This Is About The Time

           Mom and I slept under the stars. At first, her arm wrapped around me like a tentacle, then she pointed at the Big Dipper spooning a skyful of stars into The Great Hunter’s lap. She taught me about constellations, and later, metamorphoses of Monarch butterflies, but I wanted to understand how parents also shed themselves at a certain age.

            Dad taught me to shoot a rifle at a firing range in Ft. Walton Beach. Thirteen, I already pictured faces on the target and the bullet going through my own brain. Later, we ate at Wendy’s and talked about opening a miniature golf course, what the therapist said about my liking guys, how nice the weather was.

            My brother David and I snuck to a convenience store for gummi worms, relishing the beautiful noise of clear plastic packages opening, warming worms in our hands before biting in. Dangerously close to the highway, I wondered what would happen if I jumped, and why didn’t I?

             Stacey told me he was gay—his voice and our stop for gas and the late-night meal at IHOP were one unedited film scene. His fork lifted every bite to his red red lips like he had never eaten joy before, but there it was, on the table, slathered in butter.

            Ricky drove me to Lake Oconee at one in the morning, where we knelt down in the rain and begged God for hope. Once hope had come, like cold, we listened to a song about a violin waiting beside the temple.

            Gavin and I took a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts to sit by the ocean at night, savoring clouds occasionally covering the moon. We didn’t expect the sea, or our honesty about growing older to be a field of wildflowers in the middle of a civil war, or for the cop to stop us on the way home.

             Grandpa, lying in bed with a thief in his blood, told me he loved me. Later, an aunt remarked, “He never says that,” and I sparkled from the inside. Weeks later, at the funeral, his hands seemed covered in tissue paper, as if his wrapping hadn’t already torn, and when I kissed him, his blessing was a breeze blowing through sheets, barely hanging on a line.

Previously published in The Clackamas Literary Review.