Nabs
Forrest Anderson

I stop at a gas station to buy a tank of gas and a package of Nabs. At the counter, I decide to buy a two-dollar lottery ticket. “The one with the baseball diamond. I have a good feeling.”

The clerk tears the card from the roll and drops it to the ground. Her eyes go big and she works her jaw open and shut. I look over my shoulder. A man wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a bandanna stabs a buck knife into my forehead. I know this because I cross my eyes and gaze at the brown and gold handle buried to the hilt.

My first instinct is to grab at the knife and pull it out. But I can’t lift my arms. A knife to the forehead doesn’t hurt as much as I expect. It hurts, but not terribly. It feels about the same as a snakebite.

I remember that a copperhead struck me when I was five. My father found me crying beside an irrigation ditch and carried me to the doctor’s office. The white doctor was out of town. My father wanted to carry me to Raleigh, but he figured I’d die on him. He carried me to the black doctor, instead.

The doctor said I needed a shot. I was relieved. My father had me convinced blacks practiced voodoo. The doctor prepared the shot and pinched the skin above the bite. It made him nervous to hear my father call him “nigger doctor.” He ended up giving me the shot in the wrong leg. He gave me another shot in the right leg, and charged my father for both.

I realize this memory is the start of my life flashing before my eyes. I turn around and look at the clerk. She grips her smock and screams. It sounds like a chirp. I collapse to the floor. I wait for the rest of my life.

Nothing comes. I worry that the knife pierced my hippocampus and is preventing my brain from communicating memories. I remember the hippocampus from a sales conference. My boss wanted me to learn about the brain to sucker potential customers. I sell miniature hamburger buns.

I remember the day I killed my daughter’s dog. It happened over the summer. My wife and daughter were at the swimming pool. The dog got into my neighbor’s trash. The neighbor threatened to load a shotgun with rock salt, shoot the dog in the ass. I was only trying to save the dog from a painful death. I locked him in the greenhouse.

The screaming started when my wife and kid came home. My daughter screamed, “Sorrow!” over and over. I watched her from the window, red-faced and bawling in her brown and gold bathing suit. My wife saw me and called my name over my daughter’s wails. I’d baked Sorrow.

I think I’ll ignore my name being called. I knew this couldn’t last forever.


Forrest Anderson grew up in Rocky Mount, NC. He received an MFA from the University of South Carolina and is now working on a PhD in writing at Florida State. His stories have been twice nominated for Best New American Voices, has been a winner of the 2004 South Carolina Fiction Project, the 2004 Piccolo Spoleto Fiction Open, and the James Dickey Award for Fiction, and have appeared in StorySouth, The Midtown Literary Review, The Charleston Post and Courier, and The Charleston City Paper. He's also been a contributor at the Sewanee Writers Conference and a resident at the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow.