Of all the years of my life - and that’s nearly 43 of them - 1977 is the year I could tell you the most about. Actually it’s the year I would want to tell you the most about. It was a time so jam packed with intensity and emotion and drama - I don’t recall any other year of my life being quite like that one. Of course, I was barely 15 at the time and there’s enough emotion and insanity inherent in that alone to make the year worth telling about. But there was something so different about 1977, especially the late spring and summer. Especially in New York.

I was in the midst of my first year in the local Catholic high school. I had a new set of friends, a new way of life, a new outlook on the world. I would be 15 in a few months. Life was good. Life was mine.

Though we lived on Long Island, we weren’t that far removed from the glamour and excitement of New York City. Even at our young ages (and I doubt there is a Long Island parent today that would be as permissive as our parents were back then) we would sometimes take the train to the city on weekends and just walk around, using our allowance money to buy records and eat burgers at the Steak and Brew, where we tried to pass ourselves off as 18 year olds to get the free pitchers of beer that came with the burgers. No matter how good it was to be 14 or 15, it seemed there was always something better on the horizon. We wanted to be 18 or 19. We wanted to cruise around in cars and go to bars. We were jealous of the permissive lifestyle that was so prevalent in NY at the time - Studio 54 opened in 1977, punk rock was on the rise and bands like The Dead Boys were playing at CBGB’s - it seemed there was so much turmoil, yet so much excitement - it was all so glamorous in a decadent way, you couldn’t help but want to be caught up in it.

New York City was just coming out of terrible times - there had been a huge financial crisis (I’ll never forget the Daily News headline from when the president was asked to help bail NYC out: Ford to City: Drop Dead) and there had been a stretch when the South Bronx was literally on fire for the longest time - I remember this because my father was a fireman at the time and he was always talking about, how there would be no fires left to fight in the area eventually because it was all going to burn down and Bushwick (Brooklyn) where my father worked was no better. My parents discussed all this at the dinner table with us, and we watched the nightly news and together we watched New York City (meaning all five boroughs) almost die before our eyes.

So there we were in 1977 and the city was alive. There was so much happening. And we would sit on our suburban porches and be wistful about it because at our ages we may have been able to get to the city on a weekend day, but even in the summer there was no way we would be able to take part in the nightlife that was going on there. As much as we wanted to stick safety pins in our faces or some of us wanted to wear glittering dresses and platform shoes and dance the night away, it wasn’t going to happen. And we knew that by the time we were old enough to enjoy this stuff, it would all be gone and there would be new scenes, so we lived vicariously through newspaper accounts and tales from older friends’ siblings.

And then David Berkowitz came along and the aura of NYC seemed to dive headlong into a dark time that would abate only when the New York Yankees would win the World Series that year - and even then the drama of the Yankees’ season with Reggie Jackson and George and Billy Martin was somehow fitting with the climate of the times.

When parents realized there was a serial killer on the loose, it was like life outside of school and home shut down. It didn’t matter that it seemed this killer only wanted to hurt a specific type of person - most notably young brunette women in the Bronx and Brooklyn and Queens - we were in close proximity to these killings and who knew where this guy was going to end up? So doors were shut and curfews were made and this layer of fear settled over us that spring and lasted well into summer. People talked about Son of Sam everywhere, in stores and at the pool in the dentist office, but they talked in whispers, as if saying his name out loud would be to call him into our suburban haven. I remember one friend’s mother - a holy roller who would make trays of cookies for us and serve them with religious tracts - moaning about how we deserved this, this day and age was so decadent what with it’s disco and punk rock and women dressing like whores. She pronounced whores so it rhymed with sewers. Dressed like hooo-ers. She was afraid the end times were coming and Son of Sam was just the harbinger of certain death and destruction and God’s wrath upon us.

