Skip, Patch, Eye, Brownie, Chalk
Randall Brown

     

     A prompt, a riddle, as if a story can be found for these words. Eye, naturally, goes with patch; the chalk and skip a memory of school, along with the girl in the brown uniform. Maybe a school for pirates. Maybe a bake sale, a chalk-drawn hopscotch game, a girl with peace sign patched jeans and an eye a different color than the other. Maybe the eye of the needle, a skip as when records are played. Maybe a software patch. Maybe the chalk for pool cues. Maybe a brownie point for cleaning the board, the teacher with his eye on the patch between leg and shorts.
     Somewhere Richard Ford said that stories aren't found; they are made. I don't know. Give me these words and I find the same thing, no matter how I try to find something else. It goes like this:
     We skip school, drive to the Maryland border to get beer, walk to a patch of rock in the Gettysburg National Park, chalk up each beer into the stone with found bullet casings. Your mother still makes your lunch. You open it, take out the brownie wrapped up like a present and toss it off the rock edge into the battlefield, then pass out. I am alone as the day surrenders to night, and I think about how, when they come looking for remnants and relics, they will find that brownie, of all things. But of course they won't. Animals will find it first. A squirrel, then an owl will find the squirrel.
     It is what it always is. I think about your mother and my father, the notes we found, their meetings in places like this one, and how many people have stared up at the stars and imagined them as something else, like the blink of an eye, watching the two of us, wasting what little left we have of childhood on these things. 

//   Advance   //