After the Parade by Lori Ostlund Page A

with the cheap dress shoes. She returned looking satisfied, her transaction complete, but she saw him then and stopped.
    â€œHow can you just stand there chewing gum?” she asked in a cool, steady voice.
    He stared back at her, feeling the familiar urge to vomit, but he knew nothing could get past the gum. He panicked, the pastel spittle foaming around his mouth as he struggled to breathe.
    â€œWhat kind of a boy are you?” the saleswoman said just before he passed out.
    *  *  *
    His jaw ached as it did after a visit to the dentist, but the bubblegum was gone. He kept his eyes closed and breathed in, focusing on the smells: metal, ointments, and Band-Aids fresh from the wrapper, as well as something unfamiliar, a thick odor that he thought might be dead people, for he knew that he was in a hospital. He had never actually smelled a dead person, not even his father, but he knew they smelled. His father had said so at supper one night, describing, almost gleefully, the odor of an old woman, five days dead, whom he had found that morning after the mailman noted an accumulation of mail.
    â€œWe had to break in,” his father said. The idea of the policebreaking into a house had shocked Aaron. “Found her tipped back in her recliner with a bowl of grapes in her lap. She choked.” His father paused. “The stink of the human body,” he said with awe. He took a long drink of milk, got up, and retrieved the shirt he had worn that day. “Smell here,” he said to Aaron’s mother as he held it to her nose repeatedly, wanting her to be impressed by the stink of the old woman also, but his mother said, “It just smells like you, Jerry.”
    Aaron opened his eyes. On a chair was the box with his cheap dress shoes. He remembered the saleswoman running out to the ambulance with it, and he wondered whether this meant his mother was nearby. A man came in. “How are you, Aaron?” asked the man.
    â€œAre you the doctor?”
    â€œI’m a nurse,” the man said. He held Aaron’s wrist and stared up at the clock on the wall. Aaron had not known that men could be nurses.
    â€œDo you feel groggy?” the man asked. “We had to give you a sedative to loosen your jaw.” Groggy was a word Aaron knew. The man was looking at a chart, and when he glanced up and smiled, Aaron was startled to see that he was wearing braces.
    â€œYes,” he said, “I feel groggy. Is my mother here?”
    â€œYour uncle’s here,” the man said, as if that were the same thing.
    When the door opened, it was not Uncle Petey but a stranger with a nub for an ear, the skin smooth and pink. “Hello, Aaron,” said the stranger. “I’m your uncle.”
    â€œMy uncle is Petey,” Aaron informed the man politely.
    â€œAh, yes, Petey,” the man said. “A name better suited for a parakeet, don’t you think?” He gave Aaron a moment to agree, but Aaron did not. “Lives up on the Iron Range. Fine country, the Iron Range. They’re really doing God’s work up there, though I suspect your uncle Petey’s not involved with any of that.”
    â€œHe works in a mine,” Aaron said. He did not tell the man that the mine was closed or that Uncle Petey had quit even before that because he was afraid of the dark.
    â€œMy name is Irv Englund,” said the man. “You can call me Mr. Englund. We need to get going because it’s nearly suppertime, but let’s have a prayer first.”
    He took Aaron’s hand and prayed aloud in a fast, rhythmic chant, asking God to make Aaron into a child worthy of becoming a lamb. When he said “Amen,” he pressed Aaron’s hand hard against his nub. It was as smooth as Play-Doh. Aaron pulled away, and his uncle laughed.
    Mr. Englund drove an El Camino, a type of car Aaron knew because his father had always pointed them out. “The car that wants to be a