Which it may very well have seemed to a lot of people that summer. I know I had my share of fear. While the summer of ‘77 and all of its intensity and scariness played out on the front page of the Daily News every day, there were other, smaller things going on in my little world that just added to the thickness that was beginning to choke the life out of summer. A young woman who lived five houses down was murdered; thrown off the roof of an apartment building in Brooklyn by a jealous boyfriend. My friend Lori had taken to visiting her relatives in Queens that summer - she came home with stories that made me wonder if Mrs. Holy Roller wasn’t on to something - a girl who had been raped with a broomstick right in her own bedroom, by relatives. A shopkeeper gunned down by a 14 year old. And Lori’s 13 year old cousin, nine months pregnant and shooting up heroin. Now, I think about all those stories and I know that Lori was exaggerating some and making some up and maybe she liked to see the horrified look on my face. But then, in the midst of New York on the brink, in the midst of this general feeling of an uprising of evil and animosity towards anyone who didn’t walk the walk of the norm - animosity that bordered on hatred - I believed it all and it made me feel sick. Between the oppressive heat and humidity and all that was going on around me, I felt a sick sense of dread that summer, but it was a dread tinged with a curious excitement. There was so much electricity in the air you could almost hear the crackling of static when you woke in the morning. And it was so damn hot, it was the first time I felt the cliche that the heat could make people crazy wasn’t a cliche at all, but true. The relentless sweltering had gotten to all of us, kids and adults alike; we were short tempered and cranky and prone to starting fights over nothing. It was like living on the edge and we all knew it. I think we aged five years that summer, all 14 and 15 but cynical and hardened in a lot of ways, just from having so much death and tension and raw energy shoved in our faces every day, from the shell shocked parents harping on us and hammering us with statistics and warnings. And we were living all this out with a soundtrack, huddled in the abandoned house next to the high school or in the sump or in someone’s basement or fort every night, listening to this bizarre mix of the Ramones and Sex Pistols, Kiss and Foghat, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Queen. We were all revved up with no place to go, just some green grass and white picket fence kids both fearing the world we were living in and wanting so much to be an intrinsic part of all that fear, to be in there, at CBGB’s or on the quiet streets fo Brooklyn, looking for a serial killer. We settled for drinking cheap beer and smoking stolen cigarettes and alternating our disaffected youth rock music with the sounds of baseballs being hit out of Yankee Stadium.

July 13, 1977 found us sitting in front of my house. Nature was offering us a freaky show of heat lightning and we stared at the sky for a while, entertained by nothing more than streaks of electricity bolting through the air. And then a weird thing happened. It was subtle, almost imperceptible from where we were sitting, but I noticed it and so did Lori. The night sky got darker. Something changed. It was about 9pm. By 9:30 or so, news of the New York City blackout had spread and we realized we had witnessed it in a way.

I remember my mother having this sense of panic about her. I remember her saying “this won’t be like 1965″ and it was only later on that I knew what she meant - the blackout of 1965 was calm and peaceful. The blackout of 1977 was anything but, and we could almost anticipate it, sitting in my mother’s kitchen listening to the radio for breaking news. I thought again of my friend’s mother. It was all coming to a head - Son of Sam, disco, punk rock, Abe Beame and money woes and rapes and murders and pregnant 13 year old girls on smack. Somewhere in Levittown, Mrs. Holy Roller was probably under her kitchen table with some candles and her rosary beads and the bible, waiting for Satan himself to bang down her door.

I was scared. Out there on Long Island, where we had lights and television and safety, I was scared. The news of the riots and looting and mayhem came in and my mother remarked that New York City was a sinking ship, a disaster of Titanic proportions. My father was at work in Bushwick and that panicked me, it even panicked my friends. This was the climax of everything, of all the turbulence and fear and the explosion we had been waiting for - or predicting - was happening.

