning on his hoe.
    “You know they do! They’re not fit to kill!” He was talking about Kai, who was so highly evolved he could have been a spiritual leader, and Tiger. Poor Tiger. Anyone with even a little bit of a functioning heart would have pitied her, the way her snoot was shaped in such a way that she always sounded congested, and the fact that she was pig-shaped, and thus had no dignity.
    “Reed. Do you ever go
in
your house? Because maybe if you slept
inside
your house you wouldn’t be bothered by my dogs.”
    Reed made a sound like a gunked-up combustion engine then lifted and lowered one of his legs, probably the longer one, a gesture surely