---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN#/ISBN# issue/book “About the Arts” cc&d, v283 (the May 2018 issue) Order this as a 6"x9" paperback book:

Order this writing in the issue book Across the Wall the cc&d May-Aug. 2018 issues & chapbooks collection book		get the 372 page May-Aug. 2018 cc&d magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN#035; paperback book:

The Least Influential Boy in the World

Joshua Copeland

1

    “They” gagged him. Again. The red kerchief with the white dotted and hyphenated shapes. Bloods regalia. “They” did it. At night. Each behemoth took his turn. Behind closed doors. They had oversized and cellulite ridden backsides, thick and graspable love handles, and droopy, feminine pecs. The clichéd apex predator. The pain was incredible and wordless. And it never got better. Chad never opened wide enough to accommodate them. When he saw Chad sitting dazed and sad on the rec room bench, another bitch, sharpening his pool cue with a pink cue cube, smelling of KY and with Kool Ade for lipstick, walked over to him and said, “It’s not the end of the world, dude. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You learn to like it.”
    “We’ll fuck you till you love us!” Ghost screamed into his ear. Spittle landed on Chad’s earlobe. He felt the sewing of the stitches in his rectum shredded into bits of fiber. The shower floor smelled of the cheap Bob Barker soap. The soiled feet of the inmates had dirtied the pale tiles. His first night at The Salt Lake County Jail—his first night at any jail, Chad walked into the showers ten minutes after the guard showed him to his bunk and “they” jumped him. The first few times they kept a wet rag to his face. Not anymore.
    He grunted, the sharpness of the gag bit into his lips and the sides of his mouth. His screaming at night had broiled his vocal chords and worn down his throat. During the day, the sun painting octagonal shadows through the grated windows, his voice was always hoarse.
    Ghost gyrated his hips. Chad huffed through his nose, blowing out specks and gobs of mucus. Why not just let it be. Forever and ever and ever. Amen. He closed his eyes. Nothing. He opened them. The world was a slot machine, and he had hit the jackpot. His right cheek rubbed against the tile in time to the thrusting.
    He woke. He felt nickels and dimes and quarters under him. He used to sleep with his pants on, and during the night change slipped out onto the sheets as he tossed and turned and sweated. He heard the night nurse, Brandi, going door to door, telling patients it was time to wake and line up for breakfast. Chad tore into his drawers and pulled out his gray slacks and stomped into them. He pulled on his sleek white button down shirt. He was so enraged he got the buttons wrong, and the shirt clung to itself lopsided. He marched down to the tech desk. Morgan sat behind it, leaning back in his chair.
    “Morgan! Nigger! You’re a nigger! I hate niggers!” He screamed in spondees, pronouncing each syllable as if he was blowing out of a French horn.
    “Oh man, Chad, I’m white.”
    “You’re a dumb assed fat lipped nigger!”
    Morgan sighed. “Chad, go back to bed.”
    Chad went back to his room and left his pants on the floor and lay down. The loose change was cool and random on his skin. He did not try to sleep. His head still rang. Gongs and cymbals and xylophones and bongo drums and tambourines and snare drums and bass drums. Just lay it off, he thought. Eventually the real world would creep back in, the dream would dissolve into fire-red sand, and he’d get a hold of himself. He kept his eyes wide open. If he shut them the nightmare would return. He willed them to open as dilated as possible, afraid to blink. Every muscle lay rigid and tight, his toes pointed straight up to the ceiling, his ankles pulled up, his hands clenched and taut over his stomach. Problem was, nightmares don’t really fade, they just doze a little under the skin, biding their time.

