by Dana Jerman

ELEVEN NOW. Still rather early for the “chuff mob.” The rag-tag crew of nowhere-else-to-be smokers he’d been taken up with lately. Laughing at their seats on the monument steps. Watching everything, identifying somethings, rarely logging anything. Mindful as time itself. Disappearing when the nineteen hundred hours lamps grew their glow.

D thinks there’s a jab on his seat here on the highest step before the column, but he can’t feel a welt yet. A mosquito or glass. Whatever. Supposed to be a hot one and will be. Full of toothy smiles, one of which his own. Dust and brown bagged beer and sun and traffic and smoke.

In an hour or so, to get thru until the bars open, Jetta will bring a bottle and maybe, like last time, he’ll find himself a little buzzy. Startled to watch regular drivers tag so closely on the back of a long funeral party, just for the privilege of blowing a few lights…

The hole in his smile was made by a tooth that opened wide one day like a set of double doors. Cracking right down the center to let pain in and blood and nerve out.

It was a good way to mark the beginning of the summer. It was like a break up, and he remembered to go back to music. That’s what his sister always told him:

“Bulwark yourself. It’s a vulnerable time. Show yourself to as much gloamy music as possible. Take in the lessons and be healed.”

Whisky and headphones were keys to the future hidden in plain sight.

D looked around. You don’t get many days like this, he thought to himself and took a long draught of the air- slightly stale like toasted bread in the dry heat.

Too, he thinks “This is exactly what I want to do with all of these days.”

Surely enough here comes Ms. Jett with a bag and a grin. So far for her, it has been a summer to beat all summers.

She came to a full stop and made direct eye contact with him. Her gaze blazed like Major Tom hearing Ground Control come thru for the first time in a week. Her arms spread wide.

“This is the best it ever gets, and no better.”

Her single line of poetry followed by her bruising iconic laugh. The laugh of someone who gets away with pissing in side gardens of well-kept housing complexes on a nightly basis.

The knowledgable laugh of someone who asks the world for nothing at all.

D smiled up his own smashed grin and found himself talking:

“Jetta, sometimes you remind me of a porno I saw once. There was a lady in it at the time that made me think of Marilyn Monroe.”

D didn’t know what to say after that, so he giggled and put his cigarette out. Jetta stared.

“That’s the best compliment I ever heard.” She pulled the gear free from the bag. “But never say anything remotely like that to me ever again.”

Cy walked up as they laughed, so they greeted him at the same time. Hugs and claps. Cy pulled up the bottom of his t-shirt to wipe his forehead. His big belly glistened. “Couldn’t resist gettin’ down with ya’ll idiots in this heat today, Lord.”

They tittered again, giddy before the tip they were about to get onto.

“Cy you know you our best role model for giving up.” She squinted as she lit a stick. The breeze coming in with her. Jetta in top form. What a day today was going to be. What a day for friends.

A cigarette appeared in Cy’s mouth like a jump cut.

“I’m like Peter Pan and ya’ll are my misfit toys.” He scratched his gut over the smoothed down 4x t-shirt.

“The lost boys.” Jetta corrected him thru her own joint. “This is what we do when we come back from running away.”

She sat and bolted one from the freshly opened bottle.

A bird started up gloriously in a nearby tree as if morning had only just come. D turned his face up and listened. He felt a bead of sweat tumble from his temple and caress his jawline on the way down. He closed his eyes and yearned toward the song so frantic and clear. His dream drifted into form where he might be the bird. Transformed same as the soul of the corpse in the cavalcade from earlier, happy to be free and left behind.

Let everyone else hurry to follow the dead to nowhere. He was here now under the sun with a bird who sang unbridled and joyful as a toddler banging on a tiny piano.

When he opened his eyes, he watched Jetta and Cy too in their own silent meditation. The heat and smoke melting their dreams into jewels. Bird song sliced into them like hot cake left in offering to the raw timeless history of an unassuming Thursday.

The present was a threadbare thing. The cloth of itself unspooling in a circle. Into nothing but more absence in an imaginary hourglass. 

Jetta took a sip after a hard swallow and moved her glance toward Cy who spoke up out of his own daze.

“I saw that funeral a while back when I come up across the street. I couldn’t move while I watched it. My heart turned around in my chest. I had this, vision, of this woman I knew when I was young. In a flash there was this whole separate life I had with her. Too I was there at the end of her train, seeing her off to a perfect heaven…”

The bird stopped singing and Jetta passed him the bottle.

Like a wave to crush the vacuum, there again were the sounds of traffic far and near, and some girls laughing.

The world felt close and good then. Like a hug.

D took off his shirt, draped it around the back of his neck and ran his tongue over the missing place in his mouth. A space now as real and familiar as the tooth itself had once been.