A Decent Disaster
It’s raining, she said. I said it was cold. We agreed that it was wet.
Everything below s was soaked, two floors below my open window everything was wet and slick and the lights made oily streaks on Tilghman Street. It was gray all day, offensive, calling me out for hours before it thought of breaking, gray the way you heave and choke before the most violent kinds of weeping. I hadn’t seen that in a while. One time before a storm the sky was green and my Grammy looked for Jesus. That was years ago, a fluke. There’s no big fussing here, no fressing. There are no earthquakes, for example – also, no tornados. There are no mudslides or great fires, nothing wild, really. Nothing here to threaten, nothing here to test a man, his body, nothing here to test his will. Here it only rains.
She says there’s nothing romantic about subsistence living, that it was insulting, not just rude; thoughtless, not just crass, to go on about it. She hates foodies, too, wonders how they sleep at night. Maybe a disaster then, one where no one dies, sandbags holding back the surge of rivers, maybe where they track great winds, where burning brush and bushes threaten trailer parks and gated homes.
It’s dark now but beneath it I know everything's still here, the black street like shiny coal, the soft grass in my yard and all my neighbor’s trees. Still there. Still green. Still wet. My shoes will smell like shit.
I’ve been to the hospital once but it was for a broken toe. I left four hours later with a cast up to my knee just in case they said. In case of what? Complications. I said I’d rather like some and then they gave me crutches. It laid me up for six weeks and I couldn’t go outside. I laid on my bed with my foot propped up, looking out this window at the sky and green tree leaves. The warm days were nice, and I’d go on my porch with books about other places, books with Epic Protagonists. What I really wanted then was my blue Cavalier, wanted to take it around town or up sweet smelling hills with late light filling in the spaces between leaves. The great spines of our mountains would be brindled with those marks, I’d pull Gs coming down into the valley with my elephants in tow.
I can’t believe this rain, she said. It’s so cold, I said, I know.
Everything below s was soaked, two floors below my open window everything was wet and slick and the lights made oily streaks on Tilghman Street. It was gray all day, offensive, calling me out for hours before it thought of breaking, gray the way you heave and choke before the most violent kinds of weeping. I hadn’t seen that in a while. One time before a storm the sky was green and my Grammy looked for Jesus. That was years ago, a fluke. There’s no big fussing here, no fressing. There are no earthquakes, for example – also, no tornados. There are no mudslides or great fires, nothing wild, really. Nothing here to threaten, nothing here to test a man, his body, nothing here to test his will. Here it only rains.
She says there’s nothing romantic about subsistence living, that it was insulting, not just rude; thoughtless, not just crass, to go on about it. She hates foodies, too, wonders how they sleep at night. Maybe a disaster then, one where no one dies, sandbags holding back the surge of rivers, maybe where they track great winds, where burning brush and bushes threaten trailer parks and gated homes.
It’s dark now but beneath it I know everything's still here, the black street like shiny coal, the soft grass in my yard and all my neighbor’s trees. Still there. Still green. Still wet. My shoes will smell like shit.
I’ve been to the hospital once but it was for a broken toe. I left four hours later with a cast up to my knee just in case they said. In case of what? Complications. I said I’d rather like some and then they gave me crutches. It laid me up for six weeks and I couldn’t go outside. I laid on my bed with my foot propped up, looking out this window at the sky and green tree leaves. The warm days were nice, and I’d go on my porch with books about other places, books with Epic Protagonists. What I really wanted then was my blue Cavalier, wanted to take it around town or up sweet smelling hills with late light filling in the spaces between leaves. The great spines of our mountains would be brindled with those marks, I’d pull Gs coming down into the valley with my elephants in tow.
I can’t believe this rain, she said. It’s so cold, I said, I know.
Chris Cocca's work has been published at venues including Hobart, Geez, The Huffington Post, and O:JAL. He earned his MFA at The New School. He can't stop thinking about that time Billy Joel wrote a whole song called Allentown (that Chris thinks is) about his family. Catch him at @thatChrisCocca.