2

        Everyone spent most of their time sitting. The clock took its time in an Einsteinian warp. The hands rotated a swath through the institutional celluloid. The vents pumped in Serequil XL to keep the patients calm, and it gave the whole unit a smell of burnt toast. There was breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The vending machines opened for fifteen minutes, once at ten a.m. and once at four p.m. A big screen TV sat in the day room. Jody and Misty mostly used it to play Xbox One. The two stationary bikes were broken and missing pedals. The windows, to create the illusion of open space, stretched from floor to ceiling, so you could look out at the parking lot and see all the nurses and techs and counselors and security and administrators and cafeteria workers and custodians parking and driving off. Jared, a military nurse on Southeast, rode his Harley in at eight a.m. Wednesday through Sunday. There was a jet black Mountain Cougar rug nailed down on the orange carpet next to the tech desk. Nailed so tightly, a thick Hardened Steel Flooring Nail every two centimeters. The mouth was in perpetual scream, the tongue thick and meaty, the canines edged and keen. Sand was everywhere, always jamming up the custodians’ vacuums. It blew in when someone opened the entrance doors, leaving an open ended isosceles triangle of sepia on the floor. It floated in your generic cola in the cafeteria. Pinpoints of it lay on the sofas and the chairs. You felt it when you dug into your pockets.
    Every day, Chad wore the same clothes. He had been admitted to the Salt Lake County jail in a J.F.J. end on end business suit he bought at J.C. Penny’s, and when they transferred him, that’s all he had. He hadn’t washed it in the three or four months he had been at State.
    Sally Johnston, the admin for Southwest, had a tech escort him to her office one day. “You know, if you keep disturbing the other patients, we’ll hold a medication hearing, and I guarantee you you’ll lose, and Dr. Mellors will put you on a heaping dose of Haldol daily. One hundred milligrams for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You’ll need help tying your shoes. And if that doesn’t work, it’s out of Southwest, up two floors to Forensics. Do you want to know what Forensics is like? No vending machines there, no yellow passes to walk the yard, no smoke breaks, no windows. And the patients up there aren’t too friendly. They mean business. Remember, State is for people without the money to pay for a real hospital, people without resources. So you’ll be with the worst of the worst. Try what you do down here up there and see what happens.”
    “I keep asking you guys for Tiopan at night.”
    “What? What’s that?”
    “It cuts off Oxygen to the part of the brain that controls dreaming. So I won’t have nightmares. My prof in Med Psyche One talked about it for Gulf War vets.”
    “You’re not the doctor. I’ll see what I can do. Look...” she stared down at his file. “You’re...twenty four. You’re not psychotic. You’re neurotic. You know right from wrong. If you don’t start behaving, you’ll never be released.”
    It was around two p.m. on a Monday. Or a Tuesday. Or a Wednesday. Chad sat next to Todd and Dusty. Todd was an ex lance corporal. He had a crew cut with a mullet and always wore a red cub scout’s pack shirt. Dusty wore jeans with a hole in the left knee and a black shirt advertising Blueberry Pop tarts. His face looked equine, his nose and mouth stuck out, his teeth were all over the place, and gray hair ringed his lips, two blubbery worms. Chad’s attention drifted to their conversation.
    “No, I seen plenty,” Dusty went on. “On The Dark Web. You need a TOR browser.”
    “A what?” Todd asked.
    “It stands for The Onion Router. I don’t know. Some military type thing.”
    Todd frowned. “Soldiers would never use anything like that.”
    “Ah ah. It’s not meant for searching for the stuff, but people use it to search for the stuff.”
    “Whatever, dude.”
    “It disguises where you’re coming from, like your IP address. You got to look for sites advertising hard candy.”
    “What?” Todd said, irritated.
    “Hard candy.” Dusty spelled it out.
    “I don’t know if I want to hear this.”
    “I’ll spare you the details. But shit, those were the days.” Dusty shook his head. “Before they registered me as a level three risk. When I was on the outside, my PO came by my trailer a knockin’—totally unannounced, at random—to make sure I didn’t have no desktop or laptop or whatever. He looked under the bed, in the closet, in my bathroom, my dresser drawers, wherever.”
    “He was a good guy. You wouldn’t last two seconds with the niggers down at County.”
    “Sure I would. They’d put me in punk city.”
