“You’re being dramatic.”
“I couldn’t stay, knowing that he’s going away.”
“At least he has a job now.”
“It scares the hell out of me.”
“He’ll be fine,” Mom says.
“I need to go to bed.”
“Don’t worry too much,” she says. “He’ll be back before you know it.”
I lie in my bed and think about John John running through the woods with a rifle, about Lloyd doing pushups, about John John coming home different than the John John that left me here. I don’t want anything to change, but then I want everything to change.
Nothing Lasts
“WE COULD GET naked,” Zephyr says.
“Not today.”
“Come on,” he says.
He’s high and his eyes are filled with blood and darkness.
“I have to figure things out,” I say.
“I thought you loved me.”
“I do,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I’m scared,” I say.
“Man up.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“You didn’t seem to mind before.”
“Only because you were with me.”
“I never left.”
“I think I need to be alone for a while,” I say.
“I don’t have time for these games,” he says.
“No games.”
“What would you call it?”
“Confusion.”
He goes to the door and opens it, waiting for me to leave. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. We’re done. I tried being honest and now I’m out. Zephyr wants things a certain way. I can’t do it. I can’t just turn myself around like that.
Out in the yard, I look back at the windows. There’s no one there. I’m alone again. I’m always alone. I could walk into traffic now and no one would notice. I give up and go home.
“You’re back,” Mom says.
“Yeah.”
“Why so sad?”
“I thought I was in love,” I say.
“And now you’re not,” she says.
“I don’t know.”
She takes my face in her wrinkled, soft hands.
“You’re too young,” she says.
“It still hurts.”
“That never changes,” she says and walks away, the pain of too much time and too little love weighing on her like a yoke of water.
When You’re Losing
THE STREET GLITTERS in the light from the streetlamps, diamond twinkles, rainbow colored. I sit with my back to the school’s brick wall on the corner. No one sees me here except for the red and black fire of my cigarette. Oxy makes me weak and sick. Soon the sun will rise. Soon I’ll have John John take me home. Right now, he’s curled on the sidewalk snoring.
It’s hard to remember why I’m here. It’s hard to put the night in order. Things have blurred and run together. There were girls for a while. And they went away. Zephyr gave me head on the backseat of John John’s Chevy. I smoked a lot of weed. I drank a pint of two dollar wine. Still I cannot sleep. And somehow, I can’t remember how I got here.
“John John,” I say.
Nothing.
“Hey,” I say.
He rolls away from me.
I stand. John John’s too far gone for me to wake. I stand and stumble into the street. Cars come by me and one of them honks, swerving around my staggering hips. I’m coming down enough to know that I’m going to get in trouble if I don’t get home soon. I live too far away to walk. I’ll never make it. I’m alone and I need help and there’s no one here to help me. Out on the highway, I hold out my thumb. People don’t pick up hitchhikers the way they used to, but I have to try. I stand on the edge of the pavement and wait for someone going my way. The sun rises over the mountains, bloody as murder, harsh as an absent father. I stand there and hold my thumb out. A blue Dodge stops.
“Where you going?”
“Home,” I say.
“Are you okay?”
“I will be.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Love.”
“What’s that?”
“Love,” I say. “Can you take me home?”
“Mine or yours?”
“Do you have a bed?”
“Yeah.”
“Yours is fine.”
“Do you need to let someone know you’re okay?”
I shake my head.
“What’s the point of that?”
“They’ll worry.”
“They’ll worry whether I’m there or not.”
“Okay.”
I stare out the window.
“Just don’t say you love me,” I say.
“Okay.”
“Love’s the score you get in tennis when you’re losing.”
Aftermath
LEAVES LIE ON the lawn in layers of rot and mold. Overnight, a couple of mushrooms pushed through the dirt, soft and pale as bone. I should be wearing shoes, but I’m not. A tattered cloak of clouds hides the mountains and the rain sings through the naked oaks. Cold mist eats through to my spine. A coat would be nice, but the coat’s in the house and I don’t want to go there right now.
No one moves on the road out front except a small murder of crows. There are no shadows and no sound. Mom comes to the porch dusted with flour from working with Grandma in the kitchen making pies.
“Bill,” she says. “What’re you doing?”
What can I say? John John is gone, a soldier now. No one’s said anything to me for days. Words hang in my throat like a sliver of bone, of light maybe.
“Bill,” Mom calls.
I turn and walk into the house. Mom puts a hand on the back of my neck.
“Do you miss him?” I ask.
“Who?”
“Bobby,” I say. “Dad.”
Mom stares at me. She shrugs and touches her fingertips to her chin.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I miss the idea of them.”
I don’t know what that means. I miss the people in my life. I miss the pressure of their voices on my face. What am I supposed to do now? I’m alone. Not that there’s nothing for me to do. I can call them. I can go to their houses. But what’s the point? Why should I go out of my way to fill the emptiness with company when the company always goes away?
I lie on the couch and let the sadness press me into the cushions. I cannot move. I cannot think. All I can do is wait and hope and listen to the sound of my lungs working, wondering if this is the last breath I’ll take. Maybe I’ll die here. Maybe dying would tell me how to live with people. We’ll see. Someday, maybe, someone will come into my life and never go away.
About the Author
William L. Alton comes from a split family. After his parents divorced, he moved with his mother to Oklahoma, spending summers in Central Washington with his father. He started writing in the eighties while incarcerated in a psychiatric prison and never stopped. Through his writing he tries to make sense of his own experiences and help others with similar struggles. His work has appeared in Main Channel Voices, World Audience and Breadcrumb Scabs among others. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has published two books of poems, Heroes of Silence and Drowning Is a Slow Business, as well as a memoir titled My Name Is Bill. He earned both his BA and MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. You can find him at williamlalton.com.
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