SUMMER SUNLIGHT

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Once (this was in the part of town that has now detached and called itself Siggertsville, which the rest of town calls “Cigarettesville,” and it was in the year of the unexplained fires) there were two young people sitting on a wall. One of them was a boy, about eighteen, tall, thin, with light brown hair that had been bleached lighter by the summer sun and surprisingly dark eyes—they gave up nothing about his mood and only one thing about his character, which is that he was the kind of person who gave up nothing about his mood—and a frown that he thought of as recent but which would turn out to be permanent, since the forces that placed it there, the unjust forces represented by parents and teachers, pastors and teammates, would only harden around him as he aged (and he would harden, too, faster than he could predict or even imagine, and by the time he was thirty he would look forty, and by the time he was forty he would look fifty-five, and that would only be the halfway point of his life, and for the rest of it, his look would continue to run away from his actual span on the earth) and he would respond to those forces by putting his head down and making money, which he converted to power, which he converted to more money, and then more power; there would be times when he had so much of both that he would hardly know what to do with it, and so he would give some of either away, as a game he was playing with only himself as adversary (no one else was powerful enough to truly oppose him) and as a result a game in which he would, even as he lost, win. The other was the boy who would become his husband. He opened a can of beer and passed it over and declared the town deader then a cat smashed flat by a pickup truck and just then a pickup truck sped by and the two boys laughed and kicked their legs like kids.