Chronicles of A Pull Tab Hoax by Erica Plouffe Lazure

             Rebekah Dobrasko CC


Chronicles of A Pull Tab Hoax 


Sheila Reddy collected the aluminum tabs of her father’s beer cans, on account of her uncle, who was sick, and campaigned her classmates at lunch with hand-lettered posters to do the same—“Donate your Tabs!” she’d plead. And soon a clear trash bag filled with shiny figure eights destined to Support Kidney Dialysis! “Got Tabs?” she’d asked us at lunch, in pitch-perfect tones she’d probably picked up from QVC. We sniggered at her “Got Tabs” slogan in the same way we sniggered at the 4:20 bell, or any reference to a “joint” meeting or a “pot” in ceramics, or “acid” rain. But as she talked, one of us dropped an actual tab into Sheila’s can of Coke—haha—that afternoon, and during our fifth period Math test, the strychnine kicked in and she began to draw on her problem set, small intricate patterns that rivaled the Fibonacci nautilus poster on the wall. When our teacher noticed, Sheila spoke of kaleidoscopes, of the music looping through her brain, and then she burst into song, “Knights in White Satin,” in front of the whole class. The nurse arrived, and Sheila slunk in her seat, eyes wide, and refused to un-grip her test—“I must finish,” she said—as they escorted her from class. The cool dark room in the nurse’s office, we later heard, was too cool, too dark, and when the clueless nurse was on the phone with the hospital, Sheila stole away from the nurse’s office, still gripping her doodled-on math test, and made her way down the hall, to the table where she must have seen it: the bag of shining silver aluminum tabs, which she picked up like the Grinch on Christmas eve, and stole away with her treasure to the wings of the auditorium. After a school-wide search, the custodians found her an hours later, on the old velveteen sofa behind the scarlet curtains, the shining silver tabs sprawled about and on her, and the sofa, and she a sleeping queen of the shiny tiny eights.
             Sheila didn’t return to school for a week, and we fretted she’d connect it all back to us, to my inane questions about her dying uncle, the kidney charity, how people should care about dialysis, as my pal dropped in the tab. And the day we almost forgot about her, almost forgot about her stupid “Got Tabs?” campaign was the day she returned. She, too, seemed to forget about the tabs, because she no longer sat at lunch campaigning for aluminum in her old lady pantsuit, soliciting classmates, ignoring our sniggers. She seemed to have grown taller somehow, her hair more red, her face flush and bright. And when we passed in the hall, it was almost as though she could see us, see through each of us, like she knew who and what we really were about, and that no number of silver soda tabs would help her uncle, or his kidneys, or any of us.

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Erica Plouffe Lazure is the author of a flash fiction chapbook, Heard Around Town, and a fiction chapbook, Dry Dock. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Carve, Greensboro Review, Meridian, American Short Fiction, The Journal of Micro Literature, The Southeast Review, Fiction Southeast, Flash: the International Short-Short Story Magazine (UK), Vestal Review, National Flash Fiction Day Anthology (UK), Litro (UK), and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Exeter, NH and can be found online at ericaplouffelazure.com.

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