Photo by Enguerrand Blanchy on Unsplash
by Alex Stolis
It was the Wild Wild West, it was rain that never stopped, a cold blanket of wind from the Lake covered everything, and kids down by the Coolerator huffed paint and smoked homegrown, the rumble of secrets left an unbroken string of loneliness around them. They were living their past, owned it, bought an paid for it, Paradise didn’t like the sight of blood but couldn’t escape it; at the end of every fist every sharp word cut after cut. Everyone has a different story with the same soundtrack the same ending the same dreams, he dreams he is a ghost, makes himself invisible, he listens to the tick tick tick as the engine cools; closes his eyes and remembers the scent of her hair, the moon hanging full and ready to burst, he wishes for one last first chance. The river is impassive, kids tag the abandoned buildings with crude cocks and tits; how can they live without their lives, how will they know who they are without their past? Paradise dreams his bones are laid out in a field of yellow, there are black birds sitting in a crooked tree, and he watches her dance; a slow-motion suicide note; she is every hollow fragment of memory he has ever needed, he’s filled with made-up stories and make-believe endings. He becomes a color by number accident that never happened, the mercury drops, and t’s a day for breath to freeze in his lungs, for the earth to be solid, real; a day for the cold to make him remember.
Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis.
