An angry wind whipped the pop-up canopy like the whooping I got for calling Andy Harper a bastard. I didn’t know what I was saying back then. I was only eight.  My hind, blistered pink for days, made it near impossible to sit, or even move. Twenty-three years later and I can still recall the throbbing sting. Ma said she would’ve made me eat soap if she hadn’t just run out. But money was tight back then and she couldn’t go wasting a bar of soap on my dirty mouth. Her dishwater-dry hands worked for free. Dad had just lost his job over at the paint factory and was out beating the pavement most days. It wasn’t too long after my whooping that he got hired on at Lawry’s. That’s when things started to look up. He made shift manager in less than a year and Ma always had a bar of soap waiting for me then. Who knows, maybe if he’d gotten passed over for the promotion we wouldn’t have buried him yesterday.

The guy that did it, his wife is expecting. He didn’t take the layoff well, but then who does? Dad’s hands were tied—he was just passing on a message from up the ladder. Sitting there in that old green Laz-E boy he told me how it killed him to lay these guys off. He didn’t know what he was saying. No one in the shop saw it coming. This guy was just there to pack up his things. They didn’t know he was packing a 9mm. My dad went out to lend him a hand, and that’s when he did it. Two shots, they said—one in my dad’s chest and one through the guy’s own head. 

I didn’t go to the guy’s funeral, but his wife came to Dad’s. We haven’t met, but I know it was her. She stood in the back with this awful look on her face—part shame, part horror, wholly shattered. She kept running her ivory hands over her rounded belly draped in black—like she was consoling the child inside. I thought to myself how lucky that little unborn bastard was. He wouldn’t have to say goodbye to his dad, like I did. I guess that’s what made me think of Andy Harper, and being eight. Sitting under that tarp at the graveside, while it took its beating from the wind, I found it impossible to move. For an instant I felt that throbbing sting, but this time it hit my chest. The beating wasn’t meant for the canopy—it was meant for me. I’m the reason my dad took that job at Lawry’s, me and my dirty mouth. He had to pay for more soap.

Soap Money is a piece I wrote for a creative writing course in college. My kids were much younger at the time, so I took my laptop to the backyard and worked on my assignments while they played. We had to turn in weekly writing journals, and I was out of ideas. I closed my eyes and listened to the noise around me—kids laughing, cars passing, dogs barking, and a tattered tarp whipping against the fence post. The tarp was originally placed to provide shade but had come loose by storms and wind.

That sound—a tarp whipping in the wind—became the seed for Soap Money. Inspiration may be an unending well, but it’s not always readily tapped, and I’m always searching for seeds that might propel my next story. Where do you find creative inspiration?