Brian Benson: DON’T FIND ME • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Brian Benson
DON’T FIND ME

Every hero needs an origin story, and in mine, I’m the size of a trash can, squatting in bushes, crying. I’m crying because I’ve just learned I can’t go to the circus and sit on the elephant. I can’t go to the circus and sit on the elephant because on the way to the circus Dad said he had to stop by a customer’s house for a quick chat, and the quick chat went long, and now it is too late and dark for me to do anything but squat in the bushes, crying. Mom and Dad are pacing the yard, calling my name. I can hear the fear in their voices. I like knowing that they feel bad, because they made me feel bad when they said it was too late to go to the circus and sit on the elephant. I may or may not be sucking my thumb. I am likely wearing a sweatshirt with a dinosaur on it. I am definitely squatting behind a tree and crying as my parents shout my name at the dark and talk in low voices about when it might be time to call the police. When the shouting stops and the voices go even lower, I sit in the dirt. I pull my thumb from my mouth. I say, just loud enough to be heard, “Don’t find me.”

People tend to smile when I tell this story, so I tell it a lot. Sometimes I compare the brush I was squatting in to the department store sweatshirt carousels I’d crawl into when Mom wasn’t looking. Sometimes, I play up my small-town roots, adding that the circus was held in the same field where I played T-ball and broomball and where the Lions Club held meat raffles. If I want to be seen as empathetic—and if I want my family to be read as working-class—I mention that Dad’s contracting outfit was at that point still a small, struggling thing, and so he very much needed to have that chat, keep that job, keep us fed. Wherever I take the story, I always make sure to focus on the clear injustice of the situation—an elephant ride! they promised!—and on those three words I murmured from the bushes.

I tell this story this way because I want to make you laugh.

And because I want to be seen as the victim of something.

One day, during a weeklong visit to my parents’ custom-built, lakeside, five-bedroom home, I tell my story to my mom, who, of course, is the one who first told it to me. My mom shakes her head and says I’ve got it all wrong. On the night in question, we were never even supposed to go to the circus; the plan was always to go the next night, and either I’d misunderstood or had understood and thrown a fit anyway. I dig in, ready to argue for my story, to tell her how clearly I recall squatting in underbrush, feeling lonely and betrayed, yearning for the simple thing I’d been promised— but the words catch in my throat. Turns out an origin story is not the same thing as a memory.

I don’t remember squatting in underbrush. Don’t remember watching my parents wander in the dark, distraught, shouting my name. Don’t even remember saying, “Don’t find me.” The only thing I’m sure I do remember? Looking down at my parents from the back of an elephant. That’s the part of the story I usually leave out. The next night, I got to ride the elephant. I always get to ride the elephant.

Brian Benson is the author of Going Somewhere and co-author, with Richard Brown, of This Is Not For You. Originally from the hinterlands of Wisconsin, Brian now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches at the Attic Institute. Essays by Brian Benson have been published or are forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, Tahoma Literary Review, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and Sweet, among several other journals.