some sketches

some prose stuff i sort've made out of nowhere

is this any good? should it be expanded on? just any feedback would be nice

Around 1995, or ’96, first grade and before the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup I remember that Easter was an astronaut’s holiday. My Dad would duct tape small fuzzy yellow plastic chicks to the bodies of small Estes hobby rockets and launch them towards the unwrinkled blue sky of Northville, Michigan. A perfect place. One rocket landed with passenger intact in the massive backyard, which was referred to as “the commons.” The burnt up craft was floating in a small scummy pond, there was no great gunmetal ship to recover it like an Apollo landing, just a poorly coordinated pale blond boy, wearing corduroys and a v-necked sweater. I jumped in; there was no real choice in my mind. The brave astronaut had to be saved. I could not quite swim back the three feet to shore, and so stared into the bottom of the shallow pond, wonder if the tadpoles would take me in, or if I was in trouble for ruining my nice sweaters. Pulled out by a strong hand on my shoulder, a cousin my family no longer has contact with, rested on my back in the stiff uncut grass and wondered how close I was to really getting away.

My older sisters and the neighborhood kids would play baseball in the commons, a small gravel infield with a rusting backstop, the outfield was large enough that a lazy player could pretty well call anything they didn’t want to run after a homerun. I was given a small baseball bat, bright red, about the size of the souvenir mini-bits you can buy at actual baseball games. One time I was listening to “Love Line” in middle school on the radio, and a girl not much older than me was describing the sexual abilities of a mini-bat; I probably had a panic attack. Neither my sisters, nor the neighborhood gang found my bat useful. Well, they did make fun of it. It was hard enough being uncoordinated.

This April, at an attempted birthday party for my good friend Dan the police were called. Not because of Dan, or myself, or the small group of our mutual friends who had arrived, but because a girl who shares Dan’s birthday (or, possibly “birth week”) invited as many people with reflective sunglasses as she could find. I was hiding upstairs, plastic pitcher of beer in my hand, just waiting for the insanity to end, and hoping to get a chance to play with Dan’s chinchilla, Chuck Chuck. Instead, the police game, some silly roommate door locking situation ensued, and I ending up on a bed, sobbing and gasping for breath. Something about men yelling and banging on doors opens up a terrible part of my brain where I am entirely powerless, where there is no hand pulling me back. Juliana was rubbing my shoulders and telling me I would be okay, but with my eyes wide open all I could see was white, the pure white of adrenaline and panic, my heart rate rippling the perfect ivory sheet of my vision.

Ashley Altman is a saint. I don’t know if she ever moved to Niagara Falls, or if she is still dating that perfectly nice Italian boy, but she kissed me when I looked my most awkward, and there is no way I could ever repay her. Round glasses, bull cut, American Eagle Polo shirts just a size too small, with baggy Docker’s Khakis, goddamit I looked gross. She came over pretending to work on some social studies project, I had taken off my glasses. She told me to put them back on, that I “looked cute in them.” And she kissed me. Pretty amazing girl.

Sometime second semester the walk four doors down the hallway to the kitchenette with the microwave became too much. The canned soup I was constantly eating didn’t taste all that great anyways, so I eventually succumbed to slumping into my destroyed futon and spooning room temperature minestrone into my bruised face. Dorm life has a way of breaking people down.