alright, here we go, story number one
i’ve been writing this on and off for a few months now, inspired by the evocative phrase “Rocket Summer” from Ray Bradury’s Martian Chronicles. i wanted to write something that tried to capture a different side of that feeling, existing in a place that is suddenly and definitively impermanent, and what’s beyond them
i settled on a summer after graduating high school and waiting for college to start, that space where you’re no longer who you were, but you’re not who you’ll become yet. this is the beginning of that exploration, the struggle to find the self while awash in uncertainty and fear, and maybe coming out the other side in one piece
i’m going to try to keep plugging away at this one. hopefully i finish it before the new year. here’s hoping
As always, Enjoy.
liminal summer, part one
by Jeffrey C. Brister
We sit at the edge of the city, four cylinder engine rumbling gently, three boys and one girl all freshly graduated from high school, and watch the sun trail down the sky to the horizon. Today is the Summer Solstice, which means we have the longest possible window to make it happen.
But that means we have to wait. And wait. And watch the horizon intently, while sweat dapples our foreheads in Matt’s shitty, old car with no air conditioning; while we sit in the still, windless Central Texas heat as we face west; while we hold our breaths and each of us wish we had something, anything to drink right now; while we nearly vibrate out our seats in anticipation of that single moment.
None of us knew exactly how we heard about it, all we could figure out was that we’d all learned about it. It seemed like it was pieced together through fuzzy memories, little recollections and dreamy waking moments that hadn’t fully faded out. Matt’s was at a move-in party for his co-op. He was stoned and drunk, surrounded by guests and new flatmates, in the middle of a prismatic sea of light and smoke. A free jazz band was whipping up a maelstrom of sound, flurries of cymbals, kicks, and snares, a saxophone and trumpet danced in contrapuntal circles through the furious storm, and a voice whispered to him, cutting clear through the noise: he doesn’t remember what it said, he just knew the next morning he needed to be here.
Catie’s happened on her morning jog. She was rounding the final corner of her daily two miles, when she kicked a rock that wasn’t there before the step. The moment before she hit the ground, a dog walked across her vision, its fur a perfect portrait of where we now sat in Matt’s car.
Alec’s moment came while he was on his own little trip to Mississippi. He stopped in the middle of the night on I-20 at a gas station near Shreveport, to grab a bottle of No-doz and and make sure he was headed east, and as he was checking out, he spied from the corner of his eye a brochure glowing in a tourist display, with blue text that said Go Home, Then West.
Mine felt a little less magical. I was laying in the bed of a man over twice my age, looking at the mixture of our seed glisten in my hand after I’d wiped it from my chest. It had a modest prismatic effect, dulled by its thick, pearly gleam. My hand turned over as it caught the setting rays of sunlight from his high-rise apartment, and in a small moment I imagined my hands as more slender, my fingers longer and narrow, tipped with nails long and claw-like, painted blood-red. I imagined his cum splashing on my sternum between two voluptuous tits, a ring of lipstick staining the head of his cock.
And I knew that unreal person was me, and I shook my head to banish the thoughts.
When he kissed me goodbye, I felt his tongue in my mouth, and it tasted of golden hour light and exhaust and the sweat of my friends. He tasted of the hands of the clock ticking to precisely this moment, in this car (it annoyed all of us—we could all sense heat and sweat in some way, so we deduced that it would need to be Matt’s car. We gave him gas money for his trouble).
Matt keeps the radio down, letting it play at a dull, fuzzy hum. We’re at the edge of the current station’s area, so swirls of static push up through the noise, as otherworldly blares and hisses. We tune them out like every other unnecessary stimuli here: there’s nothing but us, Matt’s gas pedal, and the horizon. Nothing else exists, not even our bodies.
“So…” Catie said, nodding her head at me and moving her hands in a circle to get me to talk. We were having lunch, sitting by the window at a sub shop near my house. She’d finished her food and stared at me trying to pick over my own. I didn’t really feel hungry right now, even though I hadn’t eaten in a day.
“I dunno, it’s just like…I saw something, like I had girl hands, or something,” I stammer out, realizing how stupid it sounded once the words had left my mouth. “Felt like me, like I was looking at it. Not a dream.” That was the part I had the hardest time shaking off—that sensation that I was experiencing truth, a refraction of reality bent through a prism.
When it happened, first I was sure that it was a dream, an unreality, easily sloughed away like molting skin, and it would shrivel up and float away like every other dream. That mean denial, chalking it up to simple misfirings of neurons while I drifted in the no mans’ land of waking and sleep.