I thought this would be the end of all it, in a way. I thought of the graphic my English teach had drawn on the blackboard just a few months ago, showing the movement of a story, with the climax as the peak of a mountain and then everything slowly rolling down the hill after that, towards the inevitable resolution. I expected that everything after the black out would be anti-climatic as the conclusion of this summer drew near. Although it was only mid-July, it was if summer was ending right then and there. I never wanted so badly to get back to school and normalcy and routine. I hated that there was more than another month of this floating feeling left, that time and all the empty space between July and September was pulling us towards something worse, something even darker. Maybe the blackout and the subsequent mess of arrests and broken glass was it. Maybe from here on, we could get back to the business of being kids who don;’t think about things like men who stalk and kill. And we tried. We hung out, we listened to records, we went to the movies and started and ended teenage romances and some of us went to summer school during the day because we didn’t pay attention in 9th grade biology.

On July 31, Son of Sam struck again and broke us out of our complacent reverie. It’s not like we had forgotten about him - he was on the front page nearly every day and we were devouring every word from Jimmy Breslin, who had become this cult figure demigod, an agent to Satan to some people, who thought Breslin was giving the killer too much publicity, a hero to others who praised Breslin’s caustic, raw writing and his willingness to be a pawn in order to bring this killer into the open where he could be caught.

And finally, he was caught. August 10, 1977, with summer almost over, with back to school banners already hung in the windows of May’s department store with all the hot, open days of freedom already taken from us, a killer was moved off the streets and into jail and the sigh of relief everyone breathed nearly cooled the air.

Somehow it fell to the Yankees to salvage 1977 for us. Ron Guidry, Mike Torrez, Sparky Lyle, Mr. October with his five home runs in the series, three in one game. Watching those games against the Dodgers, listening to the sounds of the cheers, New York seemed good again. It seemed whole. And then there was Howard Cosell on ABC during game 2 of the series, as another one of those Bronx fires burned out of control behind the Stadium and he intoned “There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” And that seemed to epitomize it right there, to encapsulate everything about that summer.

The Yanks won the series, Ed Koch replaced Abe Beame that November and New York, as always, recovered. But not without leaving its mark on some of us, even 14 year old kids out in suburbia who vicariously lived through the whole sordid summer, but felt every bit as if it belonged to them too. It makes quite a story, anyhow.

1. The DJ Plays Our Kind of Music

Now and then he takes a phone-in
And anyone who’s feeling lonely
Can call him up
And make a little conversation
And in the night there’s music playing
Soft behind the words he’s saying
Would I like to make a dedication

Curtis Freeman is a small man with very little hair. He walks hunched over, making him appear smaller than he already is and he pushes that little hair off to one side, which only serves to accentuate the fact that he is on the downhill side of going bald. He wears a constant frown and his brows are always furrowed and people say that Curtis Freeman is the very definition of sad and pathetic. He is a puppy who’s been kicked, a child who is lost, a man without an island and any other metaphor the people of Green Valley can find for sad or forlorn.

On this day, Curtis Freeman is wearing an ill fitting black trench coat that hangs almost to his heels and slopes off his shoulders lazily. He is holding an attache case that seems to weigh him down, causing his hunch to be even hunchier and he bows his head toward the ground as he walks, so as not to let the day’s barrage of rain strike his face. He discovered a flat tire on his car in the train lot, so he is walking home the two miles from the station, in the cold autumn rain, occasionally slipping on a wet leaf or being chased by a loose dog. Such is the life of Curtis Freeman.

Curtis gets to his house at 6:13 p.m., a full hour after he usually gets home. He is soaked right down to his underwear, which he wrings out over the bathtub before depositing them in the laundry basket. He puts on his pajamas - grey sweatpants and a t-shirt that depicts the women of Farscape - much sooner than he normally would and settles down at the kitchen table for a meal of Dinty Moore stew and crackers. First, he turns on the radio.

If there’s one thing in Curtis Freeman’s life that brings him a small glimmer of happiness, it’s the WKLX greatest hits of the 60’s and 70’s, especially from 6 to 10 pm Monday through Friday and 10am-6pm on weekends, when Stu McLundy is spinning the discs.

