The School Centennial
Bath Flash Fiction, The Lobsters Run Free AdHoc PressUK, 2017
The night Dad wore his waistcoat we were trussed up too, in some outlandish outfits of one kind or another. My brother would get teased later, but for now we were caught up in the excitement. My father was returning home, to his tūrangawaewae.
Off we went, out of the city and in and out of small towns and through a winding gorge. And at last we came to the place where the rickety bridge spanned the wild river, and we stopped to stretch our legs, and my father showed us a nest made from moss, and my sister collected skeleton leaves. And then we were in The Hall with all the seating laid out and the smell of good things to eat, and that’s when my brother gets teased about his sailor suit. But there is my father, Special Guest Speaker, up there making them all laugh and proud.
Maybe it was that when we crossed the rattly bridge, the noise disturbed the taniwha that lay buried under decades of river silt and rocks. Maybe it was the taniwha that tricked him into going back through the years, that made the walls darken and close in, and become that terrible room once more where small boys learnt to stutter. And he stopped being kingpin, and stared into their yellow eyes and roared. And they asked him to stop but he said no. And in all the rumpus someone had the foresight to cut off the microphone and trundle him off the stage.
And we left the warm and the lights and the supper waiting, and drove back through the dark, and over the rumbling bridge and the shadowless blackness of the river below, and in and out of the forested gorge, and up, up through the years, and home.