Free The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder

and then I closed the damper. The mother and the babies made a terrible racket for a while, but then they all got quiet. Everything seemed to be okay. My wife closed her laptop. She stood up from the love seat, and thanked me for coming, though she wouldn’t look at me. My hands were black from the soot in the chimney.” The pizza guylooked down at his hands. “I told her I thought we made a good team. We saved those birds, I said. She said, We saved those birds from the danger that you created for those birds. Which, she said, feels pretty familiar. Then I left.”
    “What happened with your consulting job?” Chad said.
    “Long story short,” the pizza guy said, “the next weekend I was down in the basement. I would come in through the bulkhead, sit in the old rocking chair that used to be in the nursery, and just listen to my wife and kids upstairs. I liked to hear them. This night they were playing Yahtzee—my son, my daughter, my wife, and some man named Kent I had heard a few times before. It’s my Yahtzee game, by the way. I’ve had it since I was a kid. They were playing in the living room, and every time they shook the dice in that cup, the birds in the chimney went nuts. They clearly were thriving. They chirped like crazy at the dice, and then my family and Kent all laughed and laughed like it was the funniest thing. I could hear my daughter say, They like it! And then Kent said, Or they don’t! Laugh, laugh, laugh. Now who’s the fraud? Now who? And that’s why I went upstairs, and that’s how this whole thing got started.”
    “Guys?” Trent said.
    “Chad? George?” Trent said.
    “Jeff?” Trent said.
    “Take it easy,” the pizza guy said, and he left. He had another delivery.
    “Guys, let’s do this,” Trent said.
    •
    FANCY DRUM lay capsized in the hallway, but really, any container would have worked just fine. With mock altruism several men simultaneously offered up the use of their capacious jockstraps, while Gary suggested Vince’s purse.
    “It’s not a purse,” Vince said.
    Someone stripped a pillowcase off a pillow, and the case was passed hand to hand up to Trent, who stood in front of the television. Trent began to transfer ping-pong balls from a large freezer bag into the pillowcase. Some of the balls were yellowed like teeth. Four or five of the men tried quickly to formulate a joke about Trent’s weight, and Gary got there first. “Don’t eat them, Trent!” Gary yelled, just as Bald Michael was about to do his Cookie Monster voice. Trent smiled mirthlessly, patting his stomach. The weight had simply come with his third marriage. His habits had not changed. He hadn’t stopped going to the gym, hadn’t altered his eating or drinking. This was just who he was in this marriage. With his first wife he had been an outdoorsman; with his second wife he had been really into live music, and he had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day; with his third wife, apparently, he would be overweight. From what Trent could gather online, his first wife still enjoyed the outdoors, as did her current husband.
    When Trent had finished dropping the ping-pong balls into the pillowcase, he gripped the opening as one would grip the neck of a large bird, and he gave a trial shake. The soft clacking of the balls in the case was pleasing, and several men closed their eyes to hear it better. It is true, however, that many men felt the absence of the lotterydrum, though they knew it to be ridiculous and excessive. The drum, like the conference room, had become part of the way things were done, and its excess, it might be said, had become part of its necessity. It was, perhaps, after all, appropriate. Not just any container would have worked just fine. More than one man had the odd sensation that a lottery without the drum somehow wouldn’t count . Others felt exposed somehow, or denuded by the loss of ceremony. This anxiety caused them to be garrulously nonchalant about ceremony.
    “RIP, Fancy Drum!”