I have had this idea in my head for a short story for a little while. This is what I have so far...
I watch and I wait. I’m not sure what I’m waiting for but I’ll know when I see it. I sit in the shadows. A solitary street lamp illuminates the dingy parking lot I watch over, a faded pool of swirling yellow lapping at the darkness. Shadows from the convenience store hide my presence.
From where I sit the view is clear and I can see the light undulating like the sea, its mesmerizing. I don’t think many kids think about the light rolling like waves. There are lots of things I think that are different from the other kids, lots of things that only I see; it’s always been that way.
I have thick glasses and problems with dry eyes so I blink a lot and I always blink slowly. And I’m big for my age, 5’ 7” and 160 pounds at 14-years-old makes me, well, noticeable. So I sit and I blink and I think while watching the occasional person swim back and forth through the pool of light.
One of the guys at my new school, Jimmy Johnson, he looked at my blinking eyes and my freakish body and started calling me “Hooey”, something about Baby Huey, that fat duck cartoon that used to be on television ages ago, and the hoot of an owl, cuz of my blinking. Of course it caught on. So I sit alone, my quilt gathered around me. I blink and suck my thumb – thank fuckin’ god Jimmy doesn’t know about that.
That quilt is the only thing that belongs just to me. I can’t quite remember where it came from, although I have vague memories of a soft-spoken woman with a twisted smile underneath the quilt with me, the quilt held up by her arms like a tent before it slowly descends, enveloping us in a soft, warm darkness. Her laugh is a gravelly sound like pebbles in a cement mixer. I remember being happy then. That’s all I can recall.
It’s actually quite large, my quilt; perfectly square when you open it up. The pattern, identical on both sides, held together by an infinite amount of perfectly matched black stitches. The quilt’s pattern is crazy; riotous blues crash into shimmering greens, slim bands of silver shoot throughout everything and the edging is silky crimson red.
copyright March,2008 - All Rights Reserved
