The sweat that had collected in the shallow canyon of her lower back was now cooling and slipping down Page’s ass crack. She shivered as the metal bleacher bench dropped ten degrees. The sun was running away and slurping all the day’s colors down its gullet. The only not-black thing left out there was the faint glimmer of a silver “12” that was rising and falling on Piper’s chest.
Piper licked her lips and gathered a tablespoon of salty mud on her tongue. She hoped her crusty sweat would be good fertilizer, because she wasn’t sure how long she would be able to last out here, and the only way out, as far as she was concerned was down, swallowed by grass. Only then would she open her eyes. Till then the world would just have to suffer on without her as part of its audience. Till then she would amuse herself with the weird squares that appeared like geometric faeries when she pressed her finger against her eyelids.
No matter how hard he tried, Peter could not make his eyes focus on his sister, who would not move from the middle of the field. No. He could not move the lenses of his mind around and instead was forced to ogle Page’s cracked heels from where he stay hidden under the bleachers. He hated himself, hated that he, beyond reason, wanted those heels in his mouth. He didn’t know why, but he did know that this was an un-shareable, unspeakable want. Maybe in his mouth, he could keep them warm. And then he knew something else. In a burst of moving from boy to man, he articulated what it was he wanted most in this wide wonderful world. He wanted to be able to take something small and keep it safely inside himself.
It had taken nearly the entire afternoon to journey from the end zone back to the sideline. It had been foolish to cling to the girl’s shoelace when she began thumping her way into the field, but it’s pinkness was so startlingly new, a color heretofore not seen by the ant who had spent his life in the company of only brown, green, and blue. Most spring afternoons he had lazed about in a sunflower seed shell lolling in a lake of jerky-flavored boy spit. But this crispity clean strand of sugar beckoned him. It promised yumminess. It promised sweets. It promised hope, and the ant clung to it until he and the shoelace and the shoe were ejected from her foot and sent spiraling into the sky.
The tree settled down like a stomach after riding a roller coaster. How odd, she thought, to know that sleep is on its way. She rustled with curiosity having never once experienced the sensation in the entire 83 years in which she had been a tree.
My eyes paused here. Near the bottom of page 97, catching with fear the void halfway down page 98. My lungs paused in the middle of a breath and we hung there: Page, Piper, Peter, the ant, the tree, and I. Suspended. Attempting to control a story so intent on ending. It lay there open in my hands, perfect, so perfect this cessation.
In the hairs between seconds, I wished something faster than thought. I wished that whomever was reading me would bookmark this page and
Photo by John Henry. Words by Stephanie Chavara.
