by Kelly Pedro

 

After Pa dies, Uncle Benny shows me the storage locker and homemade arm-wrestling machine: An apple-peeler rigged with a spongy arm that looks like it once belonged to a mannequin.

“Your Pa loved messing with this.” He flips a tall bucket upside down and sets the gadget on top, then swings a chair next to it and sits. He fiddles with the hand trying to open the fingers while my five-year-old daughter, Ida, runs circles around him waving a bag of what looks like cooked spaghetti that she’s found in the storage unit.

“C’mere Janet, I’ll show you how this works,” Uncle Benny says, even though I didn’t ask.

I slip my car keys into my back pocket and sidle over. I’m only here because yesterday Uncle Benny asked for help with Pa’s stuff, and I thought he meant the things in Pa’s apartment. But today he brought me to the storage unit and presented it like Ida does when she shows me artwork she’s made at school and expects me to know what it means without asking any questions. When the aluminum door rattled open, Uncle Benny began pulling things out: boxes of mismatched plates, rusted bicycles with flat tires, a yellow canoe with a gaping hole in the side that Uncle Benny said Pa planned to turn into a bookshelf and sell, a recycling bin full of beer sleeves with sayings like I like long walks to the fridge, and the arm-wrestling machine.

My uncle motions for my hand, and I sigh and hold it out. He positions my hand in the mannequin’s palm and squeezes it so that the fingers mold around mine.

“What is all this?” I ask.

Uncle Benny scratches at a bug bite on his cheek. “Your Pa never liked throwing anything away.”

“Except his wife,” I say, “and his daughter.”

“Come on, that was the addiction, not him.”

Today, he makes excuses for Pa. What about last year, I want to ask, when you found out Pa had slept with Aunt Joy? What about your real wrestling, knocking holes in the drywall, till the landlord pounded on the door and threatened to toss Pa out of the last place that would have him?

I think of all the times I took Pa in after he said he wanted Ida to know him, only to find him gone the next week or month. How many second chances does a person deserve? Everyone’s a martyr in death, I guess, everyone’s a hero for battling their demons.

Uncle Benny says Grandpa built the arm-wrestling machine to keep them busy when they were young. He says Pa was the arm-wrestling machine champion, the only one between them strong enough to push the arm back, even though he was the ropier of the two. When they were older, they tried hustling people at The Boobie Trap, our town’s only bar, to save enough to finally leave.

“Your Pa lost his first match to a city viper, and we didn’t have any money, so your Pa gave him a kitten because his kid had asked for one.” He shakes his head and scratches behind his ear. Flakes of skin snow onto the shoulder of his navy custodian uniform.

“That was my kitten,” I say.

“Was it?” He chuckles, and I want to tell him it’s not funny.

Uncle Benny says he found out later Pa was secretly turning the crank on the apple peeler to move the arm back and make it look like he was winning.

I take my free hand and pull open the fingers on the hand of the mannequin’s disembodied arm to release myself. I notice its nails are neon pink. I raise an eyebrow at Uncle Benny.

“Your Pa did that. Wanted to teach himself how to paint nails in case you ever asked.”

“I never asked,” I say.

“Could’ve though, and he would’ve. Was ready and waiting.”

I pick at my thumbnail, watch Ida sprinting around with the bag of spaghetti and wonder why I never asked.

Ida runs over and holds the bag in my face and shakes it and the spaghetti wiggles as if it’s alive. “Can we bring this home?” Her fingers grip the bag tight like she’s holding a delicate fish in water. Her nails are painted orange. I remember offering to paint them without her asking.

I grab the mannequin’s hand and squeeze, feel my elbow bump against the crank and wonder how Pa tricked Uncle Benny into thinking he was so invincible. My thumb’s nailbed whitens as I heave my chest into the spongy arm of the machine, screaming and hollering so loud that Uncle Benny grips Ida’s shoulders and pulls her back as I try to break it, this stupid thing my father loved so much he couldn’t let it go.

 

Kelly Pedro has won the CRAFT Literary Flash Prose Prize and The Writers Union of Canada’s Short Prose Competition. Her fiction has appeared in CRAFT, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Flash Frog, jmww, Tahoma Literary Review, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominee, she was also shortlisted for the 2025 SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. Learn more about her at kellypedro.ca.