Associate Editor Lily Davenport: Lisa Thornton’s “The Man Under the Blanket” enacts a troubled nostalgia, imagining an act of communal violence underlying a treasured family memory. Through the frames of its posed and candid snapshots, the piece asks us to examine the nature of belonging to a family, to a shared past, and to a projected future.
Listen to Thornton read the story:
The Man Under the Blanket
We watched the slides projected onto the living room wall when it was raining or there was nothing good on TV. My father clicked the images into place, his thumb working the device that moved from memory to memory. My mom’s dead sister posed with everyone in front of my grandparents’ Christmas tree. My cousin who they found dangling in the cafeteria stood upright behind me, his hands on my shoulders.
The shots from the Cape were full of wind and sand. Reeds blowing this way and that behind my parents and my sister, when she was a baby and I was not alive yet. I loved to look at my family before I was in it. I tried to discern: Was my mother as tired before I arrived? Was my father still brave then—did he trust his own voice? Was my sister filled with insecurity, or was it me that did that to them?
We laughed at the image of my sister sitting on the green blanket my father brought home from the army. The one we wrapped our dolls in as we carried them through imaginary storms and fled imaginary persecution, and sat on to watch fireworks by the lake. I felt its woolen scratch on the backs of my legs as it flickered on the wall.
My sister’s baby legs shot out in front of her on the blanket, knee joints like those 1970s plastic pop beads in bright red, yellow, and blue, the strings of a sunhat tied tightly under her chin. The dunes rose up behind her. I imagined my mother off to one side, arm poised in case her firstborn started to topple.
Oh, there he is, my father said every time this picture clicked into place. There’s the man under the blanket. A black Converse sneaker poked out from the green cloth, left by my father no doubt, as he ran into the waves. The way it was angled made it look like there was a man lying under the sand, under the blanket, under my sister. One foot above ground. Oh, the one we buried, my mother would laugh. That man on the beach.
And my sister would smile at the giant image of her rosy cheeks, and I would close my eyes halfway to make that feeling bigger: The one I got in my chest when I thought of my family killing someone on the beach, a stranger, and burying him underneath my sister. Underneath their picnic. When I thought of my family laughing at their crime years later, my mother munching popcorn from our biggest bowl, my father chuckling as he clicked to the next image.
Lisa Thornton’s work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hippocampus Magazine, and Pithead Chapel, among other places. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction award and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. Her stories have been nominated for the Best of the Net award and the Pushcart Prize.
