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Order this writing in the collection book Revealing All Your Dirty Little Secrets available for only $1995 |
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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
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Decidedly Fall
Michael R. Jones
I decided to think about things we did. How I feel is quite simple. Or I’m an expert grown bored.
We played with the dogs as equals. We sat all night sometimes in a booth at that one greasy spoon on Western Avenue. We fucked for hours and obsessed over burning buildings and plane crashes. We dismantled the carbon monoxide detector and told our parents and step-parents where to stick it.
I take me nephew Calvin to the Pier. I can’t go with anyone else (or by myself) and feel embarrassed by my fear of the ferris wheel. It happened there.
She was the only woman to ever drag me to the batting cages. We both batted medium speed and after 50 swings she was still going full force as I stood aside and wheezed.
I had fallen in with the McSweeneys crowd. There were 10,000 younger writers better than me.
It was a graceless fall. A lithe leap from a ferris wheel is just hopeless. One can’t get good footing.
I couldn’t go to the services. At least she was reunited with her mom and dad at last.
I floated on the lake in a rowboat, drunk or sober I’m not really sure. My phone died. My beard grew. Gulls gutted my gums toothless.
Sometimes I see her, shopping at Dominick’s, while I’m waiting to get my pills filled.
When I see my nephew suffocated with a plastic grocery bag wrapped around his head like a lollipop I decide I’ve had enough.
We used to wash the dishes gently, as if bathing infants.