Stu really does spin discs. He believes he is the last disc jockey in all of the US of A who still puts the needle on the vinyl, spins the black circle, plays the oldies the way they were meant to be played. In fact, his show is called Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy, as a tribute to what Stu thinks is the best part about listening to records.

Stu is a beefy, flabby man who wears sweat-stained blue Seersucker suits and masturbates to the Dawn part of Tony Orlando and Dawn. When he plays a long song, like McArthur Park, Stu is either taking a dump or rubbing one out to the cover of Tony Orlando and Dawn’s Greatest Hits. Despite these personal defects, Stu is somewhat of a celebrity in Green Valley. He makes appearances at charity car washes, department store grand openings and the annual Kiwanis Thanksgiving Dinner for senior citizens. When people see him, they say Hey, it’s Scratch and Skip Stu! - though the kids have taken to calling him Scratch and Sniff Stu, thanks to the creeping sweat stains that make Stu smell like a can of old chicken soup. Sometimes they’ll ask him to say something radio-like and he’ll always, without fail, say Stu McLundy here with the greatest hits of the only eras that matter, about to drop the needle on the Defranco Family. Heartbeat, it’s a lovebeat. He says this all smooth and baritone and almost sexy. If you didn’t know that Stu McLundy is a fat, sweaty, smelly, sexual pervert of a man, if you’ve never seen him but just heard his voice, you would think he must look like the Marlboro Man in Armani, drinking a martini, shaken not stirred. You might even fantasize about his disembodied voice. The people of Green Valley tolerate him and some even love him, because K-Tel records put out an album called The Best of Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy and he went on NPR to talk about it one day, in what was probably the most famous moment anyone in Green Valley ever had. They finished the segment by playing Stu’s signature song, the much maligned Heartbeat is a Lovebeat. It was a swell moment for Stu and all of Green Valley.

Curtis Freeman turns on the radio, annoyed that he has already missed a good twenty minutes of Scratch and Skip. He hopes he didn’t miss any Chicago or Three Dog Night. He digs into his Dinty Moore, crumbling some Saltine crackers over the stew and nods his head in time to Freda Payne’s Band of Gold. His radio is small and old, a gift from his brother nearly twenty years ago. The sound is tinny and mono and that’s alright with Curtis, because every song sounds like it did back in the days when AM radio played music. The song ends and Stu McLundy’s voice fills Curtis’s kitchen. Stu’s voice bounces off the toaster and microwave, absorbs into the ceiling, and is a warm caress around Curtis’s head, is an aural Zoloft.. Curtis sits up straighter, lets his frown turn just a bit upside down and the weight of his world on his slumped shoulders lifts a bit. He finishes his stew, cleans off his plate, turns up the radio and does an awkward sort of dance across the tiled floor as Brand New Key wafts through the kitchen. This goes on for hours, as Curtis sweeps the floor, plays two games of solitaire on his laptop, dishes out a bowl of vanilla ice cream, reads the daily comics and does his awkward dance to the pop hits of days gone by in between all of minutiae of his life.

2. You Don’t Mess Around With Jim

You don’t on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Jim’

Over at the KLX headquarters, Stu McLundy is stacking the final few records of the evening, carefully placing the DeFranco Family’s Heartbeat on the bottom of the pile, so he can - as always -sign off with what he believes is the greatest pop song ever recorded. At 9:35, as he’s about to drop Bobby Goldsboro on the turntable, one Marcus P. Fetterling walks into the office, trailed by two men in dark suits and somber faces.

Marcus P. Fetterling is the owner of WKLX, as well as the building WKLX sits in, as well as a wholesale tire warehouse, a decomposing tenement in the next town over and MPF’s, an establishment that seems like a good old pub from the outside, but which has several rooms in which activities that may or may not be legal take place. Marcus wears a nylon running suit that makes a swishing sound when he walks and has more than one thick, gold chain hanging around his neck. He wears yellow-tinted sunglasses, even indoors, and his dark, wiry hair always has a sheen of hasn’t been washed about it. Marcus has dreams of being in the porn business, but so far the closest he has come was when he installed a hidden video camera in the back rooms of MPF’s and compiled a stash of VHS tapes he calls “Marcus’s Greatest Hits.”

