Not All Sparks Start Fires

an excerpt

It’s a summer night like a fever, sticky with sweat and verging on delirious. Every front porch swing and backyard Adirondack down the street play host to listless bodies searching for some scrap of cool in the darkness. The cool is not forthcoming.

Those who sleep—or try to sleep—twist their sheets in fretful dreams to the rhythm of unbalanced ceiling fans that do nothing more than ripple the humidity into reluctant motion. Those who don’t, well, there’s no relief for them.

She and I, we sit in silence on twin lawn chairs from our childhood days. They’re the same chairs we sat on when our feet could barely reach the ground, selling watery lemonade to neighbours under the blistering sun. Their fraying plastic webbing crackles around aluminum that has barely stood the test of time.

I can count the fraught relationships that decayed long before these chintzy chairs—people coupled and split, come and gone, fractured parts of families up and moved away. Half of hers stayed, and half went, and she’d never really been a whole person since; she looked for love wherever she could find it. I wasn’t looking much at anything back in those days, eyes full of baseball and fire trucks, scraped knees and setting twigs on fire through broken bottle glass.

I think we had a chance, once upon a time, so long ago the memories are faint and hazy as the horizon on a late August day. We used to meet on the old trestle bridge after midnight, all hushed giggles and whispered dreams. We’d lie close enough to feel each other’s heat—not touching—flat on our backs, staring up at the stars. Sparks flashed between us then, glinting like the fireflies we never tired of watching. But that was teenaged whims and fickle longings and wasn’t meant to be.