Drive Down Victory

Flash fiction about the first time, after a long time

⥁⥀⥁

Flood within, flood without. The valley floor accepts the rain, flows it through the streets where I sought you: a friend, a brother, a ghost, a gap—memories dulled by ten wide years and renewed by surprise, these eight miles of straight the runaway between openness and closure, a heart unguarded or a situation unchanged.

You, now, and who exactly that is, awaiting at the table near the back where we often holed up, minds full of polyrhythms, mouths full of jokes, glasses full of steam on nights like this—those moments and the peanuts we made, the howling and the lost time reflected upon as I slalom through the traffic cones, the spraying flooding clogging storm drains, the potholes now ponds.

You, the flake, the friend who cancelled last second but showed up first minute. Words heard before, halfway there with cancelled plans.

Until you were angled and reeled north into the marine layer and the cold summers of circumstance and opportunity, gutted and mounted and kept in the plastic valley by a life you came to love—a life I tried to understand through posts and stories as you began to dematerialize, memories replaced by the lessons I needed to learn.

Until a delayed response became a never response.

Until you deactivated, cutting the last and final tether.

Until most definitely you musta meant became most certainly you don’t give a shit—never gave a shit, our friendship a sunbleached façade hiding snide comments and judgment, concealing that you were a self-obsessed miscreant seeking only passengers.

You, and who you probably are, brought low into the smog once more with the scales of wonder and regret held in balance enough to push you to send a message and for me to say yes, into the rain and thankful for every red light, with curiosity and the urge to tell you what I couldn’t in those dreams where you appeared, my change muzzled, unable to show you that I’ve become a tree.

Flood within, flood without. The hope that the last second would come and you would not. I could drink a beer in peace, then return home to the tiny sturdy life that you would not understand or expect from me, the wild one once full of confusion and panic, now probably full of what you wanted to see outta me this whole time.

That neon sign, burbling in the rain, means I must turn, turn into the lot of crumbling asphalt and stubby trees, wishing for the rain to stop as I look across all the unknown cars.

⥁⥀⥁

⥁⥀⥁ Update Archives

⥁⥀⥁ Fiction

⥁⥀⥁ Appendices

⥁⥀⥁ Non-Fiction