Adrian Matejka

The first space shuttle launch got delayed until Sunday, so we had to watch the shuttle’s return to Earth in class instead—PS113’s paunchy black & white rolled in, the antennae on top adjusted sideways & down for better reception. That same day, Garrett stole my new pencil box. That same day, Cynthia peed her jeans instead of going to the bathroom & letting Garrett steal her pencil box. Both of us too upset to answer questions about space flight, so we got sent to the back of the class. I smelled like the kind of shame that starts a fight on a Tuesday afternoon. Cynthia smelled like pee & everyday Jordache. The shuttle made its slick way back to Earth, peeling clouds from the monochromatic sky & we all—even the astronomically marginal— were winners. American, because a few days before, a failed songwriter put a bullet in the president in the name of Jodie Foster. The shuttle looked like a bullet, only with wings & a cockpit, & when it finally landed, the class broke into applause & the teacher snatched a thinning American flag from the corner, waved it back & forth in honor of our wounded president & those astronauts.

A Schwinn-ride away: Eagledale Plaza. Shopping strip of busted walkways, crooked parking spaces nicked like the lines on the sides of somebody’s mom-barbered head. Anchored by the Piccadilly disco, where a shootout was guaranteed every weekend, those gun claps: coughing stars shot from sideways guns shiny enough to light the way for anyone willing to keep a head up long enough to see. Not me. I bought the Star Map Shirt for 15¢ at the Value Village next to the Piccadilly during the daytime. The shirt was polyester with flyaway collars, outlined in the forgotten astronomies of disco. The shirt’s washed-out points of light: arranged in horse & hero shapes & I rocked it in places neither horse nor hero hung out. Polyester is made from polyethylene & catches fire easily like wings near a thrift store sun. Polyethylene, used in shampoo bottles, gun cases, & those grocery sacks skidding like upended stars across the parking lot. There are more kinds of stars in this universe than salt granules on drive-thru fries. Too many stars, lessening & swelling with each pedal pump away from the Value Village as the electric billboard above flashes first one dui attorney, then another who speaks Spanish so the sky above is constantly chattering, like the biggest disco ball ever.

blacks painted onto bricks & split vinyl on the East Side, jaws as tight as window locks with the curtains drawn & behind that diligent fabric: blacks already tucked into homemade forts—folding chairs, wobbly backbones & the whole, snowy world waiting outside like ghost stories whispered around the last sputtering match. & later, top sheets pulled up over heads from fear of mirrors at midnight or some backfired beater’s rusty pop pop pop after the key twists at the edge of the week. No doubt: Tuesday is the scariest day in Section 8, but Friday is right after it in the suburbs. & after those trembling weekdays, even more blacks with money disappearing & reappearing as unexpectedly as poltergeists inside of TVs & haunted trees with fast fingers in West Side yards. & still not a wavelength of any kind for a black to put in the bank. The inks in everybody’s hatted & contracting checkbooks don’t change black. Some front-row architecture might. Some guns, too, & their loud, colorful opportunities: whatever version of black is inside a fist around a grip. Not a color, really—more like the face a man makes in the glinting face of a gun pointed at him every single day.

This sunlight on snow. This decrescendo of covered stumps & brush — stop for it. Stop before the sled end- over-ends down the chin of the hill — the way it always will at the rock ⅔ of the way down. Stop & shiver in it: the ring of snow inside gloves, the cusp of red forehead like a sun just waiting to top the hill. Every ill-built snowball waiting to be thrown, every bell-shaped angel stamped over the brown leaves. When my daughter ranges in winter, she works every dazzling angle — the crestfallen pinecones, the grizzled beards of bushes in the morning, a furnace’s windup huffing in this throat- clearing of snow.

In nyc , we stalked fishes in filets of sounds: delivery engines & ashy doors clapping shut, vendors knuckling fin & silhouette- shaped words into salty expectations. My daughter & I walked down a couple of  slim-bricked blocks that smelled like snapper & afro sheen with no afros in sight. On snaggletoothed streets, we double-took the wet alleys where things jumped off the hook like smart seafood before lunch. We parted the perfect & abundantly wintered streets. My daughter said,I know these parts

That was the week it didn’t stop snowing. That was the week five-fingered trees fell on houses & power lines broke like somebody waiting for payday in a snowstorm. That snow week, my daughter & I trudged over the broken branches fidgeting through snow like hungry fingers through an empty pocket. Over the termite-hollowed stump as squat as a flat tire. Over the hollow the fox dives into when we open the back door at night. That was the week of snow & it glittered like every Christmas card we could remember while my daughter poked around for the best place to stand a snowman. One with a pinecone nose. One with thumb-pressed eyes to see the whole picture once things warm up.

I lied when Pops asked, but I’ll admit it now. I did touch the blue egg to see if, somehow, it felt as much like the sky as it looked. The egg: speckled in its twiggy nest, eye level to 8-year-olds, perfect & off-limits like the Baoding balls on Pops’ desk. We tried to find its mom, but the finches scattered when we came near. One twittered the alarm from a maple. Others balanced on wires, flapped wings at us like we were gravity. I can still see how carefully Garrett scooped the egg from the nest, then headed out to find a spot on the March concrete to drop it.I want to see if these things break into pieces or in half like on TV

It ends because the beginning won’t jumpstart again: red smudge of a mouth, lipstick everywhere the afterthought a comet leaves on its way out. What makes this moment unfold like a fine woman raising herself up from the bathroom floor? Honky-tonk in the honeyed brown of an eyeball? Perfume & its circus of heart-shaped introductions? It ends because the needle always winds up in the lead-out, like a man pawing around for broken spectacles after he wakes in the world’s rubble. Hand over hand he paws, through stilted guitar picks & abandoned stilettos, raised skirts & rocks, glasses as chipped & smudged as the topography of a skipping record. He could be Albright himself, foraging the still-life swish of low-rise tutus & skyscrapers cracked in the twisted aftermath of a smile. Even without glasses, he remembers her in high style: magnanimously coming down the blue & violet threads of night, her green dress clashing with the bathroom tile.

This is the g-dropping vernacular I am stuck in. This is the polyphone where my head is an agrarian gang sign pointing like a percussion mallet to a corn maze in one of the smaller Indiana suburbs where there aren’t supposed to be black folks. Be cool & try to grin it off. Be cool & try to lean it off. Find a kind of black & bet on it. I’m grinning to this vernacular like the big drum laugh tracks a patriotic marching band. Be cool & try to ride the beat the same way me, Pryor, & Ra did driving across the 30th Street Bridge, laughing at these two dudes with big afros like it’s 1981 peeing into the water & looking at the stars. Right before Officer Friendly hit his lights. Face the car, fingers locked behind your heads. Right after the fireworks started popping off.Do I need to call the drug dog? Right after the rattling windows, mosquitoes as busy in my ears as 4th of July traffic cops. Right before the thrill of real planets & pretend planets spun high into the sky, Ra throwing up three West Side fingers, each ringed by pyrotechnic glory & the misnomer of the three of us grinning at the cop’s club down swinging at almost the exact same time Pryor says,Cops put a hurting on your ass, man.& fireworks light up in the same colors as angry knuckles if you don’t duck on the double. Especially on the West Side—more carnivorous than almost any other part of Earth Voyager saw when it snapped a blue picture on its way out of this violently Technicolor heliosphere.