Brown
By: Jeff Killinger
Tags: Flash Fiction, Fiction, Short Story

photo credit: Raphael Biscaldi (Unsplash)

Ron didn’t apply for a job at the other delivery companies. This one paid the most, and had the best benefits, and it didn’t occur to him until the first time he put on the uniform — brown shorts cut above the knees and a brown collared short-sleeve shirt — that he looked just as he had in his JV volleyball uniform his junior year of high school. The other schools in his conference all seemed to have brand-new jerseys that year, tailored to fit the builds of the teenage mountains who filled them. But Ron and his teammates were stuck with whatever they could snatch out of the piles of dull brown hand-me-downs at the beginning of the season.

“You guys look like shit,” an opposing player had whispered to him through the net between points. “Literally.”

And so while Ron felt comfortable in the warehouse, where all of his colleagues were identically dressed, every time he drove out into the real world, he felt embarrassed, young and awkward, and he tugged at the parts of his uniform that showed curves on his aging body that he hadn’t had to worry about as a high schooler.

He envied many of the customers along his route, based on the packages he delivered. Musicians, tech gurus, fashionistas. These people were doing things with their lives. He was just carting around their stuff.

He was never afraid of a customer until Ben Graham moved into the neighborhood. Ben received multiple packages daily to his ranch house, heavy packages from chemical companies, envelopes marked ‘Confidential’ from organizations that, based on their comically-patriotic names, could only be militias. And, day by day, as Ron brought these packages up to the door, he noticed the lawn becoming unkempt, the windows and frames coating with filth, and Ben, when he answered the door, looking both more sleep-deprived and also harder, tighter. The tattoos that were once limited to his forearms now spread to his fingers, as well as up his arms, presumably to his chest and shoulders, because the flames poked up under his collar and crawled up his neck. Ron would hand the packages to Ben and practically trip over himself hustling back to the safety of his truck.

That summer was a scorcher across the country, and with the heat rose rhetoric, protests, violence. Ron scoured local newspapers in the days after white supremacist rallies, looking for pictures of Ben, armed and armored outside abortion clinics or Confederate monuments.

As Ron unloaded a package in front of Ben’s house one day, it almost slipped out of his hands, the cardboard slick with some sort of chemical that was soaking it from the inside.

“What did you do?” Ben asked, standing on the porch with his thick arms crossed in front of him. He stomped down the walkway and grabbed the package before Ron could answer.

A week later, when the cause of a recent explosion at a congresswoman’s office was revealed to be a chemical bomb, Ron almost threw up. He grabbed the form he had been eyeing in the HR office for weeks: Report a Customer. He filled out his name, as well as Ben’s name and address, but when he reached the check boxes, none seemed to match the threat he believed Ben posed. He didn’t have any proof. There was no checkbox for ‘gut feeling.’

His next day out, Ron stopped short of Ben’s house, just out of eyesight, slid out of his truck, rolled the back door up over his head, and climbed into the back. Ben had several packages that day, and Ron rested one in his lap and used his pen knife carefully, carefully, slicing the tape to reveal its contents. To find proof.

As he tilted the open box towards the light coming in through the open door, a shadow obscured his view inside.

“What are you doing?” Ben said.

Ron shot up, fumbling for an excuse, tugging at his brown shorts, as Ben climbed into the truck and stood, his shadow stretching against the wall of undelivered packages.

“You can’t be in here,” Ron managed. “It’s the rules.”

“And yet,” Ben said as he turned and slid the door down behind him, reducing the light down to a sliver, then nothing, as the latch clicked into place, “here I am.”