Marcus P. Fetterling has been an absentee boss for the most part, making an appearance in the station offices every few weeks or so. So when he waltzes into the studio, Stu McLundy is surprised. When it is apparent Marcus is not alone, Stu’s surprise turns to chagrin. Those fellows in their dark suits have bad news written all over them. They may as well be carrying signs that say We Are Here To Fuck You Over!

Marcus swishes his way through the obstacle course of crates of albums, empty soda bottles and piles of dirty tissues that are the victims of Dawn porn. Stu doesn’t make an attempt to rise to meet his boss; he sits there fondling his DeFranco family vinyl as Marcus bends down and shoves his hand toward Stu.

“Stu. My man. Good to see you again. How’s tricks? Wife, kids ok?” Stu slips his hand into Marcus’s grip and pumps halfheartedly. He doesn’t have a wife. Or kids. Or tricks. Before he can answer, Marcus pulls his hand away and points toward the two Fuck You Over men. “Got company, my man. Put on that long song with the guitars. Freeman? Seabird?” Stu senses a nervousness in Marcus’s voice, a shakiness that says “just pretend we have it together here, ok, my man?” Stu opts to play Donna Summer’s Love to Love You, Baby, figuring seventeen minutes of moans and disco would be enough to get him through whatever the Fuck You brothers and Marcus have to say to him.

“Stu McLundy. Bob Harrison. Mike Hamm.” Marcus says this as a way of introduction. They are in Marcus’s office, which is dark and musty and unused. Speckles of dust flit in and out of the small light the lone lamp gives off. After an exchange of handshakes, Marcus sits down and a herd of dust bunnies scamper around his chair. He pulls a bottle of Jack Daniels and four paper cups from his desk drawer. The cups are small and have riddles on them. Bob and Mike decline a drink. Stu takes his (Why did the boy throw a clock out the window? Because he wanted to see time fly!) and drinks it like an 18 year old frat boy. One shot, grimace, wipe mouth with sleeve.

“Stu, I’m gonna be straight with you here. Bob and Mike represent Jim.”
“Jim who?”
“Not Jim who. Jim what.”
Stu holds his Dixie cup out for another drink. He stares at the cup while Marcus pours and finally gets the joke. Time fly! Hah!
“What’s a Jimwhat?”
Bob stands up. He is broad shouldered, imposing, reminds Stu of that guy in Men in Black. Not Will Smith. The white one. Tommy Lee. Tommy Jones something.

“Jim is the new wave in radio, Mr. McLundy.”

Uh oh. Stu’s stomach does a flip-flop and he can feel the whiskey climbing up his esophagus. He swallows it back down.

Mike stands up. Except for the suit, he’s nothing like Bob. He’s a hipster, with a goatee and that dirty English boy haircut and a faint whiff of Abercrombie & Fitch lingering around him.

“Mr. McLundy - can I call you Stu? Good. Stu - WKLX has become problematic for Mr. Fetterling, in that it is no longer - if it ever has been - fiscally solvent. Therefore, it would be prudent of him to let go of the entity known as WKLX in order to bring his finances into a better place, monetarily speaking.”

“Ah, fuck.” Marcus swings his chair around, stares at Stu with what he hopes is a forlorn look. “Mrs. F. is divorcing me. Taking me for everything. I’m selling the station. Jim is taking over.” He swings the chair back around and faces Bob and Mike. “Can he go back to the studio now? Song’s almost over?”

Stu is nervous and anxious and befuddled and just a bit buzzed, and the sweat stains on his armpits have bled down to his waist and around his back. He growls. “Who the FUCK is Jim?”

