Michael McFee

Four lanes over, a plump helium heart— slipped, maybe, from some kid's wrist or a rushed lover's empty front seat through a half-cracked car window— rises like a shiny purple cloudlet toward today's gray mess of clouds, trailing its gold ribbon like lightning that will never strike anything or anyone here on the forsaken ground, its bold LOVE increasingly illegible as it ascends over the frozen oaks, riding swift currents toward the horizon, a swollen word wobbling out of sight.

Little paper cuds we made by ripping the corners or edges from homework and class notes then ruminating them into balls we’d flick from our fingertips or catapult with pencils or (sometimes after lunch) launch through striped straws like deadly projectiles toward the necks of enemies and any other target where they’d stick with the tiniest splat, I hope you’re still there, stuck to unreachable ceilings like the beginnings of nests by generations of wasps too ignorant to finish them or under desktops with blunt stalactites of chewing gum, little white words we learned to shape and hold in our mouths while waiting to let them fly, our most tenacious utterance.

How well its square fit my palm, my mouth, a toasty wafer slipped onto the sick tongue or into chicken soup, each crisp saltine a tile pierced with 13 holes in rows of 3 and 2, its edges perforated like a postage stamp, one of a shifting stack sealed in wax paper whose noisy opening always signaled snack, peanut butter or cheese thick inside Premiums, the closest we ever got to serving hors d’oeuvres: the redneck’s hardtack, the cracker’s cracker.

He stood on his stoop and clapped her sneakers together hard, a sharp report, smacking right sole against left, trying to shock the mud from each complicated tread, spanking those expensive footprints until clay flakes and plugs ticked onto the boxwood’s leaves like a light filthy sleet from the rubber craters and crannies where they stuck weeks ago, until her shoes were banged clean though that didn’t stop his stiff-armed slow-motion applause with her feet’s emptied gloves, slapping mate against mate without missing a beat, half-wishing that hollow sound echoing off their neighbors’ houses could call her back.