    “And that is?”
    “Protective Custody.”
    “They’d get you. They’d find a way. County is like eighty percent darky. Them boys can’t keep themselves out of jail. In all the pens, they is the majority.”
    Chad thought back to his conversation with the Block Head Admin for Salt Lake. The guy talked with a western twang, like he chewed on a stem of wheat, his first name was Opie, and he walked bow legged. Chad remembered his name tag. It was red, in big, white letters: “U.S. Department of Justice”. Under that, in smaller letters: “House C Administrator.” And under that, “Wendelbow, Opie. And at the bottom, in black: “8990-C”.
    “I need out of Gen Pop,” Chad told him. “Like now. Please, sir.” His voice quivered, he was pale, the vessels in his eyes exclaimed themselves.
    Opie sighed. “Why, son?”
    “Bad things are happening.”
    “So what.”
    I’m-I’m being sexually attacked.”
    “We all got to start being a man sometimes.”
    “Please. I’m only five foot nine and a hundred and thirty pounds.”
    PC ain’t for you, boy. It’s for accused sex offenders and snitches only. Just kick ‘em in the balls.”
    The conversation between Dusty and Todd continued.
    “This one pic, it was of a girl, a teen—”
    “I don’t want to hear it, man. I don’t want to hear it. And you got med mouth.” Med mouth was when medication caused a dry mouth. White gunk formed on your lips and your breath stank.
    Dusty sat up, he spoke quickly. “She was nude, in bed, totally shaved. Some razor burn.”
    “Shut up already.”
    “She looked like a minor, but that’s okay—”
    “No it’s not.”
    “They don’t prosecute on fifteen and sixteen year olds.”
    “Wonderful.”
    “So obviously she was posing for her boyfriend. He took the picture. She gave him the finger. I even remember the date: 05/07/2008. A Confederate flag hung over the bed. So this was in the good ole U. S. of A. A poster of Justin Beiber on the wall. Next to that a red and yellow Bulldogs cheerleading sign.”
    “Thanks for all the details.” Todd yelled to the tech desk. “Can we line up for lunch yet?! He’s triggering my PTSD!”
    “A lot of this stuff used to come from Serbia and the Ukraine. But then those governments clamped down. So now it mostly comes from us.”
    Todd turned to him, stone eyes. “Don’t badmouth the country my brothers fought and died for.”
    “She was hot.”
    “Why am I listening to this?”
    “But what made it illegal was that the boyfriend got the girl to get her sister in bed with her, the little girl was around eight, and she pulled up her nightgown.”
    Chad stood up over Dusty and pounded him. He called Dusty a nigger.
    Todd yelled, “Staff! Chad’s fighting again!” Then he got up and walked away. A male tech ran over and bear hugged Chad and body slammed him onto the carpet. Other techs ran over. A crowd of patients gathered round. Techs from Northwest ran in. One dug his knee into Chad’s back.
    “Get the fuck off of me! I didn’t do anything wrong!” His cheek was pressed hard against the carpet. All he saw were knees on the floor and tennis shoes. Adidas, New balance, K Swiss, and Nike.
    Someone shouted, “Brandon! Thorazine!”
    Brandon rushed out of the nurse’s station with a hypodermic. “This is an intramuscular of Thorzine, Chad. It will put you out.”
    “No! I don’t want to go to sleep!” He had to work to stifle shouting, “Please!”
    A male tech reached under his waist and unsnapped his pants. “No! Stop! I’m sorry!” They yanked down his slacks. He wore soiled and torn briefs. They pulled those down to his thighs, pink and hairless. Chad felt the cool air on his behind. Then he felt the pinch. The alcohol on the needle stung.
    “Just calm down,” a female tech said. “You’re safe. You’re okay.”
    Chad quickly lost his energy. He felt like someone covered him in a soaked wool blanket. He squirmed weakly. “Pull my underwear up! And my pants!” Brandon walked over to Dusty and looked at Dusty’s left ear and left eye. Then he went back to his station and walked back out with industrial vinyl gloves, a white bottle of saline solution, and some gauze and medical tape. He dabbed the solution on Dusty’s eyebrow and ear and wrapped them both up.
    Dusty laughed it off. “That guy’s crazy.”
    Chad struggled to keep his eyes open. A male tech dragged him like a limp mannequin by his armpits to his room. The tech lay Chad in bed, left, and returned with a notched brown leather strap. He pulled off Chad’s navy blue dress sock on his right ankle and tied one end of the strap to Chad’s ankle and the other end to a handle on the bed. “Sleep it off, Chad,” the tech said. “You’ll be better a few days from now.”
    Chad’s eyelids shut, without his consent, and his world went a charred black.

