What Happened Was
by Joseph Young
I was at the filling station. A dirty man with a red gas can came up to me. He was wearing a suit coat and tie, tie to his sternum, coat to his elbows.
"You have a dollar, sir? I was on my way to my sister's wedding.... I stopped to swim in the rivers.... They took my wallet...." That's the way he spoke, in ellipses.
I had a dollar to give him, and I would in just a minute, but I was bored. I was bored so much back then--work and home and stare at my hands.
"Which rivers?" I asked him. "Are there rivers close by?"
The question pulled him from a haze, eyes floating down from the sky.
"Rivers? Yeah. Two of them...." He pushed his hands together into a joining point. "Just back there." He gestured across a football field to where, indeed, two lines of trees angled and merged. "But I wouldn't go back there.... Boys with cigarettes...."
I pulled a five from my pocket and handed it to him. "Tell me," I said. "Your sister? When's she expecting you?"
"Tonight. The rehearsal, the fitting...."
"Fitting?"
He threw back his head and laughed, all the lines of his face pointing to his lips. "You expect me to attend a wedding in this?"
He wandered away, dodging the traffic that flowed between him and the football field. I paid for my gas and got in the car. I spent a moment looking at my hands and then started the engine.
At home, the kids were digging a hole in the backyard.
"What's up?" I said.
Harvey turned around and held up the dead bird in his palms.
"Okay, guys."
I drew a bath and settled in. You want me to tell you how I felt? Well, here's what happened: I thought about the man with the gas can. I thought about the two rivers joining. I thought about the dead bird my kids had buried. I thought about my wife coming in and slipping into the water with me. I felt okay. I felt a decision being made. Love was pulling hard against freedom. Back then, there was so much love.
Copyright © 2006 Joseph Young.
Joseph Young's work has appeared in such magazines as Eleven Bulls, Opium.com and .print, SmokeLong Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, Alice Blue, and elsewhere. More about Joseph Young can be found at his website, josephyoung.net.