3. Alone Again, Naturally

In an effort to make it clear to who
Ever what it’s like when your shattered
Left standing in the lurch, at a church
Where people ‘re saying,
“My God that’s tough, she stood him up!
No point in us remaining.
May as well go home.”
As I did on my own,
Alone again, naturally

Curtis Freeman was not always a sad man. Once, not too long ago, he was happy and in love and had a head full of thick, brown hair. It wasn’t until Sharon Weiss left him - two weeks before their scheduled wedding - that he started balding. And it was shortly after that Curtis’s shoulders began to hunch and his brows began to furrow.

Sharon left him a note on a Sunday morning in the form of a bright orange post-it slapped on his coffee machine. The message was written in Sharon’s flourished, fancy handwriting, all those curls and squiggles squeezed onto a 3X3 sheet of sticky paper.

Dear Curtis,

I am sorry to break your heart like this.
I am leaving town.
For good.
I love you still.
But not in that way.
Anymore.

Sorry,
Sharon

So Curtis did what any man in that situation would do: he used logic and reasoning to deduce where Sharon was headed, tracked her down, cornered her at the Vince Lombardi rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike and killed her. He then drove all the way to Roscoe, NY, the Trout Fish capital of the world, with the body of his dead ex-fiancé in the trunk of his car, slightly bludgeoned and definitely bloody. He stopped at a deserted resort area, taking a few minutes to wax nostalgic about his childhood. He thought of all the summers they would drive up to Roscoe, four kids and two let’s-pretend-to-be-happy grownups stuffed into a sedan, every turn on the slithering road throwing blankets and pillows and board games across the back seat, his sisters and brother piling on each other, squealing in fake pain. They’d pass this place with it’s rows of white cottages and southern-style porches; the vacationers - most dressed in white and navy blue - swimming, boating, laughing, trout fishing, giving the resort a vibrant, idyllic feel.

Whatever it was then, it was no more. With the empty parking lot and bare sign and a lakefront that looks like a ghost town, it just seemed, much like Curtis Freeman, sad and forlorn.

Curtis pulled up in front of one shuttered cottage, dragged Sharon’s body out of the trunk and tossed her into the man-made lake. He sat on the porch for a few minutes, remembering the ladies with their sun umbrellas and the little girls and boys in tennis clothes. He smoked a cigarette, flicked the butt into the lake that contained the stinking body of his one true love, and drove back to Green Valley, singing along to Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky on repeat the whole way.

And now, months later and not a hint of suspicion hurled at Curtis, just sympathy and maybe a few snickers, he sits in his kitchen as always, waiting for the Stu McLundy show to wind down. 9:55 and it’s closing time for Scratch and Skip. Curtis reaches for the off button before Sharon Weiss’s favorite song and Stu McLundy’s calling card, Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat, begins.

He hears it play in his head anyhow as he gets ready for bed.

When he dreams, he dreams of his wedding that never was. Sharon is radiant in her wedding gown as she twirls her way onto the dance floor. As she gets nearer, Curtis sees that there are lily pads and fishing line stuck to the hem of the gown. The lace drips with dirty lake water and Sharon’s feet squish as she walks, leaving a trail of muddy footsteps. She sits down in a chair in the middle of the dance floor, ready for the part where the best man - Curtis’s brother Hank - removes the garter from Sharon’s tanned, smooth leg and tosses it to a lucky man in the crowd that has gathered around them. As he lifts Sharon’s dress, a trout slithers out from the garter. Hank grabs the trout and throws it backward over his head. Stu McLundy is there, hands stretched out. The trout lands in his arms and he cradles it like a baby. Sharon gets up to dance with Stu. She whispers in his ear, a whisper that Curtis, being the dreamer, can hear:

Listen to my heart pound
Listen to my love sound

Curtis wakes up sweating.

