The mineshaft-dark air weighs heavy on my chest. I’m lying on a hard mattress inside a farmhouse attic, blind but for this glowstick in hand. She lies next to me, a glowstick of her own held tight to her chest, lighting slender collarbones. I follow her gaze upward and see what she sees in the inky space above. Only the great good lord knows this blank canvas we find ourselves staring into; this rarefied stitch in the cosmos where color is extinct and time cannot advance without a deliberate push.
The glowsticks were thrown to us hours earlier by the notoriously observant women of the Omak Neighborhood Watch at the town’s annual parade. Under overcast skies, we made our way down narrow sidewalks littered with half-chewed candies that clung to our shoes and dyed shallow puddles the color of a new sponge. We followed her kid brother Norm who marched down clean swept streets with the boys of the historically offbeat Omak High Band. He played the trombone and not well, but he fit right in. Here, there weren’t tall buildings or neon signs flashing in the windows. Nothing here stood taller than your tallest ladder. Brick storefronts lined the street, unadorned but for awful displays even a mannequin couldn’t stand behind. In the road, Norm and the horns squawked loudly to the beat of the thumping percussion while the arrhythmic tuba player bomp-bump-bomp- -bumped a version of Louie Louie they played in honor of some locally remembered man. If he could hear them now, he’d wish they’d picked another namesake.
Nearing Oxford St, a narrow and red-headed trumpet player noticed his dragging black boot lace and promptly took a knee. The marchers behind him, heads down like horses in blinders, trying to interpret their little dots dancing up and down hand-penned lines, collapsed like a just-squeezed accordion. Norm’s trombone slide speared the lower back of a wincing xylophone player while the float following them - a bloated croissant fashioned from paper mâché strips - slammed its brakes, sending the poor old baker flying face-first through that thin pastry shell hiding the driving motor and its sweating engineer down below. In unison, the ribbon-haired baton-twirlers threw a dirty look at the red-head (I asked, but no one could tell me his name) who showed a clumsy example of poise after bringing the whole rough spectacle to a quiet halt. Nobody jeered, no one cursed. In the grandstand, parents tightened their faces into forced smiles and jingled keys in their pockets in anticipation.
Cut-newspaper confetti, from where I don’t know, began to fall softly out of the blue. Thin crinkled strips curled around buzzing power lines, dusted men’s caps, disappeared into never-used storm drains. I swiped a falling strip and stretched it out between my fingers to read something indecipherable about ‘geese’, ‘endosulfan’, and ‘the county judge’. Exhausted by this squat little town, I twisted my expression into something tired or ill-looking and tossed my head back painfully, suggesting we turn for home. But she aimed a dagger of a forefinger my direction and suggested I hold on one damn minute. The red-head wrapped up a haggard double knot and the band leader wind-milled his arm forward to shepherd his sorry lot another half-mile. Norm struggled with his crooked slide, inviting stifled clucks from friends and neighbors. The band began Louie Louie from the top as they neared the old fogies of the Omak Founding Fathers, dressed in regalia in special bleachers, basking in the unfounded belief that they held some real dominion here. One Founding Father unashamedly shoved pill-sized plugs into her ears as the band approached. It was then that we’d both had enough. After a quick discussion, we agreed to make our way to our temporary home - her stepdad’s hill-top chicken farm - reasoning it would be the only time we’d have fully to ourselves for the rest of this weekend. She felt bad leaving Norm, but quickly lost interest as the band’s racket dissipated and and we cut hurriedly against the current of parade-goers trying to keep pace with the floats tossing out freebies.
The day grew short. The retreating sun eclipsed the narrow farmhouse, casting a thin shadow that divided the road we followed into two halves. We moved quickly under a big sky, enthusiastically spinning wild hopes for our night together. We hoped that in our solitude we’d unearth some unique treasure. Or breathe life into a some tantamount truth presently deflated like a tin-colored balloon. Or, in a stroke of genius, a light bulb will flicker above our heads as we see our predestination and begin confidently plotting our course on this piecemeal map of ours that, for months, has been expanding only in modest scraps of scrub territory. Nothing even capable of cultivation. Fueled by noncombustible banter without any sort of intent, we share time nodding at stories we pretend we haven’t heard before. These troublesome discussions we lure each other into, the sharp looks shot when the air between us thins. And at the molten core of it all, the mutual recognition of a love maturing insincerely between us, like bourbon being aged in a plastic barrel.
Now, on the rustled quilt bedspread beside me, she rips the top off the glowstick with her teeth and flicks her wrist neatly. A cluster of stars rises upward, arching in the dark to homestead in the void. I follow suit, pitch over sideways and send comets screaming silently into the dark; their paths glaring for an instant behind them the way stadium lights echo across vintage television screens. We lose sense of ourselves, hurling a flurry of asterisms with the impassioned but inconstant orchestration of a drunk conductor. No empty space is saved. No darkness remains. We conjure a hundred newborn constellations that, in our fervency, we don’t stop to properly name.
The glow finally runs dry and we can expand our small universe no more. We launch these useless tubes into the invisibility and forget in an instant we’d ever had them. She snakes an arm across my chest and pulls me backward into corduroy pillows stacked three high against the knot-pine headboard. She doesn’t say a thing about our lighting the dark. I don’t admire our artistry in this brief wink of divinity. Wasted words. These static and unnamed constellations will burn out by the time the original sun rises again and only translucent flakes will remain in epitaph to these theoretical civilizations, thought destined to grow untended into eternity, but suspended inside fast decaying shells. No, we don’t vaunt. We don’t even smile. We only keep awake together, floating on this pacific sea, looking light years above ourselves at those faraway glowing bulbs.
izzy806
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
discoholicmusic
origamiaround
annaxmalina
2087
gummygunk
