Matthew Dickman

All of us were boys only some were taller or already in high school, and almost nothing else mattered but to learn some new trick, to pull off something we saw in a skate video, wind cutting around our bodies when we flew off the lip of a ramp, grabbed the board and twisted into a 180, kicking a leg out and landing it, the only way to run through the neighborhood was to run through it together, flipping off cops and skinheads, I almost don't even remember girls but a vague sense of the taste of bubble gum and how they smelled so different from us, sitting in some kid's basement drinking his parents' vodka, we grew out our bangs, moved in a pack, jumped in when some one of us got jumped, so when a man we had never seen before came up and started beating on Simon, one of us dropped his skateboard, walked over to the man like someone walking into a bank and stabbed him. The man, startled, sat down, right there on the asphalt, right in the middle of his new consciousness, kind of looking around.

My mother and I are on the front porch lighting each other's cigarettes as if we were on a ten-minute break from our jobs at being a mother and son, just ten minutes to steal a moment of freedom before clocking back in, before putting the aprons back on, the paper hats, washing our hands twice and then standing behind the counter again, hoping for tips, hoping the customers will be nice, will say some kind word, the cool front yard before us and the dogs in the backyard shitting on everything. We are hunched over, two extras on the set of The Night of the Hunter. I am pulling a second cigarette out of the pack, a swimmer rising from a pool of other swimmers. Soon we will go back inside and sit in the yellow kitchen and drink the rest of the coffee and what is coming to kill us will pour milk into mine and sugar into hers.

One look at the lilac, one smell and my childhood is — dogs scratching at the sliding glass door, bits of bottles coming up like grass in the grass, a dirty towel down by the feet of the tree, Lysol cans, small packets of Land O’Frost turkey meat — there in front of me in spring, in the wonderfully fat rain, flowering purple and whatever the pinkish purple is called and the white ones too. They smell like my siblings, like the backs of my infant son’s ears, like my son whom I would kill someone for. Before he was born I wouldn’t kill anyone. But now I would. And after I’d get a coffee from Starbucks, a coffee and a piece of that amazing lemon-frosted lemon cake and think nothing of it, and read the paper and hold him against my chest and listen to his body living, alive outside his mother’s body, and the lilac outside on the street, outside everyone, and heavy in the rain.

Olive seashells in the air you can eat. The very inner of the inner ear in the breeze. Last night my son dreamt about falling out of trees. I had almost forgotten that we were simians. The fiddlehead turns on itself but only ever in love. Green cinnamon roll, a snake too small to hunt anyone. Curled in like my son’s fingers, his fists. More beautiful than a spider fern, spun-in island, moldy tongue of a hippopotamus, the eye of the forest. When my son wakes up screaming I don’t pick him up right away. I tell him where he is and who I am. At night all the fiddlehead wants to do is sleep. When I sleep I dream about death adders curling around his soft body, all of us making the same kinds of sounds.

Blue light ringing through the green grass. The bent heads of petals are not praying to anything or to anyone. Only we are standing in a field of them, my son and me and me holding him. In my arms he stretches out to the very far ends of the earth like a radio signal made of skin and organs, of everything. I was singing a song to him I made up about me dying. Since yesterday he has not been crying as much as screaming like it is terrifying to wake up. It is terrifying to wake up and terrifying to sleep and his feet going blue in the cold spring air in which he is growing. His mother is growing him with the milk she makes all day, spilling out in blue. The song I am singing to him puts him to sleep, will put me to sleep. Will one day burst the drum in my ear like a bell, very much like a voice screaming from far off, though you don’t know if it’s hurting or hungry or nothing at all.