End Of The Year Collection - 2014

by Spain, Laura

  “Check out the hairy slicks on that Chevy,” Billy said as his car pulled up to the end of the street. “He’s got it jacked up with collector headers. I’m jazzed about seeing how this is going to pan out. David hasn’t lost a race yet.”

  “Of course he hasn’t,” Melonie said trying to fit in with the boys, “He’s gonna lay a patch, a real nice patch. He always does. You’ll see. Not only does that hunk win the races, he races with style and wins by a mile!”

  Billy looked at her and rolled his eyes. She was not the girl he fancied, but she was always around because she was Trina’s best friend, and Trina was David’s gal. Had been for a while.

  Trina climbed out of the car they had ridden in, giving Melonie a wink and rushing to David, pink poodle skirt dancing in the breeze.

  “Hey there, stud,” she said to him. He kissed her on the cheek and she blushed.

  “Hey… you took away my mirror warmer! I’m tellin’ you it’s a good idea,” she said.

  “It ain’t nothin’ personal, doll. I’ll put it back after tonight. I just gotta be able to see where I’m goin’ and how far behind me that BelAir is.” He laughed. “You reckon’ Melonie’s ever gon’ back off Billy there? I feel like he’s gettin’ a bit frustrated with the girl is all. I mean look over yonder, poor thang’s justa followin’ him ‘round in circles.”

  “Babe, you know she’s on the make since Charles. Main reason she’s adoin’ it’s cause he’s racin’ tonight. We’re both rootin’ for you, as always. Charles ain’t nothin’ but a panty waist anyhow. I honestly don’t know why the girl’s so heartbroken over such a thang, but love is love I s’pose.”

  He smiled at her and took out a cigarette from his rolled up white t-shirt. “Love is love, and darlin’ I’m in love with you.” He pulled her close to him and she giggled, ran her fingers through his slicked back hair and backed away, twirling as she turned and taking the cigarette from his mouth and throwing it to the ground. The other cars began to pull up along the street, turning their headlights on for an added effect. Girls let their tops down so they could sit on their seats and have a great view, still keeping their hair perfectly done up.

  “Charles has a bitchin’ rake,” one of the guys said as another replied sardonically, “Yeah, but he’s one real gone cat.” And they laughed.

  Remarks and comments could be heard from every direction.

  “David did a sano job fixin’ up that ’55 Chevy. I ain’t never made it over here to see him race. I’m excited.”

  “Yeah, he’s gon’ smokem’ tonight. Don’t matter how purty that BelAir may seem to be, up close it ain’t nothin’ but a skuzz bucket.”

  As all of these comments were finding their way to David’s ears, he was sitting down by his car, staring off into the empty land near the railroad tracks. This would be his last race and he was content with this decision. He was graduating soon and the boys out of high school that came to race with the youngsters never really made anything of themselves. He was determined to not be one of those guys. He sat and he contemplated the future and what life had in store for him. He knew things would not always be how they were for him at the present moment, but he knew he could create the perfection he was feeling now in some way or another. He knew that the encouraging chants would soon fade, as would their importance, but he promised himself that the way they made him feel was a feeling he would never let go.

  “Whatchya thinkin’ ‘bout, babe,” Trina asked, walking up on him out of nowhere.

  “Oh nothin’, just wondrin’ what’ll be ‘round here in 50 years or so. Wondrin’ where I’ll be in 50 years or so...”

  “Use your imagination,” she said, putting her hands over his eyes. “A blue house. A purty blue house will be right here. It’ll have a fenced in back yard and a…. and a… and a weepin’ willow tree in the front yard. The river’s right yonder and a weepin’ willow would go just fine right here in front of a blue house.”

  He turned around and smiled at her. “A blue house and a weepin’ willow, huh.” He laughed. “Sounds pretty nice to be honest. Weepin’ willows grow fast. They don’t need much time to reach a good height, and a blue house sounds perfect — blue’s always been my favorite color.”

  “I know,” she replied, “now c’mon! Race is startin’ soon. The boys have already blocked off the street and ain’t no fuzz around to cause us any problems . . . and I’m wavin’ the flag tonight!”

  He walked over to his blue ’55 Chevy and climbed in. The engines revved and he looked to his right to see Charles in his BelAir. He looked to his left and envisioned the blue house with the weeping willow tree. I’m truly happy, he thought to himself, I’ll remember this moment forever. Trina’s pink poodle skirt came to life when Billy’s headlights came on to show the racers their finish line. Her hands went up and she was holding a flag in her hand. 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

  The flag dropped to the ground, waving to an elegant rhythm that David couldn’t hear. His foot forced its way down and his car began to speed towards the pink poodle skirt, towards his last winning race, towards the end of the road. His muffler made a loud noise that muted the cheers and whistles coming from the onlookers up ahead. As he sped forward, everything in his sight seemed to be illuminated by the bright headlights of the cars in front of him. As he got closer, everything seemed to go white until it all disappeared, in the blink of an eye, as moments in life often seem to do.