3

        Chad sat in the day room. It was filled with patients watching TV. A tech, Stacey Larger, escorted Charles in. He was eighteen, with brown hair in a bowl cut; he wore a Brigham U sweatshirt and black sweatpants. He perpetually had a hard on, and he had elephantine genitalia, so it stood out like a lateral flagpole. Charles spoke in sing song, like an underdeveloped adolescent. His voice cracked a lot. They sat down. A James Bond film was on.
    A sex scene. A brunette with tiny Kalashnikovs for earrings and a braided updo. A red evening gown hung off her scanty frame. The gown was strapless and covered with emerald glitter. She stood in a boudoir with a man in a tuxedo. His dinner jacket was off and the sleeves of his white button down shirt were rolled up. He had a tattoo of a blue python, scales prominent, on his left forearm. The makeup table with a mirror sitting on it was in disarray. “Do you think the kids are okay?” he asked her. She dropped her gown and walked like a cat over to him in blackly laced bra and panties and high heels. She undid her hair and it flopped down to her shoulders. Three pink panther paw prints were tattooed next to her belly button. Chad’s penis and scrotum shrunk. He was afraid if he looked at his groin he’d see a puckered maw, nothing there but impressed sphincter-like lips. He felt them literally lessen into his body.
    Charles asked, “Stacey, can you say the word ‘labia’?”
    “Why?”
    “Just say it.”
    “Labia.”
    He laughed in a slow, warped huff.
    “What’s so funny?”
    “Don’t you know what that means?”
    “A part of the body, I’m guessing.”
    One of the patients sighed.
    “It’s your Va G G. It looks like a flap. It gets full of blood when you stick something in it.”
    “Charles, let’s be appropriate and watch TV.”
    The couple on TV began to kiss. The lady’s arm drifted down the man’s back.
    “Oh Stacey, why don’t you lose some weight so you can be like the pretty girl on TV?”
    “This show is triggering you. Let’s head back to the sofas.” They stood up. Charles grabbed her breast and tackled her. The patients lunged at him. They pulled him off her and beat on him. “Staff, help!” Stacey Larger yelled.
    Charles curled up in a fetal position, trying to ward off the blows. “I’ll teach you to respect other people’s private parts!” yelled one patient with plaid pants and a Simpson’s T-shirt.
    “Not to a woman! No you don’t!” yelled another.
    “You fuckin’ sicko pervert!”
    “Guys! Guys! It’s okay! Leave him be!” Stacey Larger said. She got up and tried to maneuver through the tangle of bodies and pull them off.
    Techs ran in: “Lay off guys! Let us handle it! We got him!” They pulled down Charles pants and briefs and shot him up with Thorazine.
    “It brings back old memories, doesn’t it, Stacey?!” Charles screamed through the pile of arms and legs, looking like an octopus. Stacey Larger began to cry. Chad stayed out of it. He didn’t want to risk a shot of Thorazine himself. He was learning to play the game, to be that number.

4

        Carter Hampton, thirty-four, a former rodeo hand who worked most of his life on The Tara Hill Ranch, sat in a red leather wheelchair with an American Flag hanging upside down on back. An IV stand sat next to him, an IV needle inserted into his brachial artery. He couldn’t pay his bills, couldn’t find a job that paid more, and was a week away from foreclosure when he tried suicide via skydiving. He was twenty-three at the time.
    He spent his off time jumping out of planes. Once a month a Cessna 182 would fly him up to the skies and he would take the leap. So his plan was to keep his parachute closed and fall to earth at one hundred twenty-two miles per hour, terminal velocity for the human body. He torpedoed as far away as he could from the other jumpers. But as the black parking lot to the Target store loomed bigger and bigger and opened up before him, he lost his nerve and let out his reserve chute (He was too low to let out the primary chute). But it was too late. He hit the tarred pavement with a splat! like a swatted fly, right next to a western grandmother loading up her car with items. An ambulance ferried him to the hospital.
    He was damaged goods. Permanently damaged goods. They diagnosed him with semi-reverse parapalegia. He was one hundred percent deaf in one ear and seventy-eight percent deaf in the other. His eyeballs locked like he was looking at his crotch, and he had five/five vision in both of them. Not a muscle on his arms or chest worked. The only part of his face he could move was his right cheek. His digestive system was defunct, so he had a colostomy bag. He couldn’t talk, and he needed a daily IV drip of Duratine to keep his lungs working. Below the waist he was fine, his sexual organs and legs worked great. Swiftkey, the same company that invented the computer Stephen Hawking used to talk, donated their device to him. “Shoot me, please,” in a synthesized voice echoed throughout Southwest. Sometimes Carter would kick at the nurse when he or she changed his IV rehydration bag. At night before he fell asleep he’d hump his bed and he always orgasmed. The nurse on duty would have to clean him up the following morning.

