Page 43 - NS 2024

Streetlamps Owl Merle
The boys are seventeen and think they know everything. Lets not look at this through the lens of anything else.
Close your eyes and picture it shimmering in its own right. Both their faces are glowing in the ambery yellow-canary parking lot lights. Their cheeks may be wet but reflection alone is never this bright.
That same light dyes the deprived and uniform cedars such a good green and turns the metallic paint on the fire escape molten. The light is so warm it’ll melt on your tongue.
But we’re so far removed. Not in a coffee shop but the border of the forest, the backlot of a church. We are looking at the planet of a single setlight. The place where the taming begins staged for a brave rebellion against it.
The patter of the boys’ feet pound against cracked and bleached pavement. They could be feather light and graceful, but they are practiced at that repression already and tonight’s music calls for wild abandon. Tonight they will not be quiet because they do not have to be.
They are learning this. Look at them and their invincible limbs, jerky and whirling with the Free and leaping quality of their dance.
They’re seventeen. They know everything. They hold each other’s dominant hand and dance, fast then slow then faster. Pulling each other close and then spinning away, only to catch on the taut line of their interlocked arms and bounce inward again. Some of the dancing is just running as they buy themselves time to improvise the choreography.
They never stop moving and they rarely break contact for long. They both have tears in their eyes at the fullness of it all, and are still young enough that they’d never admit it. They dance and they dance and they dance, and as long as they’re in motion nothing can touch them. Brave as the stories they sometimes live in, their dance defies the paths laid out for them and they know it.
Their feet move faster and gasping breathless laughs are allowed to fill the sleeping street. Laughter is always allowed, but the boys are seventeen and do not know this yet. For them it is a rarity. A taste of the fearlessness that one day will be theirs all the time.
They topple like dynasties and release their grip to hold two pairs of scraped palms against two laughing, gasping chests. The boys catch their breath and embrace each other as the plinky guitar continues to build from their little transistor radio. Still larger than life, the first boy calls out: