And just when the mushrooms hit some crazy asshole named Kenny throws a cup of gasoline on the fire and it explodes. And fire climbs and rips upwards in the pounding sky.
and once the embers make themselves brothers with the stars, they are gone. No memory, no history, no future. And I laugh like the devils brother and Frankie throws a wicked grin across the growing crowd.
If there’s something I could never hate about Wisconsin it was the winter parties. There is something so whole about drinking and doing drugs and laughing in the snow, so close to the world.
I talk forever with a mexican high school kid with a wicked haircut. He goes and finds us cigarettes. We smoke and talk for twenty years and grow old and die before turning into one.
I piss in the field and laugh at my own anxiety, understand that I’m fine, understand that I’m lucky, I’ve always been lucky.
I watch my mother spring off the top of tree ranges and refill my cup from a frozen metal keg.
Two girls from Indianapolis kiss me on the cheek and hold each other around the waist. In the past I would try to convince them, I would try to be sly, but I won’t.
I’m not worried about arrivals, I have already arrived.
And decades later but three hours more - people begin to leave and Carter eats snow and plays wildly. He grows taller and fights snowmen and hunting vests, and howls madly - and brothers and sisters if you howl then I howl.
I see her then, the girl from college, she walks amongst us ignored.
And while I can see the trail of the other, I can see the past versions of each person. There are hundreds of Frankies following tonight’s version. They all laugh and cry and grow and fail and differ in attitude and fashion.
The are hundreds of the mexican kids. Hundreds of the girls from Indianapolis. The party multiplies and shows an unending history.
but...not the girl from college. She walks with only one shadow. The girl I met one day on campus.
I watch history wind around a party in the sticks outside of Tomahawk and I see her there. No history, nothing, no memories left, no ability to create new ones.
Something has stolen her heart.
