The man sits at a corner booth in Westaround Café and nods his head to the lonely guitarist humming out of static-sick speakers. He twirls a sweating glass of ice water in his hand, so that the ice cubes ding and rattle up a melody. He thinks.
Good towns are books; this town here, Hardswell, is a matinée. No matter if he wished it different.
Books kill nostalgia, see. You can flip to your favorite chapter and gulp it in whenever. You relive every moment you cherish. But, matinees, they won’t let you review that one quarter-second you coughed through. What you do see, you see once, and when your memory grays, than that color is lost until the end of time.
He looks out the window to a hush, sunny street, where some high school kid with strong arms and a purple football jersey—number 66—strolls along the sidewalk, swinging the hand of poppy redhead. She’s wearing the away jersey, white, number 66. Their shoulders brush and they’re smiles are boomerangs to heaven. In an hour or two, the kid will be sitting stiff-spined on the back seat of a school bus, focused, on his way to the weekend game. The kid probably was hot stuff, or looked like it, anyhow. Probably knew every name, height and weight on the opposition's team. Probably dreamed in his uniform.
But ask the kid about the Semi State Championship game in 1982 and the kid’s eyes would peel up, and the he'd call the man loony just for asking. The kid probably hadn’t ever heard one rumor about the man’s 1982 spine crunching sack, or the straddling smooch Lilly Leu gave him afterwards that leaked to every peeper in Hardswell High, and even caught ear of Preacher Bart. That kid probably knew nothing about it.
He probably didn’t even give a rip about the 1983 Senior prank, when class coated Principal Mather’s chair with Maple Syrup and dabbed laxatives into the P.E. teacher's, Mr. Lament, morning coffee. Oh, yes. By third hour Mr. Lament was all veiny necked and red faced from squeezing his doughy buttcheeks together, and somebody joked that Principal Mather’s bum never looked sweeter. Man, the teachers had gotten all rashy about that, but the students themselves crapped themselves laughing. Literally.
Not that it helps to remember any. Everybody graduated in '83, Principal Mathers bought a better chair and Mr. Lament, for the first day in history, led a jog without blowing a breeze out of his rump. A memory’s only home is in the mind, where it ages, grays—decays. Soon it’s forgotten all together. It happened, it’s gone, unrecorded but in the mind, and the stuff that was written down in yearbooks and what not, well, nobody would want to waste a five minutes looking it up. Soon it’ll be as if it never had a beginning. As if it never mattered at all.
There must be a billion and three memories or so that are now completely black, that have died like a bland day in time, so essential to one clique, once. Now deleted forever. The man wonders if that’s a dishonor; to forget. But what’s big for a day always shrinks in the distance of years. It’s a fact harsh enough to make the man want to smoke.
His story won’t be reread, reviewed. The moment now spins the globe. So, he sits in Westaround Café, twirling the ice cubes in his glass of water, and accepts the matinée called his life. The past fades. It’s the present that seems to keep people chippy, even if the greatest memories are the ones turning gray.