Did he? Did he really kill her? Sometimes he can’t remember, he can’t tell the difference between the dream of sitting in the kitchen thinking about his murderous revenge and the reality of sitting in his kitchen fantasizing a murderous revenge. Then and now and real and fake all blur together at 3am, with the soundtrack of the DeFranco family pounding furiously in his head.

He reaches for the phone, dials Sharon’s number blindly.

“Whuuuu,” she mumbles sleepily.

Curtis hangs up. Damn dreams.

For the 52 stories thing on flickr. I am seriously lagging behind.

I cross the street and she’s there, in front of the drug store, waiting for me. She knows I had to pick up my meds and she’s there like a stalker, her eyes rimmed with the black of insomnia, her hands shoved deep inside her pockets. She’s staring straight ahead at me and I have to acknowledge her. My first instinct is to turn around and go home, go to the park, go anywhere else but to the place where she stands. But I need my meds and she knows this. She knows I’m not going anywhere but right towards her.

She at least tries to look shameful, bows her head a bit and bites her lower lip but I’ve seen it all before and I don’t let her little acts of manipulation phase me anymore. It’s old. But the mere act of pretending to be shamed tells me that at least she still has the capacity to recognize that what she’s doing is wrong. She knows she shouldn’t be here. For a split second I think about grabbing her, kissing her, pushing her hair back from her face and telling her I love her but then I remember that it’s gone, all gone and I’d be just setting myself back months if I did that.

I reach for the door to the pharmacy. Open it. Walk in. She follows behind me and stands at the counter with me while I wait. I say nothing to her. She grabs onto the sleeve of my parka and pinches it, holds just a tiny bit of fabric between her fingers, as if that’s all it would take to keep me bound to her. Maybe it is. I get my pills, sign the insurance form and walk back out the door. She’s trailing behind me like a pet, stumbling to keep up with my long strides, her fingers still gripping my parka like a lifeline.

Out in the cold air again I take a deep breath, exhale, and blow smoke rings with my winter breath. I fight off a surging nicotine craving by biting down hard on my lip. I draw blood, lick it off and savor the taste of my own blood, which alarms me. My god, I’m so fucked up. I walk east, not even bothering to step around the pools of slush, my sneakers making puckering noises in the melting ice and snow. She’s still there, still holding on and I start crying as I walk, I swear my tears are freezing up the instant they hit my cheek. I don’t care. I’m just walking and crying, walking and crying and she’s fighting to hang onto my coat.

My feet are soaked and my toes are numb and I pick up the pace because I need to shake her off. I turn around. I know better, but I do it. I slow down, baby steps over the sheets of ice in front of the school and I crane my neck and I can see her, black hair and pleading eyes and trembling lips and my heart cracks, bleeds and falls apart right there in front of the elementary school where the little kids put down their crayons and stare at the crazy man on the sidewalk, the man who is kneeling down in the wet snow, crying, screaming, all alone.

Someone comes out to help me and I let them, for the first time I let someone help. They pick me up, hands under my arms and I go limp. I don’t even turn to look for her. I know she’s gone. I. Know. She’s. Gone.

She’s gone.

52 stories

Just as they could hear the tires of the pick up truck nearing the house, his mother shooed him into the shed and told him to watch from there. He was grimy, his mother said. No place for grimy children up front.

He hadn’t meant to get dirty, but it was hot and thick outside and all the dust and blacktop and stuck to his sweat. Besides, he really didn’t want to be up front. All the commotion scared him a bit and from the way the other kids were talking, Mr. Jacob would be sitting in the back of the truck, his dead body propped up like he was still alive.

“No, Matthew. Mr. Jacob is in a box. A coffin.”
“Can he breathe in there, mom?”
“He’s dead, Matthew. Dead people don’t breathe.”

Matthew left it at that because he didn’t want to talk about what it means to be dead. That’s all his brothers and sisters were going on about and listening to them made him feel like someone was poking holes in his stomach.

