**************************************
The Moffett Elementary school-grounds were a different sight to him at night. Not a benign mesa, but a squat amplification of the dull compost pile he called memory. Night and day, he thought as he approached: by day, the scene was a Prozac addict’s brain satiated. Come night, the brain went off its meds.
Off its meds, the brain’s eye registered only the compost. And like a bonfire fed by leaking bullet casings, its stench only grew.
An ocean of violets in bloom…
A lone, pale bird turned, wheeling before diving and perching on a fence-edge. It measured the human before it like the legged creature was an exhibition for avian amusement.
James tapped a pack of cigarettes and struck up at the playground’s borderline, waiting and gazing out at nothing at all.
“Intro,” he whispered. “Techno leers, guitar riff and keyboard. Thirty-five seconds.”
How can you just leave me standing…?
Some spanless interval passed before James sensed his old playmate. Gone still all over, he palmed his cigarette, pinched the ember; flicked it invisibly at a bush.
Alone in a world so cold…
Forcing motion before he was ready, he turned to see a blast from the past.
A heap of maggots stood before him. He blinked; it reconstituted into a man.
“Jack,” the man said with a rictus grin. “Too long, dude.”
“James.”
Maggot-man vacillated, staring, jaw hung low.
“It’s James now. Has been ever since we moved away.”
Billy nodded slightly, sucking on his gums. “It’s like that?”
James shivered.
“Not like that. Like this.” Billy demonstrated…
The grown-up formerly known as Jack looked his oldest friend dead in the eye, and gave the thinnest of smiles.
“It’s been like that.” He let a solitary beat waft by. “Dig, if you will?”
He watched it hit home with pleasure. Billy’s face screwed slowly into recognition and spat back: “Fuck you, Jack. I hauled ass up here for you. Fifteen years.”
“Seventeen, in fact. You lose track at the Hilton?”
“Oh, you askin’ for it, Jack.” Billy displayed that nonpareil thousand-yard stare; for eternities it’d made both of them lords of the jungle. In the joint he’d plainly honed it past all mortal ken, to a terminal edge. He shook like a stick-shift jammed in first gear. “You must want it bad…”
Never like you did, James thought.
Dream if you can…
…a courtyard…
An o-cean of violets in bloom…
“Dude, it’s not even about what I want – it’s our due.”
Billy at thirteen loped under the net, ball ricocheting to the layup, in for two, still driving his point to the ground.
“Don’t tell me you ain’t itchin’ to hit it. Besides, spics be makin’ noise how we can’t hit it. If mothafucking Julio with his old-ass junk come cluckin’ and cocking around again, I will smash that baby bird down…”
Jack nodded, absently checking the perimeter where black on yellow fluttered in the corrugated door-hinge: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. Shredded; like we’re Rottweilers. He freaked at a sudden bass shift; Billy’d flicked the boom box to max, doing his low-riding Prince grin from across the court.
Dig if you will… the picture…
Of you and I engaged… in a kiss…
It rocked him back to reality. “We can’t shoot here all afternoon,” he shouted over the bass. “And we can’t tap that ass. You catch the headlines? We’re Poor White Trash; they’d pick us up for it day after yesterday.”
Billy swayed to the beat and the grin got wider, brighter and emptier:
The sweat of your bo… dy co-vers me…
Can you mah darrrling --
Can you pic-ture this?
“You need what I need,” Billy called back, working mellow trip-hop as Jack’s mind floated the options in the summer haze, through gasoline-fume emanating from sewage and manholes, out to the ozone. “Peas in a pod, Jack.” The courtyard rang to his laughter.
An-i-mals strike cur-i-ous poses…
They feel the heat!!
The heat be-tween – me and you!!!
“Nah, not like that. Like this. You gotta put it in her or you ain’t done nothing.” Billy demonstrated, tossing Jack aside – again – and straddling Ashlee Archer, twelve-and-a-half, dean’s list, D-Cup, First Chair Cellist and future Fountain Valley High goth bitch and dropout, currently sobbing on the Moffett Elementary playground, between the swingset and the geodesic, organically designed jungle gym, choking on cries as she cradled the wrist Billy’d wrecked with a brick some time earlier.
Touch if you will… mah stomach—
Feel how it trem-bles inside—
You’ve got the buuuu-tter-flies all… tied… up!
Don’t make me chase you –
E-ven doves have pride…
Jack carefully watched limbs flail and bounce. Then coughed once and nodded his partner up and off.
Maybe you’re just like my mother…
She’s never sa-tis-fied…
His father purchased a grey-suited man who brought a jury to reason: Jack was Billy’s naïve, brainwashed accomplice. It was only natural; Jack’s innocence writ like lines of water in his face. Billy’s, conversely, held knives.
Time served. While Billy did seventeen, James hit an M.B.A., hit Wall Street, hit halls of power, hit models and songstresses, the heap of dead leaves and overripe, rotting fruit behind his eyes forever spilling and bleeding.
This is what it sounds like…
“You asking for it, Jack, for something you do not want to unleash…”
James’ hand shot out, catching Billy under the chin, driving him up like a jig might; he smashed to the concrete like old China-ware.
“I came to give you that,” James said. “Been keeping it warm for you.
“Now get the fuck out of my sight.”
Billy got.
James watched him stumble off.
He remembered incantations he’d cast against the void in the years after he’d left this place, ripped from the playbooks of other drunks who once wandered to and fro in the earth, under the sun.
He whispered one, now: And I only am escaped alone to tell thee…
To tell her…
…What?
The dove watched him incuriously, with no sound at all.
****************************************************
My group's prompts were: Open genre, A children's playground (must be the predominant setting) and police tape (must appear somewhere in the story.)
