by Benjamin Patterson
The year was coming to a close, but it hadn’t closed, right at that moment when the scales shift and autumn begins to tip into winter (think grayscale images, shavings of frost sticking to spent grasses). Car ignitions sputtered. Every few months, a woman, or an occasional man, claimed to be a psychic. Word spread, as predictions miraculously came true. Someone’s boyfriend did die, an accident was avoided, blue paint did look good. Lines rounded the block. Social workers and city candidates could be spotted amongst the huddled customers. One could still spot the elderly carrying small reflective mirrors or out-of-place carnations. They always populated breakfast places in the two blocks that we referred to as our downtown, an area with a New England-style charm and several eccentric stores that sold antiques or glass eyeballs. The air was always thick and dusty, the architecture brick and plaster.
We were a college town. Fraternity troops crushed beer cans beneath sneakers and packaged themselves in the homely glamour of Springsteen songs and a constant state of low-level drunkenness. Recruits from the sorority developed casual courtships with many of these men. They lingered around flatbed pickup trucks, sprung for brightly-colored puffy coats as the atmosphere chilled. Meanwhile, our borders expanded. Mr. Barley Johnston invested in a personal collection of housing developments, churning out pavement where gravel had once been. Thin-walled apartments kept many wandering students within their ghostly ramparts. You could get lost out there, tricked into believing you were in another place entirely. In retrospect, maybe that sort of escapism was the point.
In many ways, it was a desolate time, a difficult time for the town. Raindrops were caught in cobwebs, weighed heavy and glowing. Cucumber wines spilled over charred wood, while wild children exchanged blows with sharpened stones by the riverbanks. Everybody wondered why they weren’t in Chicago, didn’t know what “a Chicago” was, or wondered where the fuck is Chicago? It was a pleasant time, like a stack of records and bottles of anesthetizing perfume. There was the general sensation of being rusted and metallic, wooden and chipped, set up in this strange and forgotten place in time. At the forest by the levy, people sang, fucked, died in the trees. This was the character of Marvin Stentley’s world, and he had not a single expectation of its change. He was an older hippie, with long tangled white hair and a matching wizard’s beard. He wore patchwork clothing items that resembled cloaks laced with golden patterns that he himself had painted. Marvin worked at a record store, and when he wasn’t working, he was hobbling around trying to worm his way into the permanent annals of the memory of each and every person that found themself in his domain.
Sandy had come from the mysterious, tattered edges of Iowa. She told people that she was born in a shack. In reality, she was born in a chemical suburb. She had nerve damage in her right arm from a childhood bike accident. Ever so often, her tendons would panic, leaping and writhing as she struggled to bind them in the central will of her mind. This led to a few unfortunate incidents, the most memorable being the time when her arm knocked a professor’s coffee onto his favorite button-up. Nobody knew what Dr. Gray’s scream sounded like until that fateful Friday afternoon.
One morning, Sandy was walking from her apartment up to campus. The night before, she had seen a local band (The Outrageous Peacock Nine) playing, and fragments of a sub-par musical catalog washed in and out of her head. Most vividly, she recalled the feeling of a hazy red fuzz rippling around the drummer’s head. You couldn’t find anybody who didn’t have some level of hallucinatory disorder, although they called it imagination, and they might’ve been right. Anyway, on to that decisive instant: Sandy crossed through a frat’s grassy lot, a shortcut that many took, emerging in the alley adjacent to the old football stadium. She then took a right, passing by a recently-renovated dorm building before seeing Craig, who had no chronicled last name. On the sidewalk, a fucked-up concrete spell seems to hold her in place. They’ll marry in one-and-a-half years and end up somehow in Alberta. These paths are strange, and who expects explanation?
At the essential root of this preserved image of the past and all of its tunnels of meaning and remembrance, slightly curled in at the edges in the form of a wrinkled yellow paper, the only ones that had it figured out were the birds. In unspeakable lands, miles outside of the city’s modest rings of activity, geese, crows, sparrows, cardinals, blue jays, and robins gathered in enlightened rituals. They were joined by exotic birds, Galapagos finches coated in bright azures and oranges. Flocks rejoiced in ecstatic celebrations, surrounded by ferns and low greenery, shadowed by enormous canopies rising above and fungal roots that wound around through eons of distance, slowed passage. The birds were here, and they are still here, but sometimes they get hard to hear, though it is not that hard to listen.
Benjamin Patterson is a 17-year old high school senior from Lawrence, Kansas. His writing has appeared in Glass Mountain, Rust & Moth, Ballast, Wilderness House Literary Review, and The Pedestal Magazine. He's the recipient of several Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.
January House Literary Journal 
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