“You can’t say you don’t want no trouble when just the other day you were hopping six lanes across the interstate—your feet squelching, lanced, pierced past the rubber soles by broken Nehi bottles and sparrow’s bones. You can't say you didn't see it all coming. You saw it in the guys by the payphone banks. The lady eyeing the arrivals board, fiddling with the release under a compact mirror. The baggage handler’s face back at Heathrow, eyes swallowed by an rain slicker. The kids hotboxing the parking structure elevator. Mashing all the buttons as the emergency stop failed to engage. Those bundles falling out from under their arm, saran wrap and duct tape splitting open. Coating the floor with stardust, spiraling down…down. After the fact they'll tell you that you’re a geezer. An poser. That you lacked the frequency. The stamina. The gall. "So what?" they say. "So what if you got away this one time?" They must have forgot you were young, too, then, still spiked, fed up with adrenaline and verbal uppercuts and the concentrated stuff from the miniature bottles of Chivas Regal and Cutty Sark that the Pan American attendant passed in a shawl from first class ten minutes before touchdown.”
Image source(s): (1), (2, compass rose medallion)
Cassette tape, side A. 'I Like It' by Debarge. I must have caught this over the teacher's Bose speaker while trying to examine an plaster-of-paris fibula in preparation for an ill-fated university anthropology midterm, and now throughout this whole thing, I've found myself falling in love with it again and again.
This is our Combocon2024 collab entry, taking on our interpretation on the prompts 'heat' and 'hideaway'. I suppose it's kinda a running gag at this point, but it's indeed been quite a long (short) one coming up the road. I would like to first and foremost thank my coauthor FleshMaddAvalon for her roaring spirit and dedication in the process of fleshing out the midsection of the piece and all its concepts within to completion, as well as an off-site friend named Samson who served as an impromptu advisor and accountability buddy, who, in the course of an hour's work of talk by phone, encouraged me to reach out. Additional kudos go to
Stygian Blue,
Dr Bierre,
AKAM80, and
zipzipskins for generously taking time out of their day to give it a critique. I hope you guys enjoy.