The Barter System by Gary Fincke

The morning their neighbor Mike Polkovich stuck a shotgun into his mouth, Quinn was picking red raspberries from the bushes that ran a boundary between their yards. His father was three hours into sleep after his night shift at the bakery where he had never once used those berries because, he had explained, fresh fruit pies would be too expensive for families who worked graveyard shifts of their own.

Mrs. Cellendar, who lived behind them, paid three dollars a quart, but she expected the level of each box to be mounded, and so Quinn was adding a handful of extra berries when Mike Polkovich, months unemployed, picked five minutes past eleven, the third of July, for his last job, that gun exploding from inside an upstairs, far-side room, high enough that Quinn mistook the sound for early celebration.

Forty years later, Quinn still scratches his hand as he carefully lifts leaves to find the clusters of hidden berries, following the directions his father had repeatedly given him when he was seven and expected to begin chipping-in. His fingers turn the familiar dark red as he fills two of his father’s ancient quart cartons. He begins a third just as his father appears, saying, at once, “You remembering to look under?” from where he leans hard upon a walker.

In the neighboring yard, three small children Quinn doesn’t recognize splash in a plastic wading pool. A beagle barks from the end of a stump-tied, knotted chain. The night before, his father, who has lived alone for twenty years, agreed to accepting a hospice nurse, but he is sure that the woman who will arrive tomorrow would never be thorough enough with the berries. “At least you can give them one good, going-over,” he’d said an hour ago.

As Quinn reaches the last pair of parallel bushes, the screaming children are called inside, the freed dog following. In their absence, Quinn begins to hear the silence of the dead who feasted on these berries every July—his mother, Mrs. Cellander, and Mike Polkovich, who, his father told Quinn every summer, helped himself from his side “as if they belonged to him.”

Quinn can tell that the latest next-door neighbors have helped themselves, too, but unlike Polkovich, they didn’t discover how many berries they overlooked beneath the leaves. “Or they think that it’s ok as long as they take only the ones that show,” Quinn decides, remembering that his father had always called Polkovich a thief because he stripped the berries that hung underneath the leaves. And because, Quinn long ago concluded, they would drive each fall to load bushels with apples and black walnuts fresh fallen from trees that belonged to somebody else, his mother peeling for hours, he and his father shelling for days, staining their hands, that messy work his father’s way of using what was fresh in the bakery, calling that long and tedious work the equivalent of paying.

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GARY FINCKE — Gary’s new collection of flash The History of the Baker’s Dozen will be published by Pelekinesis Press in August. He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.

Art by MARIE MAGNETIC — Marie (b. 1989, Jackson, Michigan) is a Chicago-based visual artist using color, form, and surreal images to make sense of humanity through her identity as queer, neurodivergent, Jewish, and Indigenous. Marie graduated from Central Michigan University in 2017, studying Psychology. She is a Foundation House, Haven Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts grant recipient. Additionally, her work has been published in LAMINATOR ZINE, Pinky Thinker Press, and The Globe Review.