Photo by Taylor Flowe on Unsplash
by Lisa Thornton
reads my son aloud from my senior yearbook and I’m not sure yet who the inscription is from but then he says no one has fallen out of my car lately and I exclaim Earl! because that’s a reference to Jason falling out of the Mercury while he was dipping that nasty tobacco he did sometimes and didn’t have a cup so he cracked open the thousand pound passenger door to spit but it was at the exact moment Earl took a hard left and Jason wasn’t wearing his seat belt so he fell out of the car and landed in a ball that we had to circle back to collect, a heaving, shaking ball we feared would be bloody but was instead howling and rolling on the asphalt with the teenage ridiculousness of it all. But I don’t tell my son that because I don’t want to glorify chewing tobacco, driving erratically, or not wearing your seatbelt. I don’t leave for Purdue til August he reads on and yes that’s what he can know about Earl. He was smart enough to hatch a plan to steal the deposit from the pickle bucket by crawling on top of the walk-in and crouching there silently for hours while the rest of us stuck our arms elbows deep into the Seafood and Krab and wiped the tables and locked the doors and then climb down and make off with it before there were security cameras and PIN codes and digital alarms. I hope to see you before I leave, Earl writes and my son looks up at me and I let him imagine me and Earl on a picnic table before he left for Indiana watching the stars and talking about our dreams instead of the real summer with the police and the acid and the time Jason had to go to the hospital for punching the mirror and the jumping off buildings and eating bags of nutmeg and putting two tabs on our tongues and driving Adrian’s convertible into the fields to that wooden billboard where we dangled our legs and definitely could have died so easily, fallen to our broken neck deaths in the corn, and watched the night sky fold onto itself like an accordion. My son smiles with eyes that say you were once just like me, Mom, and I say yes, Earl was a good friend.
Lisa Thornton has stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, Cincinnati Review, and other magazines. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @thorntonforreal.
