Paul Luikart- Fiction

Rose Parade

Some kid knocked and I opened up. Why? I never do that. He was raising money for the band. The band. They were off to Pasadena, he said, for the Rose Parade. I went into my pocket, handed the kid a wadded single. How long had that been in there? Well, what the hell did I need it for anyway? 

“It’s a long way to Pasadena,” the kid said. Ballsy kid.

“Sir,” he said. 

I went into all the reasons I never open my door and barely ever even go out. Chiselers, cheats, grifters, junkies, flunkies, landlords, lost dogs, religious people, and big guys now and then, who’d like to break your knees. The world is a zoo. 

“I understand,” the kid said, “I’m sorry to have bothered you, sir.”

This kid, the more I looked at him, reminded me of my own boy. Wiry, buck-toothed, broad-shouldered. Last time I saw my boy, he was all those things. Once, he’d wanted to play trombone. 

“Hold on, kid.” This time I went into my wallet. Truth be told, I’d just cashed my check. I handed him a one-hundred-dollar bill. “That’s for Pasadena.” 

“Holy shit.” He pinched it, waved it, held it up to the sun. 

“What’s the matter, you don’t believe me?” 

“I believe you, sir. I just never saw one.” 

“Bang your drums and toot your horns.” 

“I surely will. I mean we surely will, mister. Sir.” The kid leaped off my porch. Didn’t touch a single step. He ran out to a Chevy that had just crept out from the shade of my arborvitae. 

Come New Year’s, I watched the parade on TV. Plenty of bands, plenty of flowers, plenty of beautiful girls. No bands from around here, though. No bands from anywhere near here. But I didn’t think there would be, not really. I thought about calling the high school. “You’ve got a problem.” But nobody’d be there. It was still vacation. So, I watched those kids step along and step along, blaring and rattling, everything in reds and yellows, everything in flowers. 

Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021), The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, 2021), The Realm of the Dog (J. New Books, 2024), Cult Life (Tenpenny Books, 2024), and Mercy (Walnut Street Publishing, 2025.) He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.