A new story by alumni Ryan Burden (fiction, ’13) appears online at JMWW:
Trevor, staring through the green film on the apartment window, watched two boys play on slick chromed skateboards. The boards flipped and hovered in blurring spirals between their feet as they tried to beat gravity. They were much older than Trevor, who was only seven, and they wouldn’t have let him play with them. But that was all right because he didn’t want to flip skateboards. He didn’t even want to go outside. In summer the cracks in the sidewalk gushed heat like the air that poured from his mother’s oven on Sundays when she baked bread. He preferred to stay indoors, away from the sun and the sour stink of water in the gutters.
“Trevor,” said his mother. “Come and say goodbye to Mr. Gorman.”
Trevor opened his mouth wide because it hurt in the back where he had clenched his teeth shut whenever one of the boys fell. He cringed at the gristly crackle of bones in his jaw.
Mr. Gorman’s hands were puffed up like the red leather cushions on their couch. “Always a pleasure,” he said.
Trevor’s mother smiled and Trevor went back to the window. For a time the two adults stood whispering by the door. Mr. Gorman’s voice was like the muffled rumble of a cement truck in an underground tunnel. Trevor heard the apartment door open with a rubbery sucking sound. Then it closed again and he could tell that Mr. Gorman had not left. Outside, the older boys took their shirts off and hung them like limp, wrinkled snakes around their sunburned necks.
