Photo by Benjamin Wagner on Unsplash
You’re playing in a patch of worn dirt using pieces of metal that you’ve pulled from even more worn bleachers. To you the flaking paint and rust chips are shovels, steam rollers, and paint brushes. Your father is playing in a pick-up basketball game on the asphalt court behind you. You rake the dirt with your fingers and throw a cigarette butt into a bush, then another, and another, your hands starting to smell like wet, dirty ash. You want to clean the dirt up, give yourself something fresh to work with, but this time when you put your hand down, a piece of broken glass slides into your palm. You slowly pull it out, parallel to your hand, forming an open pocket of flesh. The blood looks purple as it bubbles under your already dying skin and starts flowing down your hand and dripping into the dirt. You stare, frozen, not wanting to interrupt the game.
You’re walking down train tracks toward the mall, stoned for the second time in your life. You’re singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” because you snuck into Con Air and Steve Buscemi sings it in the movie. In retrospect, it’s a pretty creepy thing to do given his character’s backstory. An image of Earthworm Jim is spraypainted on the side of the overpass you’re walking under. You think about playing the game on Super Nintendo before you sold the system and all your games at a pawn shop so that you could buy something newer, more interesting, less connected to a child you don’t want to be anymore. Rusty water drips down the wall of the tunnel from the road above so it looks like the paint is crying red-brown tears. It hasn’t rained in days. You used to love the mall because of the Dream Machine and the Waldenbooks and the Kay Bee Toys. You feel something that you’ll eventually recognize as nostalgia. They’ll knock the mall over in 25 years to build an Amazon distribution center.
You’re surrounded by piers, parking lots, and old storehouses as the sun comes up over the harbor. Lately you’ve taken to just walking around when the night winds down but you’re still too high to sleep. A lot of the time you end up here, chain-smoking until your head calms down and you hate yourself a more manageable amount. The sound of water lapping against the stone walls of the piers makes you feel safe. Someday you’ll work in a new office building nearby when they decide to create a neighborhood here, or at least something that could be called a neighborhood if you tilt your head a certain way and come from a certain income bracket. There will be a lot of shiny glass and glistening metal and consulting firms and lifestyle stores. Being the type of person that works here will make you kind of feel like an asshole. Sometimes after work you’ll sit by the ocean and smoke a spliff and people will look at you like you are an asshole. Like you haven’t been doing just that for 20 years.
You’re on the commuter rail. You’ve been in your hometown for a few minutes, but it only starts to feel like home when the train pulls alongside junkyards and warehouses for the last few minutes of the trip, just before you pull into the refurbished beaux-arts train station on the fringes of downtown. In a few years, the city will have what a lot of people will call a renaissance. The guerilla galleries and squats will change to lofts with exposed brick and the hole in the walls will become farm to table restaurants. They’ll even build a baseball stadium. People will cheer as the development pushes out longtime residents and community centers. You’ll get drunk one night and some guy from the suburbs of Boston will talk about all the money he makes from the investment properties he bought here and after some heated words, you’ll nearly fight him. It’ll be the closest you come to getting into a fight on the side of thirty you’re on without feeling like a piece of shit afterwards.
You’re in the parking lot next door. The bottom of a dumpster rotted out and some rats chewed into the pavement underneath it so they could crawl right out of their burrows and eat. Their musk is strong enough that you can smell it over the trash rotting in the July heat. Streaks of grease paint the bottom of your fence to a gap where the rats chewed through the wood. It leads to the tunnels that are caving in a plant bed you’ve been fighting to save. A few days earlier, one of the rats surprised you and you instinctively killed it with the garden hoe you were holding. It was the first creature larger than an insect that you’d killed on purpose since you were a child, when really you were just guilty by association because some of your friends were throwing a frog around and you did nothing to stop them. The heaving in the rat’s chest as it died was the same as the frog’s when your friend missed catching it and it smashed into the pavement right at your feet. Both tiny rib cages laboring until they couldn’t hold in life anymore and so it passed into the air and then into your head, turning into molecules that somehow transformed you.
Brenden Layte is a writer, linguist, and editor of educational materials. His work has previously appeared in places like X-R-A-Y, Lost Balloon, and Pithead Chapel. He also won the Forge Literary Magazine’s 2021 Flash Fiction Contest. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and tweets at @b_layted.
JMWW 