He found a milk crate in the shed and shoved it over to the side window. He wouldn’t miss a thing from there. The shed - once a place where his father kept his tools and now a rotting corpse of crumbled brick - looked right down the driveway and towards the street, giving Matthew a fine a view of all his family and neighbors gathering by the roadside. He settled in and waited. For what, he wasn’t sure. But he knew from the way the older kids were talking that they had done this before and that it was a big deal to have a dead guy paraded down your street. He just wished Mr. Jacob wasn’t the one being dead today. He liked Mr. Jacob. He was the only grown up who ever smiled like he remembered what it’s like to be happy.

Yellow. Years later when Matthew would think about this day he would recall how everything was tinged in yellow. Not the yellow of daisies and crayon suns, but a brownish, dirty yellow that cast an eerie glow on the death circus he watched from the shed window.

For three days after Mr. Jacob died, the sky had been bloated with thunderstorms that wouldn’t budge. Matthew’s mother and father stood outside every morning and said “gonna be a big storm today,” but it never rained, never thundered and the sky just turned yellow and gray and brown like it was rotting. And as Mr. Jacobs’s funeral procession approached Matthew’s house, all rumbling tires and crying women, the clouds seemed to sink under the weight of the storm they were holding in and the sky felt lower, like it was pressing down on them and forcing the whole world to bathe in its weird storm-glow. The dirt road, the dry hedges, the gossiping women and stoic men and oblivious children playing by the porch - they were all tinged dirty yellow and it hurt Matthew’s eyes to look.

The pick-up rounded a corner and was headed toward Matthew’s house. Every child stopped moving. Every woman stopped talking. Matthew held his breath, afraid to make a sound and break the spell of revered quiet. There were only a few sounds; tires doing a slow turn over dirt and Mrs. Jacob, held up by Matthew’s mother and aunt, praying and crying. Her whispered sobs carried loud like echos.

Matthew, still holding his breath, watched the trick get closer and only when the noise of the wheels on dirt was enough to drown out Mrs. Jacob, he began to breathe again.

The truck was open in the back and had a makeshift wooden bench on each side of the truck bed. On each bench sat three men and between them, on the floor, was Mr. Jacob, resting comfortably dead in a wooden box. The men were all dusty boots and squinty eyes, dressed in the same hats and flannel shirts and faded work pants. Their expressions never changed as they stared into the crowd of people that followed them on foot. Their faces were worn and filled with lines like etched stone and as the wind kicked up and the hems of their pants ands cuffs of their shirts flapped and fluttered, they never flinched not even as wind-carried dirt settled on their lips and flew into their eyes. Every few seconds the long box would shift and the men would all bend down at once and push the box back.

As the truck moved right in front of Mrs. Jacob, the men all took off their hats and bowed their heads and Mrs. Jacob wailed, a sound that made Matthew’s heart feel squeezed and tight. Matthew’s mother and some other women were trying to keep the widow from running into the street, but Mrs. Jacobs’s grief carried her away from grasping arms and she ran toward the pick-up truck, trailing it, holding up her long funeral skirt as she half-ran, half-stumbled and the driver of the truck sped up just a little and later - years later - Matthew would wonder if the driver was trying to get away from Mrs. Jacob or trying to keep her from reaching the truck bed. His brother would say to him “same thing, ain’t it?” And Matthew would shake his head. “No, not at all.”

Later, when the sky finally cracked and the rain flushed the yellow from the sky, turning it black and brown, Matthew sat on his front stoop with his mother, eating a piece of pie and looking at the very spot where just this morning Mr. Jacobs passed by his house for the very last time. Matthew knew then this would be one of those things he would remember forever, that one day he’d be sitting on the porch like his father before him, telling stories about his childhood, and this would be one of them. Even if as the years went on the colors would change or the pitch of Mrs. Jacob’s cry would get louder or tiny flaws of memories would change the snapshot in some way, it would always be there, hanging like a poster in his mind.