You’re supposed to be 43 now, maybe 44?, and you’re either the guy on Instagram with the photos of handguns and old cars and tattoos (HOLD FAST and DON’T TREAD ON ME) and the surgery scar from the terrible car accident, and I can’t really tell because I think those eyes are the eyes I remember, maybe?, but you’ve grown a beard and you live in a different state, and you haven’t posted anything in the last three years, and I don’t know if you’re dead or not,
OR
you found God and volunteered your time for Him, and you work at a warehouse one state over from where we grew up, and, two years ago, you wanted a different job, so that’s why you made the LinkedIn page, but there’s not a single photo of you online—your profile mentions you were in the Army, which you were, though it doesn’t give your years of service—but I hope this is you instead and
that you’re doing well,
NOT
like how it was when you were 19, and it was Halloween, and your girlfriend told us you were on leave over the weekend, staying at the Days Inn and not at your mom’s place, and it smelled like old smoke in the room, but there we were, just the five of us on the king-sized bed and the cloth armchair and the questionable floor, and your girlfriend was dressed as a harlequin for the party she went to earlier— none of the rest of us were in costume—but, holy shit!, you’d shaved your head and grown taller, and you had abs and pecs and sunken eyes now, and there was a seriousness to you, maybe something to do with why you had to go and live with your dad in the middle of high school,
AND
there were empty Rolling Rocks on the floor, like the green bottles we stole from your mom’s fridge when we were 13 and she’d gone to bed, and do you remember how we stayed up late watching Tales from the Darkside on VHS after trick-or-treating? In the movie, Debbie Harry played the witch that was going to eat the little boy she chained up in her pantry, and he wound up saving his own life Scheherazade-style by reciting stories to her about a mummy and an evil cat and a family of gargoyles, and sometimes these are the fictions we have to say out loud because not saying them is worse.
Barrett Bowlin is the author of the story collection Ghosts Caught on Film (Bridge Eight). His essays and short fiction appear in places like TriQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Barrelhouse, Salt Hill, The Fiddlehead, and Bayou. He lives and teaches and rides trains in Massachusetts.
Lost Balloon 