The renovated high school freshman year, then missing a year, then another high school in another state, then junior and senior year graduating just at the graduating GPA. Neighboring park tosses for dogs, whacks tennis balls, and flicks Frisbees as a bird and red bush flutters against two way traffic lazy past fir, grass slope, and plateau. Skateboards and books were hauled through winter ice and summer brown to benches. The adjacent elementary school continues to tape butcher paper crayon stick figures and chimney smoking houses in windows looking to the twang and thwoop basketball court and baseball diamond where the first real girlfriend underhanded softballs, where late night urban myth bleachers sexed somebody, and the metal lidded concrete garbage can that is always over-stuffed or bottomlessly empty. A hilltop Benjamin Franklin overlooks the torturous PE track, competing Quaker mascot team, and easy out through the theater costume closet where smokers smoked on the hill or across the street on curbs. The Dairy Queen is gone, but the cracked asphalt path still shoulders bicycles and sneakers.
Ley Line
Michael Rerick lives and teaches in Portland, OR. Work recently appears or is forthcoming at Action, Spectacle, BlazeVOX, Brief Wilderness, Cola Literary Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, Indefinite Space, Marsh Hawk Review, The Main Street Mag, The Headlight Review, The New Absurdist, and Word For/Word. He is also the author of In Ways Impossible to Fold, morefrom, The Kingdom of Blizzards, The Switch Yards, and X-Ray.