Fiction by Dean Tuck
Dean Marshall Tuck is a writer living in eastern North Carolina with his wife and daughters. His novel, Twinless Twin (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) was chosen by Jason Mott as the winner of AWP’s 2024 James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel. His fiction was selected for this year's volume of New Stories from the South anthology. Poetry can be found in Rattle, Witness Magazine, New Ohio Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Cincinnati Review (forthcoming). For more, please visit deanmarshalltuck.com.
Memorial Day
It was back when dads would talk to farmers about letting their sons do a little work, give them a chance to turn hours, dirt, and sweat into a little cash, and maybe a memory or two to look back on a lifetime later and say, “I done that back then, and it was hard, hot work, and that's why I sell insurance.” When your dad hired you, you were just a teenager, like my sister, and I was the bespectacled sort who desperately needed an older brother. Me and you would fill our pockets with broke-up tobacco stems, and in between trailers, throw them at each other like ninja stars. You’d carry our five-gallon buckets of cucumbers to the truck for us, singing all the way—could talk all day. Couldn't tell Virginia creeper from Poison Ivy. Couldn't believe 2/3 was less than the 3/4. Couldn't believe my dad's partner, a grown man and a volunteer fireman, could put your ass on the ground. Yeah, you turned man on us. Joined the marines. Got sent to Iraq. Promptly got twin naked lady tattoos, one on each bicep (one done by an artist, the other a hack). Got someone pregnant. Got kids. Got sent back. Got home. And then, like damn general Patton, got hit by a damn vehicle, except you were just leaving a Waffle House, laughing, carrying on with friends, too damn late one night for a man with a wife and two kids. Dad says, “Some folks make mistakes and they get along, but you,” he says, “always paid dearly for each and every one of yours.” Now, me, dad, and your dad plant flags on graves every Saturday before Memorial Day, but yours, thank God, is on the new side, and we’re always by the road. And every year we walk across these stones with a hammer and screwdriver to punch holes in the hard ground for the bundles of flags we carry, and we read the names, and our dads tell the same stories about all the people who once lived in our town, and we try like hell not to think about you, but damn if we don't—yeah, man, we always do.