Page 13 of Brash for It
I take another long drag and crush the butt neat in the crack of a board.The old Kellum would have flicked it into the water and called it a lesson for the fish.The me now has lived long enough to hate assholes who treat the world like a trash can.
A woman’s voice carries across the ramp, not to me.“You lock it?”A man answers, “Yeah.”Car doors clunk closed.Tires bump over gravel.The taillights recede, then are gone.It’s just me and the water and a night so thick you could cut it and hand slices around.
I stay until my legs get ideas about stiffness, then push up and walk back to the bike.The seat’s cool.The chrome sweats.I swing on, thumb the start button, and the engine answers like it never left.The headlight throws a clean cone down the gravel, catching a flash of raccoon eyes in the reeds before they wink out.
I don’t take the straight shot home.I snake side roads that run parallel to the sound, black ribbons between dark pines and darker water.Houses pop up now and then—single lights in back windows, the blue wash of a TV in a den, porch swings creaking as the last of the heat lets go.
In one yard, a kid chases fireflies with a mason jar and a kind of glee I remember like it belongs to another man.His mother calls him in and his protest is music.He goes anyway, because the lure of cold sweet tea and a ceiling fan wins.
Good for him.
I ride until the thought of sleep stops feeling like punishment and starts feeling like a kind of surrender I can live with for a few hours.The roads funnel me back toward town.The shop sits dark and square, secure lights throwing hard shadows.I slow as I pass, eyeing the bay doors like they might decide to roll up and ask me where I’ve been.
My place isn’t far.A rental we keep for brothers or family friends who need a couch or a bed between lives.Right now it’s just me and a fridge that hums loud enough to count as company.I cut the engine and coast the last foot into my spot so I don’t wake the neighbors.Keys jingle dull in my hand.The door sticks because the humidity warps it.I hip-check it and it gives.
Inside, it’s the opposite of the beach house a woman I don’t know sleeps in tonight.It’s not what my brothers have playing house and meaning it either.
No art.
No staged couch.
No fancy ass rug I’m supposed to be afraid to step on.
I’ve got a thrift-store table and two metal chairs that know how to take a beating.A dented pot.A stack of plates that all look the same.A bed built to hold a man who sleeps hard and doesn’t dream pretty.
I take off my boots at the mat because grit in the sheets is a sin according to my mother.She still cusses me out in my head for breaking the rules, so I like to take my shoes off to keep even the voice in my head mom quiet.
I toss my cut over the chair and stand there a second, the sudden quiet swallowing even the road out of my blood.The emptiness isn’t loud.
That’s the trouble.It’s soft.It drifts.It settles like quicksand until you don’t know you’re standing in it up to your shins.
Do I want that?
I shake my head like it’s a fly.I move because stillness isn’t a friend.To the kitchen.Sink on.Water runs.I scrub my hands until the oil surrenders, black spirals racing the drain.The scars on my knuckles hold grease like memory and that’s fine—some things are supposed to mark you.
In the mirror, a man looks back who other people call hard.
He is.
He earned it.
He keeps it because letting go would mean being someone else, and I don’t know that guy.
I flip the bathroom light off and the place goes gentle-dark.The bed takes me like it always does—no questions, no conditions.I stretch out and the sheet is cool, the pillow familiar.The other side is undisturbed.
It always is.
I stare at the ceiling long enough to map the hairline cracks.A dog barks two streets over.My phone buzzes once on the nightstand.I pick it up.Brothers’ chat.A picture of Tommy Boy’s paint colors, a joke about how he got bullied into teal by Jamison.
I type: Looks like a mermaid threw up.
Ten seconds later, the thread lights with laughter emojis.I put the phone face-down.
I tell myself I’m fine.I say it out loud so the room can hear.“I’m fine.”
The room doesn’t argue.It never does.
I close my eyes.The road I just rode unspools behind my lids—pines, marsh, water in strips of light.For about a minute, it’s enough.Then the question floats back up, stubborn, slow, refusing to drown: Do I want that?