But it was sticky. When I tried to disregard it and toss it aside, the experience would leave a film, a residue of feeling and sensation, something that wasn’t easily filed away as passing fancy. My hand twisted, my fingers flexed and extended, my bones were my bones but not my bones, skin mine but not, delicate and feminine and *real*. And it was me and not me, all seen through the shafts of golden light in that bed, a dream but not a dream, of people dreaming of one another’s lives.
Which scared me. To speak it out loud meant admitting it was real. And I didn’t want that to be real.
I wanted to be me.
I didn’t want to be someone else.
Catie looked at my shaking hand, and put hers on mine. “Hey.”
The touch broke me out of my head. I didn’t realize that time had kept going while I stopped.
“Are you alright?” She asked.
“Yeah.”
We sat there, in silence, for a few seconds, just breathing. I could feel the tears in my eyes, gathering in my lashes, hot and stinging. The guy who took our order was nowhere to be found. Probably for the best.
“I think something like that happened to me, too.”
Not I expected to hear. “What?”
She leaned back in her seat, and sighed deeply. “Yeah. When I hit the ground, it was like, you know, you said, when you’re dreaming and you see something that’s not a dream, like it’s real.”
Leaning over the table, my tears suddenly forgotten, I asked, “What do you mean?” I could tell that what I was doing looked creepy, but we’d been friends for a long time, and she was used to it.
Her face was working out how to say it. Eyes narrowing and widening, cheeks bouncing up and down as she pondered very obviously and openly, brows knitting and coming apart, the effort of thought plain on her face. I probably looked just as dumb.
“So, like, I was out cold, but then I woke up. But it wasn’t me? Does that make sense?” She had a pleading look in her face to match her voice.
I nodded.
“When I woke up, there’s this girl looking at me, and she’s crying when I wake up. She’s like, ‘omigod Catie, are you ok?!’, and I’m like, ‘yeah’, and then I look up at her and I know her name and I say it, but I can’t remember it,” Catie says, rubbing her temples like it will unscrew something, “and she’s there and she’s crying and I’m crying and my forehead is bleeding and she says, ‘another scar in the same spot’”—and points to the vivid pink scar above her left eye, right at the hairline near the side of her head—“and we laugh a little.”
We both sat there for a little while, silent and looking in each other’s eyes.
Catie broke the silence. “What did I see?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I dunno.”
“It didn’t feel like a dream,” she said, “it was like that was my actual life.”
“Yeah, I know, that’s how it was for me too.” It felt like I’d stepped into a different world.
“I keep trying to remember her name, but I can’t.” There are tears in her eyes.
My hand reaches over the table to take hers, unconsciously. “Hey.”
She blinks the tears away. “Hey.”
“Something up?”
“It’s just…it’s a girl…and I’m not…”
I squeezed. She squeezed back.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”
“So do we know what’s on the other side?” Alec asks, bouncing in the front seat, watching as intently as the rest of us.
We all exchange glances and purse our lips. “Nope.” “Nuh-uh.” “Ionno.”
He nods and resumes staring. “Figured.”
Catie and I are in the back seat of Matt’s shitty old Ford Taurus, which should have been put out of its misery a long time ago, but his parents were holding off on replacing it, and the four of us were too sentimental to push the issue.
It had served us well since Matt learned to drive. He was the first, and he was the one with the most latitude before Alec graduated high school. They were pretty liberal with their spending on him, and we got to be the beneficiaries of that doting. Most of the time it amounted to getting a free meal once every two weeks, some sodas and pizza and a sleepover (how they allowed it to happen with Catie was a mystery—we chalked it up to our parents assuming platonic affection over everything, which was mostly the case), but occasionally it was a day at the movies spent on one legitimate ticket and sneaking into one or two more afterwards, or a heavily supervised overnight trip where we got our own car. That was our little home together, a little bit of our own world that we could have just to ourselves.
We had gone to amusement parks, to public pools, downtown as teenagers (we peed on the Scientology building and didn’t get caught), north, south, east, and west, over hills and across vast flat lands (an easy thing when you live in central Texas, a locus point of geography that gives you weird weather and fun drives), onto back roads and highways, into dark back alleys and places we were too young to go but got in because we were in a car and some people assume that only adults drive cars.
We’d made out in there, pissed in it (getting the smell out was hell), vomited (ditto), shat (don’t ask), came close to losing our virginity, actually lost our virginity, accidentally did butt stuff, accidentally did butt stuff and liked it, and eaten meals, drank beer and wine and cheap liquor poured into soda cans, and smoked entirely too many cigarettes in there. We’d consecrated it, in a way. Made it ours. And we were going to use it for a time-honored tradition: doing stupid shit on impulse.
That was we told ourselves, at least. All of us know it’s not like that.
there we go
hope you liked that
not sure what the next piece is, but you’ll get it by next thursday
until then
love you, take care, stay safe