5

        Chad lay in bed. It had been lights out for an hour now. His breath came light and quick. He watched his chest rise and fall. A film of sweat stuck to his forehead. His heart beat like a cartoon character’s, popping and stretching out of his breastbone. His genitals throbbed. He pulled down the covers, took off his underwear, knelt on the carpet, spit on his fingers, and rubbed. His counselor, Wella Clarkson, warned him this would happen. It was his mind’s way of controlling the pain:
    He always smelled Kamile’s armpits in bed. “Tomorrow, you go fetch us some safety pins from House and Sewing. We gonna make you some nipple jewelry. You hear, boy?”
    “Yes, daddy.”
    “Let’s hit the rec room. Time for some dicky play.” They got up and walked by the row of bunk beds. The inmates yelled.
    “Light him up, Kamile!”
    “Dig yo shit into that white boy!”
    “Punk that nigga into chocolate!”
    Kamile flipped on the lights: Two pool tables and three benches against a wall and a vending machine. “Get the balls off the table, Keisha.”
    “Okay, daddy.” Chad pushed the balls into the pockets. The table was bare.
    “Place them sweet little sugar hips on the table and gimme some o’ that asshole.” Chad unbuttoned his orange prison suit and stepped out of it. He pulled off his underwear and sat on the table’s edge. Kamile pushed him back on the green felt and lifted his legs into a ninety degree angle. “This is payback for Jim Crow, muthafucka. This is fo hundreds of years o slavery.” The air whistled through the gap in Kamile’s front teeth. “Ain’t no one gonna help you. Yo ma’s ain’t nowhere near. All yo money in the world can’t do shit for you now.”
    “I actually live in Belmont. That’s why I couldn’t make bail.”
    “You look like you come from Greenfield. You look like yo name is Winston and shit.”
    He plowed into Chad. Chad screamed. Kamile shoved a towel in Chad’s mouth. It tasted of Bob Barker detergent. The green felt rubbed his back raw. Each of his vertebrae emphasized themselves. His back burnt during the day and he asked permission to go down to Medical for some AD ointment, but Kamile said no.
    All Chad could do was look up at his feet shaking in rhythm and umph into the towel. The grated light bulb looked down apathetically.
    “I’m gonna break you in half, bitch! I’m almost there!” Chad reached down and squeezed Kamile’s testicles, delaying the orgasm. “That’s right! Make me hotter!”
    Chad spurted all over the carpet.

