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Vo l . 3 N o . 1
For the Boy Who Flipped Me Off on My Way Home It was one of those first spring afternoons when the grey sky breaks into pieces of blue and clouds and it’s like when a body Suanne Sikkema
Laura Read
Lilac City
He’s the cool dad so he keeps calling Matthew my brother, keeps giving him the fist bump, the peace sign, calls him over to whisper, If you want to be cool, get big muscles, smile at girls, wink. This will be our secret. But Kaylee is nine and she knows he sees her. Her hair is long and falls like snow melting down a mountain, her legs are starting to curve like a deer’s. Matthew tells me about the girls in the purple dresses who came to their school, how they told her that some day she can be a princess too. We are the Lilac City, so in May the scent of purple lifts from our streets like music
comes out of its clothes, a body you’ve never seen but you’ve been wanting to see for a long time so you have to look at it and not at the road which curves a little but you know the curves and how to lean into them the way the road leans into the river. I had the radio on and it was Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and the water was bubbling up in the creeks between the mountains, and all this long fall of notes and road, you drove behind me, coming up close to let me know I was in your way, you wanted to go faster. Your car was white like mine and showed all the dirt of winter, and there was a hole as big as a fist in the window like the hole in my window years ago that he said a rock made but I knew it was him. He was angry and it was something to hit and he didn’t think it would crack and the cracks would spread so when I looked through them they were long
and our high schools choose one girl to be their brief flower, to ride on the float in the Torchlight Parade and wave
and beveled like lines of rain. When I was driving, they made the world two worlds—one up close and one far away.
her white hand, cutting the air like the blades of the fan in the room she’ll sleep in for years next to the boy who saw her and felt the cool air
Back then, I wouldn’t have done what I did today after the road widened and you passed me, your middle finger up. I wouldn’t have
blow towards him like when he stands for a long time with the refrigerator open because he is hungry but nothing looks good.
pulled up next to you at the light and stared until you felt my eyes hot on your neck and you had to turn and look.