flash fiction by a.v. pankov

MacGyver’s Musings

It was when they were stuck for a beam lifter and he suggested using the scaffolds that he got the name. He’s been called it ever since. The stubborn workmen held off the praise at first but soon accepted his unquestionable triumph. His wit could not be denied. 

 “Man strikes again,” someone said, and they all took to the task in joint effort, heaving one end of the girder onto the scaffold and then the other end on the second. Back to the first – raise it a little – and so on. Inch by inch the beam rose until it comfortably sat ceiling-height, ready to be popped in onto the brick supports. “Fair play, MacGyver,” someone blurted, and they all roared in a loud guffaw. The name stuck. 

His hand is a thing to watch. It moves in a masterful sequence, forming mellow arcs across the ceiling as it disseminates courses of the smooth compound. The right moving swiftly while the left grips the tray, offering up thick blobs of skimcoat. The raw smell of it emanating as drops pepper down over him, hard as little pebbles, dissolving in the bucket of water resting idly by his side. The hand would come to work even if the rest of him did not, though that has never been the case in all his years. 

“Pass the chisel there, lad,” a voice calls out.

He carries on. 

“Mate”—he turns his head—”the chisel there, look it.” The hand points to a mound of fragments. 

His eyes dart around like marbles over the tattered floor. He locates the item, passes it. A kind smile. Work resumes. 

Pass the chisel: he heard it in full but clung to ‘chisel’—it sounded familiar. Like chisto. That’s how he identified them. There were other ways but that was his and his way worked for him. It helped him to stow them away for future reference. 

The aphasia was not something he had become accustomed to. It was a thick bulwark lodged inside his brain, impeding the current of his thoughts. Sort of like indigestion. But of the mind.

The spewing cement mixer churns over his hardened figure as he leans to pick up a paper sack. He slices the surface with the edge of the trowel; a cloud of dust spools up from the cut. He overturns it into one of the buckets, watching the grey powder trickle down in a neat stream. A single measure to half a bucket of water: too moist and it will crack; leave it too long and it becomes sandy, lumpy, unworkable. That he never had problems remembering. The ratio of skimcoat to water is calculated by an immaculate impulse. He carries the bucket back to his stalled enterprise, wondering what the nickname means (it sounded like something, too). Then he plops the bucket on the deck and gets back to work. 

Voices. He picks up various phrases every now and then. Hand. Dig. Bollocks. Phrases he knows. The listening is easier: it doesn’t leave him grasping for abstract words from his mind’s reserves. Words that steer away from him like little minnows scattering away from the maw of a net. 

The condition came after the stroke. They barely got it through to him with a roomful of doctors trying to explain in the simplest terms what went where and what was what and every other kind of who, where and what. He just sat there, mouth still frozen in lockjaw from the seizure, shedding viscous slobber onto his robe. Fucking vegetable. 

His hand sinks the trowel in one of the buckets and re-emerges. Beads of water dripping off its edge. Off he goes again, refining the coved edges of the ceiling; a Michelangelo with his Sistine Chapel. That glorious sweep of his hand now all but gone. 

Scars play over his skin’s surface as he clenches the tool. Emblems of previous escapades. Memories pockmarked with a clarity that cannot escape him with the same ease of verse. A raw, curved suture mark on the side of his thumb – from when he was a young serviceman learning miscellaneous crafts on a maritime base. Different crafts, but with the same reticent vigor. 

Memories and images spool around him like flakes in a pan of broth. Young men and girls of his acquaintance. An infant with limbs small enough to fit in his hands. A dog lying disemboweled over a patch of grass. Memories to measure up every experience thereafter. He wonders if he could ever relay them, the memories. But the impossibility of it towers over him like an old foe. He thinks it is from the aphasia, but probably it is because he was never much of a talker in the first place. 

The work moves along, his instrument swinging to and fro in the grip of his clenched fist. He gazes upon one of the men nearby, hunched over, meting out a measurement. He almost calls to him with a name of an individual he has not seen in a long time. He quickly catches it before it escapes off the tongue. Then he refocuses on his work. Enough for the day. 

The beam: the group of them stood around looking at the steel bulwark hoisted between the walls, remarking it in admiration. The welder lazily hopped up to work on the joists. One of them turned to him with a swift cock of the head and said: “Is that how they do it in Moldova, is it?”

He gave a kind, broken smile. Muttered, “Yes” in his recognizable tenor. Caught him off-guard, that one. 

A tiring silence settles over the place before the end of shift. He hears an awkward shuffling under the scrape of his trowel and turns his head an inch. The young man stoops over his roll of measuring tape, cupping the device between his fingers. He watches the youth like he is watching himself. In another time, another school of expertise. He waits a second. Then it comes.

“Here, MacGyver mate,” the kid says. “Will you come over and give me a hand.”

Arthur Velker Pankov was born in the western Siberian town of Omsk. In 2001 his family emigrated to Dublin, Ireland, where he studied journalism in Dublin City University and worked as a newspaper reported for the Irish Daily Mirror and The Irish Sun. His other published works appeared in nationals such as Newstalk and Irish Times. He currently lives in Mayo and is working on his first feature novel.