6

        Cherie poked at her head with a delicate hand in the rearview mirror, the long fingers brushing through the red weave. She got out of her 2017 Lexus IS, locked the door by remote, and the car horn beeped. She walked through the lot towards the hospital and her reflection in the doors grew larger. Her melanin always shown back darker than it really was. Forever the outcast. She looked at her hips and thought, Yep, I need to go back to the Gold’s in Clifton again. She unlocked both doors with her keycard, walked into the staff room, hung her coat in her locker, ruffled the sand out of her weave, clipped on her name tag, and walked onto Southwest to do her job.
     Aside for Forensics, Southwest was the worst unit to work on. The white bearded God of The Old Testament literally lived and breathed and hovered over Utah like the aurora borealis, and he had laid curse upon curse on the hospital. The sand that breezed through the unit, like it lived, must crawl into patients’ ears, granulate into their brains, and short circuit their neurons and galvanize their adrenal glands. Patients would throw billiard balls at each other. They used the balls to give their roundhouses extra weight. Ulnas and ribs had been fractured, teeth had been smashed like tossed dice, mandibles had been shattered, solar plexuses had been hammered and crushed. The techs had repeatedly made requests to Sally to haul out the pool table, but she had refused, saying patients needed it to cool off.
    And there was her skin. Sometimes the racism was overt, just out of the oven, like when she would walk by Barret and he would shout, “Yo yo yo what up what up what up?!” or try to coordinate his fingers into a Blood Killa gang sign. Other times it was implicit, under the covers, like when Dusty would ask her why Gangsta Rap always had to boom on and on about killing whitey and white folk. Black people were a rare commodity in Provo, and she was the only African American who worked at the hospital. She had wanted to get a job at Salt Lake Psychiatric, in the city, where there were more blacks, but they weren’t hiring. In the end, she didn’t mind; these patients lived at point zero, their lives were endless monotony, a zig zag into the sunset, and they didn’t know any better.
    “They” had taxed her since Xavier in Cincinnati. On Friday and Saturday nights, the black kids from Larimar Woods would flood the campus and mince, slice, and dice the white students. So sometimes when students got drunk, they would let loose a torrent of racial epithets. She got used to it. You learned to get used to it. Like at the hospital, she inferred a lot of it from the attitudes and tones of voice and nuanced conversation, but you didn’t have to be Jung to figure it out.
    As Xavier had educated her, the gray and black Jell-O of the human brain and the way it was wired was the cause. If you were white, and a cracker pummeled or threatened you, your brain deciphered no defining characteristics into the attacker. However, if a black threw you around, and you were weak mentally, and your psyche bent and broke easily, your mind kicked into survival mode: “Okay, so how can we, as a body, avoid this again? Who do we stay away from? What do we look for in strangers that will sound the alarum so that we’ll know to give these sickos and sociopaths and Godzillas a wide berth?” The circuitry dialogues with itself until all the wires sing together, “It’s the melanin factor! It’s the pigment!” Fear makes such a monumental footprint that it overrides judgement. Fright is blind and craven; it seeks survival at all costs, even in nefarious adjudication.
    With radical Islamic terrorism it was a similar misplaced ideology. You can plead with the Islamophobes, “This violence is not representative of Muslims as a whole.” But people get so angry they lose a handle and their rancor bleeds everywhere.
    It takes a lucid state of mind to say, “Okay, just because one Muslim is bad, that doesn’t mean all are bad.”
    But the hicks at Rednecks r Us lose control, they see stars, literally, and they lose the ability to discriminate and they just ride their anger while it bucks under them and they say, “I don’t care anymore! It’s not some, but ALL!”
    She walked by Nick Scott, sitting on the sofa. He was a cowboy, cactus-faced and wrinkled, schizophrenic and violent. “Fucking nigger,” he said, like he was talking about the taste of lemonade. “Go back to Nigeria.”
    “Not nice, not nice, Nicholas,” she said.
    She sat down next to Chad. “So Chad, I hear you’re doing better lately. No more write ups. No more Thorazine. In staff they said you’re up for a red pass.”
    “Leave me alone. What did I ever do to you?” He said it like he was sick of being hounded, and he started to flick a button on his shirt, signaling the conversation was over.
    “Okay, no problem.” She stood up and walked over to Bryce. He sat in a chair next to Charles’s door. After his brouhaha with Stacey Larger, Dr. Lupez placed Charles on twenty-fours. The doctor ordered him kept to his room, and staff had to sit outside his room twenty-four hours a day. His door always had to be open. She pulled up a chair from the tech desk and sat next to Bryce. “Hi there comrade. Just another day at State,” she said. “With the kiddies.”

7

        “Who wants to watch the fireworks?!” a female tech yelled. “They’re shooting them off at Junction Park! But if you sit down by the double doors, you can barely see them!” Chad, Todd, and a few other patients walked over and plopped down. Chad sat cross legged.
    “Nothing like spending the fourth of July locked up in State,” Todd said. Above the tops of the waterslides, at the waterpark across the way, you could see the tips of the spray of lights. The glare of red, white, and blue. Some green. Explosions of bright balls of light, the smoke blinked on and off in the night in time with the flashes and the booms and the whistles. Pyrotechnics rained down. Chad saw the tips of Girondolas and felt the concussions on the thin carpet. Burst after burst colored the night sky. He waited it out. He waited for the grand finale.
    We picnicked at Stadium Park to watch the fireworks. Many teens were there, cuddling, dabbing at each other, placing bits and morsels into each other’s mouths. Lots of families. Children running astray, being called back, tackling each other. We said one day we’d be like those parents. The American dream atomized. We’d push a boy in training wheels down Marlborough Road and have a girl in a crib we put together ourselves, a mobile of flying geese spinning lazily above her. You talked about your paper for Intro to Psyche, and how you had to write about Freud, and how much you hated him, and that he was an egotistical misogynist. You pulled an apple out of a braided picnic basket and made sexual innuendo over it, what did you say? Something about Eve giving the apple to Adam, and then they both had sex. I used my Swiss Army boy scouts knife to unpeel an orange. The huge speakers at the bottom of the hill played country tunes to keep the crowd busy, and we both hated country, but we weren’t bothered. The Liquor Control Board had their agents out grazing, asking every young person for their driver’s license, flipping open their badges like they were the shit, writing up fines. But neither of us drank, so we didn’t worry. Then the show began. I saw the sparkling lights gloss over your brown eyes. The fireworks exploded so close, and in such deep pastels, that we worried they would fall down on us, that they would drizzle down onto you and me and onto our blanket and we’d fry. We held hands, and we talked about traveling when we graduated, either heading south to Miami or across the Atlantic to Brussels.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...