The Odd Bend by Steve Saulsbury

Sean Benham CC




The Odd Bend    

     Bad enough going to A.A. meetings, but Wednesday night was upstairs at St. Paul’s. Two flights, like going up the hangman’s scaffolding. That’s how it felt some nights, especially when I was new, and doing the whole one day at a time thing.
     I sat next to Mike W., feeling like a child beside him. I couldn’t even grow a beard. Mike’s was black shot with gray. But he was troubled that evening and laid out his forearm. The skin was tan, almost blending in with the scarred church table that had probably been around since I was a teenager, attending Youth Group in this same room.
      “I don’t know what to tell my son,” Mike said, tracing his trigger finger over a large, dark tattoo. 
     His son was about middle school age, I recalled. The tattoo was a marijuana leaf, not a great rendition. Older and not professionally done, it could almost pass for an Ace of Clubs.
     “I thought I’d tell him it was a symbol from our platoon.”
     Mike, 20 years after Vietnam, was consulting me, the alcoholic who couldn’t grow a beard. I had no tattoos. I had never shot anything, besides a BB gun. 
     But he trusted and supported me. Even more than my own father, in that “room.”
     “That might work,” I agreed.
     I was drawn to the underdogs. People a little left of center, like that old Suzanne Vega song. You might not know them unless you were one yourself: ones who had each other’s backs.
     After the meeting, Mike and I had a cigarette outside. A huge tree, probably 100 years old, grew very close to the church. One of those witness trees that had seen funerals for a few of the boys killed in Vietnam. In recent years, a sidewalk had been laid alongside the church, with an odd bend curving around the tree trunk. 
     The odd bend went right to the side entrance, where the underdogs go on Wednesdays. Where some of us have transcended the basic achievement of sobriety and now have each other’s backs.

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Steve Saulsbury’s flash fiction has appeared in many journals, online and in print. He is the author of the chapbook, "Wildlife Study" (Bottlecap Press, 2025), and a member of the Harper’s Ferry writers' group A Reason to Write. Besides writing, he enjoys physical fitness, wishing his body was as enthusiastic as his brain!


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