Air-Brushed

Tommy Dean

 

At the start of 8th grade, you say we gotta cool it. I accuse you of watching too many gangster films again, but you shrug your shoulders. “Those are the breaks, kid,” you say, giving me a wink, I know you’ve spent hours practicing in front of the mirror.

You say this to me while we’re sitting on the porch swing, our feet dangling from the bench, the chain squeaking as we glide forward and back, your hand intertwined with mine because we were again practicing, the girlfriend–boyfriend project, so we’d be ready when we found our true loves. Everything was cool until I brought our tangled hands up to scratch my nose. I didn’t know this in the moment, but truthfully, I wanted to do everything together, coupled like the number eleven.

“You ever just want to run away,” you said, pulling at your shirt collar with both hands, your collarbone poking out like the Y of a nice climbing tree. I imagined ants marching along that ridge because I knew you’d never let me get that close. You were having another one of your suffocating moments. These were happening more frequently, and I had run out of ways to keep you from leaving.

You lurched out of the swing, chains popping, saying you had to go, that I shouldn’t call, that maybe you’d find your sister after all.

“Candy,” I said, trying to stand, the swing catching the back of my knees.

“If you can’t say it now, Gavin, I don’t think you ever will.”

I thought of everything but “I love you” because that’s what fathers and mothers said to each other as they left the house each morning to go to work. I needed you more than a flimsy kiss on the forehead, more than the “I’ll take care of you by paying the bills” kind of Monday morning slow dance.

“I love the way your knees poke out of the holes in your jeans. I love the way your hair whips around in the wind and always lands in the corner of your mouth. I love the way your ankles crack when you walk down the steps.”

When you reach the dividing line of our properties, the spray-painted fluorescent orange slashes from the city works department create a line I can’t cross.

“You only love the pictures in a magazine parts of me, Gavin. I don’t want to be air-brushed my whole life.”

You’ve folded your arms over your chest, and your elbows, exposed, sore and scabbed from your last skateboarding attempts. I’d like to put my tongue in the hollow of your pain. But I can only reach for your face, aiming for the lazy strands of hair curving around your cheek. I’m tightrope-walking around the circumference of the moon while you walk away, middle finger raised, torching the Earth between us.

 

Tommy Dean lives in Indiana with his wife and two children. He is the Flash Fiction Section Editor at Craft Literary. He has been previously published in the BULL Magazine, The MacGuffin, The Lascaux Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Pithead Chapel, among other publications. Find him @TommyDeanWriter on Twitter.