  Laura blinked and removed her peripheral blockers. As she walked back inside, she shut the front door of her blue house. She picked up her phone to call her father to gather some information about his past. Her younger sister, Leah, answered in a deep voice pretending to be their dad. “This is David,” she said, giggling a bit at how well she was able to mock their father. “Can I talk to Dad,” Laura said, amused at her sister’s silly attitude that assisted in confirming she had successfully completed her first semester in nursing school. “Yeah, hold on,” she said. She screamed the words “Dad… it’s Laura!” and a moment of silence fell between the line. Shortly after, there was some muffling caused by Leah handing the phone over to her father, and then he spoke.

  “Hey, babe,” he said.

  “Hey Daddy, what kind of car was your first car again?”

  “A ’55 Chevrolet.”

  “And what color was it?”

  “It was blue, why do ask?”

  “No reason,” she replied. “I love you, but I gotta go.”

  “I love you Laura. When are you gonna come over here? We need to talk and we need to do it one day soon. Are you workin’?”

  “No, I’m off today, but yeah, yeah I know. I’ll come by tomorrow or somethin’. Right now I gotta go.”

  “Alrighty. Talk to you later.”

  She hung up the phone. The notebook she had been writing in was screaming for her attention. The ideas were there, they were flowing about her mind like a thick lava ready to erupt. It needed to erupt. It needed to erupt onto the notebook’s pages that lie open and ready on the table in front of her.

  She read what she had previously written:

  Memories are circumstances that create an individual’s persona. They assist in creating both the good aspects of a person as well as the bad ones. People see a memory and they see themselves, but they sometimes remember themselves as an onlooker instead of a main character. My memories are a part of me. They are my past, my present, and my future. They are the first person to my person . . .

  She picked up her pencil, turned the page, and began to write once more:

  The year was 1964 . . .

  His Own Idiom

  by Nikolus Cook

  He wakes to the window banging as the sun seeps in

  through the green transparency of cedar boughs. The goat

  bleats in the yard, and the morning bird taps the window at

  6:40. The clay robin does a good job of keeping to his odd

  schedule when nothing else does. Nudging the long dog

  off of his le
gs, the boy gets up for a lean breakfast

  as the goat continues to call. The first

  night his father brought the kid home, it cried

  whenever left alone. His father had to sit with it

  Until it fell asleep on the porch, running a finger

  on its forehead, as with a child. That was years ago.

  The animal is now a rough translation of a Roman god;

  crowned with ragged bone, with the eyes of a surprised

  toad. The boy throws a handful of oats into a scarred breadbowl

  along with feed pellets and tosses the dry mix, getting

  a film of dust between his fingers as he walks barefoot

  in the fine, cold grasses. He hasn’t been corrected

  about that old phrase. To get your goat. Someone has

  pleased you so well they deserve this prize, two armfuls

  of string-haired belly and the grin of a wild hare.

  Films of sleet illustrate the depth between the hills, and

  the goat stands on the tin-roofed shed, babbling an old incantation

  to pull in the coming storm. I must have done something pretty good,

  the boy thought, to get the goat. One who bleats to me as the rain’s

  silver fingers braid his hair. And the clouds call back.

  Breakneck Cove

  by David Oppegaard

  1

  Interesting things were bound to wash up on the shores of Breakneck Cove and the Kells brothers knew it. They woke early in the summertime, before their parents, and dressed in the dark blue of pre-dawn, stepping into their swim trunks with legs still wobbly from sleep. Eleven and nine years old, the Kells brothers had lived on the Oregon Coast their entire short lives. They could hear the ocean calling to them day and night, lonesome for company, and they sought it out whenever they could break from the tedious constraints of dry land.

  One August morning, with school looming a few weeks distant, the boys heard the ocean’s call even more loudly than normal. They fought through the last foggy remnants of sleep and tiptoed barefoot into the kitchen. The oldest, Will, fixed a bowl of cereal for both himself and his brother, Harlow, judiciously pouring out first the cereal and then the milk. They ate standing at the kitchen counter, crunching and slurping in the ghostly light spilling out from the open refrigerator. When they finished, they set their bowls down clinking in the sink and Killer, their round, overfed tabby, lurched in from the living room. She brushed against their legs, mewing plaintively. Will nudged the cat away with his foot and she mewed again, looking up at the sink with big eyes. Harlow squatted down and raked the cat’s rough fur with his fingers, enjoying how it arched its back and puffed its striped tail.

  Will shut the refrigerator door and went off. Harlow gave the cat one last scratch and joined his older brother in the dark hallway, teetering uncertainly as he stepped into his sandals. He didn’t like wearing shoes on the beach, but their mother would know if he didn’t. She always knew, somehow. She said if Harlow cut his feet on the shoreline rocks one more time that would be it for the summer—no more going down to the cove, no exceptions.

  The boys headed down the hallway and out through the backdoor, which Harlow remembered to close softly behind them. They bounded down the steps onto the grassy plot of land behind the house, sprinting full-out into the salty ocean wind. They kept silent until they were far enough away from their sleeping parents that they could whoop loudly, like crazed madmen, and clear the stuffy house air from their lungs.

  * * * * *

  Breakneck Cove wasn’t too large or fancy, but it was theirs. Nobody else visited the cove—not tourists, not artists, not old man clammers with their black rubber hip waders and bushy beards. Located directly behind their house, on their own property, Breakneck Cove was a narrow, shallow cove boxed in by three steep cliff walls. Fifty years earlier, intent on accessing the cove, their dead Grandpa Kells had carved a zigzagging stairway out of the eastern cliff wall. All the steps were still there, worn smooth by the wind and rain, and the boys knew them well enough that they didn’t need to watch their feet as they climbed down to the cove, halting periodically to scan the ocean horizon for oil tankers and sea monsters.

  They came to the bottom of the stairway and stepped onto the stony beach. The tide was already headed out, frothy seawater churning and tearing at the muck beneath it, trying to pull it along. Harlow felt an urge to sprint with the outgoing tide, past the tidal pools and the large rock breakers at the mouth of the cove, and find out where all this water was going, exactly. He’d seen The Little Mermaid twenty-three times and was convinced there had to be some kind of happy kingdom under the sea, no matter if Will said that was crazy and could only happen in a cartoon.

  “No ships,” Will said, squinting at the horizon.

  “You think any will come?”

  Will shrugged and looked down at clump of seaweed that had just rolled up onto his sandaled foot. “Could be, later,” he said, kicking off the seaweed. “Maybe it’ll be a huge Russian iron-ore freighter.”

  “That’d be cool.”

  “Yeah.”

  Seagulls spiraled above the cove, crying to each other and diving into the cove’s shallow waters, looking for an easy meal. Will and Harlow watched the birds, scanning their movements for a discernable pattern. The boys both had dark hair and dark eyes, their skin tanned as brown as any fisherman’s. Slim and thin-boned, they were not unlike flamingos in their youthful ability to stand upright for long periods of time, searching about themselves for something to latch upon.

  Will rubbed his hands together. “Want to throw rocks? See if we can hit one of the screechers?”

  Harlow shrugged.

  “Naw. I always miss.”

  “You just need to practice more, like dad says. You need arm strength.”

  Will picked up a stone and chucked it at a seagull. The gull was perched on a rock, nibbling at its own feathers, and it didn’t even notice as the stone sailed past it and plunked into a tide pool. Harlow laughed and Will tried again, missing the gull even more badly the second time.

  “Good one, dude.”

  Harlow gave his brother a mock salute and started toward the cove’s north end. He liked to work his way from north to south as he surveyed the exposed ocean floor, methodically squatting over each tide pool he came across. Mostly he found starfish, driftwood, and broken hollowed-out clam shells, but sometimes he found weirder stuff like busted radios, beer bottles, plastic bags, soggy magazines, and unmatched shoes. Once he’d found an iPod, but it didn’t work, not even after he dried it out for a week on his dresser and tapped it with a hammer.

  Will took a more haphazard approach to searching the cove. While his younger brother went from tide pool to tide pool, as predictable as the sun rising, Will meandered wherever his instincts took him, happy to ignore the pools nearest to him. He wasn’t interested in trash—he was looking for a big score, some pirate’s treasure chest washed up on land and stuffed with silver and gold. Will wanted something epic to return home with, something he could show their parents and prove, once and for all, the glorious nature of Breakneck Cove.

  * * * * *

  They passed the morning amid the screech of seagulls and the drone of ocean winds. Neither boy found anything that interesting or even gross. The tide started to return and watching it roll forward felt like a defeat, like another great opportunity lost. Harlow wondered if he’d missed something in one of the larger pools, some murky stone he’d forgotten to turn over, but Will knew neither of them had missed anything, that there had been nothing to find that morning in the first place.

  “Should we go back?” Harlow asked, watching the tide roll over his feet and splash against his ankles. The water was always cold, even in August.

  “I guess,” Will said, but didn’t move. He’d noticed a dark spot floating among the waves and couldn’t tell if it was a shadow or what. It bobbed up and down like a large, shadowy cork.

  Harlow r
ubbed his eyes, trying to focus—the dark spot seemed to slip around the waves in a funny way that was hard to track. He opened his mouth to ask a question but Will had already started running into the ocean, his sandals slapping on the tidal skim. Harlow dug in and sprinted after, unmindful of the water as it chilled his feet and splashed his bare legs. A moment later they were both wading into the ocean, watching the dark spot as it crested upon a wave and tumbled over the breakers on its first attempt, disappearing momentarily in the rush of water and popping up again, surprisingly near.

  Harlow noticed ropey, seaweed-ish strands protruding from the dark spot’s body and wriggling in the air.