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George Singleton
Epiphany

Flank’s a town in South Carolina not named for someone famous. In reality, it should be named Outflanked, because that’s what happened when one of those British generals or whatever swerved, came up from behind a group of South Carolina militia members, and shot most of them in the back. Oh, there’d been better skirmishes in Cowpens, Kings Mountain, the Battle of Musgrove Mill, and Ninety-Six when it came to American outcomes. I guess that’s how history works. No one mentions the Battle of Flank, outside of, well, Flank. Every year we have a reenactment that basically goes like this: a slew of pretend redcoats sneaks up on a bunch of fake South Carolina militiamen, who are all hunched down facing the wrong way. Then someone shoots a track meet starter gun into the air and all our people fall to the ground playing dead. The end. It’s as if I hail from a town of fainting goats.

It’s a big deal, held every year on the the day before Halloween, oddly enough, because that’s when it supposedly occurred. It’s been a tradition in Flank—at least when I was a kid—to go out the next day trick-or-treating while wearing a big gauze bandage across one’s head. No one went as a ghost or Batman or Cinderella. Sometimes parents would stand there at the door holding terrible Butterfingers and say, “Say, are you supposed to be Milam Akers or Horace Haulbrook?” which were two of the many shot-in-the-back soldiers.

Maybe I didn’t understand these parents’ well-meaning questions, but I answered, always, “No, I’m Otto Zapp,” and then they’d say how my father did a very good job rotating their tires.

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