Tuesday.
I’m leaning back in the chair. The bodies on the teleconference are shifting, their paper shuffling is booming on the mic. The update continues, I’m fading, drifting. I look up at the clock and it tugs me back, way back.
It’s hidden inside, in a dark space, deep in a corner on the edges, frayed but biting.
~ 1967
I was a child. You were a child. A Boy.
The schoolhouse had two classrooms, three grades in each room, one row for each grade, four to six students in each grade. Three rows of heavy steel, four legged desks, each having a pocket for school things. We were in the First Grade.
He was oversize in first grade, having been held back. Tall, thin, with hunger hanging from his bones. His brother was already categorized as a Juve, his Father an alcoholic, in and out of small jobs and a Mother desperately trying to keep it all together, and losing.
Faded jeans, not from stone washing, but from hand me downs from his older brother, or from a flee market sale. Everything wrong-sized, tattered and carrying a whiff of moth balls. Laces on too-big shoes loosely tied. Hair long, unruly and badly in need of a sheer. Continue reading “Jimmy”
