Levittown
I went home to Levittown, and there I found my best friend waiting for me, no older than when I left her twenty years ago. I said, Wow, you look the same as the day I left you. No. No. No, she said. You! We walked the streets, which were named after flowers, and talked about the things we used to talk about and loved each other. It was summer. Cicadas fell out of the trees to scare us. At the public pool, we dove in naked and climbed out. We spread out towels and sunned ourselves. A boy cast a shadow over us, and I recognized him as the boy who’d hurt me a long time ago. You haven’t changed at all, I said with fear. I have, he told me. I’m older and stronger. I have a family and a lovely wife. He plunged his big hairy arm into my mouth and down my throat, carried me away like this, and dislodged me in the dirt of the baseball diamond at the nearby park, like someone shaking goo off of their hand. You haven’t changed, he said. I still hate whatever’s inside you that makes me hate you. He kicked the dirt into a cloud and it clung to me, coating my sweaty skin. I curled into a ball and waited for him to finish. In the distance, young people screamed among water sounds. Funny how children scream when they’re having fun and it sounds like they’re screaming for their lives. After a moment, footsteps shuffled near. It’s me, she said. He’s gone. She pulled me off the ground and we walked to the pool to get our things. Back on the street where we grew up, we broke into my old house and mounted the stairs to my room. Someone else lived here now, and the decorations were different. They must have known we were coming. How thoughtful, my friend said and picked up the cassette the new resident had left for us by the stereo. I was still naked and filthy. My friend put the cassette in and music started. Music from when we were new to the world. I watched her dance to “I Am the Warrior” by Patty Smyth and Scandal, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. My friend’s dancing had changed, no longer graceful, unashamed, like when we were kids. And me, I still shivered to see the gentle way I moved, the thing other boys always noticed, so I hesitated. All Levittown gave me—a boiling little stone of hate that is mine, for myself—is still there, even though I had covered it with clothes and books and boyfriends and sex and accomplishments. They grew around the hate and muffled it. Out the window, I saw a cardinal land on the neighbor’s roof and thought it looked in at us, at me. It leapt from the roof and coasted out of sight, as if someone had thrown my heart. I grabbed my friend and we danced. Come on, she said and smiled. Try! Try! I laughed because the song was old and funny, and we were kids dancing in a room that wasn’t ours, until someone came up and found us, and we stopped, too embarrassed to keep going.
Richard Mirabella (@RPMirabella) is a writer and civil servant living in Upstate NY. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, One Teen Story, Columbia Journal, and Wigleaf. His debut novel, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, will be published in 2023 by Catapult.