cotton candy and bricks

Isaac Smith
Craft Fiction
Exercise #6

The streets are uneven, rippled with bricks, beautiful bricks, dirty red bricks, each with its own posture, its own face, upright and without a lie. Some stamped with dates- 1850, others with places- Pennsylvania. These bricks have unionized and kept themselves from an early grave, encircled in the simple desires of necessity- stay alive and outlive every single bastard in this small town. The bricks never whimper about the declining economy and the dust that thickens as the decades bristle from the decay.
I heard they had ordered more bricks. 20,000 bricks, like scabs waiting to cross the picket line. Their corners sharp and their surface pocked with inverted goosebumps. They decided to hide them. People steal bricks, bricks that aren’t anchored and set deep into the rounded motion of purpose. They use them as dividers between creeping charlie and hostas, between slanted sidewalks and unwanted mulberry saplings. They keep them near their door in case a midnight should come creaking and cracking on the fringe of darkness. They chase each other with loose bricks when they’re young and angry. It’s good they hide the bricks. Even the town drunks haven’t come to a consensus. “Theyz be....in a barn outside a town.” “No! Buried! Behind zee Library. Mark my...,” hiccup “word.” “Go to hell. No bricks. It’s all just a bunch of bull. Where would they get the money for 20,000 bricks? Uh? They can’t even fix the potholes or the pool.”
There’s a black cannon in the town square. There’s a photo of me as a four-year-old eating cotton candy next to it. It’s a color photograph from the 70’s so the colors have a dreamy, misty quality, the pixels are rounded and the greens and blacks are subtle and contained within their distinctive borders. The cotton candy is three times bigger than my head. A soft white pink. It’s as if I’m eating an explosion. A pink mushroom cloud, spun in sugar and balanced upon a narrow paper cone. I’m wearing a black motorcycle and have an early Beatles haircut. Even at that age I wanted to be a biker. But somehow a biker with cotton candy is sad. Especially next to a cannon, a fireless cannon, a cannon with no blood on its hands. A cannon held in place to watch the parades and people slipping in the snow. A cannon with nothing to save but a few childhood memories of little boys with cotton candy and dreams as wispy as the dried out summer creeks.
The empty college has always been the ghost heart of my town. It started in 1853 as a non-denominational all girls seminary school and by the time I was born it was deeply in debt and spiraling down unable to survive in a town that peaked at two thousand people. It’s got quite the campus of heavy brick buildings, trimmed in peeling white wood, and pillared entrances. Empty classrooms, empty dorms, empty tennis courts, empty gyms, and empty pools. My father had gone to the college and met my mother, a local. My father had been enticed to study the great books but in the end even he had to leave like the college. It’s possible that great books deserve to be read in great places. The simple ways of a small town can kill the unsuspecting person. It’s a sort of bread and butter kind of life, over and over, without the ocean, without the mountains. People circle under a leash of genetics, with worn paths crisscrossing like bad cursive. The graveyards cradle their kin, paranoid of the subtle ripples of a stranger. It’s only fitting that the college should spend more time being empty than it ever spent insulated in the warm bodies of longing minds.
My father would tell me stories from the empty college. One of his classmates fell five stories to his death in the old dorm. He was playing around is what everyone said. “Just goofing.” He was thin and from the suburbs of Chicago. He’d died a virgin and that scared the hell out of the other guys. Only a trickle of blood had oozed from his nose and it looked distinctly like Florida. There was also the guy who got hopped up on some pills, his first experience, and wandered off campus and decided to break into a nearby house. He ended up bleeding to death on their porch. A porch I would pedal past every time I went to my grandparent’s house. They’ve all become ghosts, mostly silent but they pass by windows at the college when the storms come. They meander through empty blackened corridors with white feathery books cupped in their young arms. Their hair pushed to the side, ready to flyaway when the winds pick up and the trees bend and moan. The college will always be in session for the handful of dead people that call it home.
There was once a flood in my town. I was little and slept through the rising part but people pointed to places and said, “See that brown ring?” with such a buzz to their voice I couldn’t help but think I missed something in close relation to a circus. I thought people might be trying to trick me because I didn’t see the river anywhere close by. I ran through the grass and stopped. It was a bunny, brown and tiny. A victim of the flood, displaced but alive. I cradled that wee bunny like a first time father. In that moment I wanted nothing more than that bunny to live. To live as long as a bunny could live, with gray whiskers and the hints of watered milk upon its eyes, muscles sagging into the long summer grass where dandelions grow like redwoods. I whispered under my breath, “Live...please, live...please.” But the bunny went cold in the middle of the night, nestled in the grass nest I had molded and placed in the brown box next to my bed. The stiffened rigor mortis felt odd to my young fingers like a soft rock. I’ve never hated nature more than that moment. Its rising rivers, its brown rings, its baby bunnies, all swirls of senseless abstraction. “Next time,” I said. “Next time I’ll win. The bunny and I will win.”
The old bank downtown is no longer a bank. It’s probably the first bank I ever set foot into. Up three stairs and there it was- the vault, bold and massive, a silver heart with spindles and various locking cylinders and a metal wheel that looked like it belonged on a pirates boat peeking from the edge where the vault door touched the wall. Whenever I see a bank in a movie I’m always reminded of the smell of my old downtown bank, with its thin gray carpet and dark counters. Something of a mix between a classy nursing home and an overly priced casket. But ultimately a smell that had a purpose. This is what I liked, the purpose of the smell. It smelled serious and every time I went into the bank I tried to make my little body be as serious as I could manage. I kept my feet off of each other and I tried to keep my hands by my side instead of on my face or meandering about. The counters were too high for me to actually make eye contact with the tellers so I could keep my eyes on the vault like it would take notice of my seriousness and grant me some secret boon.
Now it just sits there, empty. But its purpose has not been destroyed. Through the locked doors I noticed a sign above the vault that reads, “The Living Well Vault” and as I moved my head I could just catch a glimpse of the first row of chairs within the vault. All empty. I hoped the front row was at least packed.
The creek is shallow and wraps around the edge of town near a bluff of golden rocks. This is where we take our senior group picture. Some on the top of the bluff and some below. In the photo I try to disappear behind someone. I do not want to exist either below or above. I do not want to be a small face trapped in the pixels of tiny death. The lies on one’s face rise larger than the fixed eyes. I should jump from the bluff I tell myself but I’m already in the grass below and years have passed. I imagine young Sac and Fox hunters gathering around the golden bluff, laughing and pushing each other lightly, long before the gathering of my class. The impossibility of change chiseled deeply within the layers of the bluff. A witness and a participant. Somewhere I imagine there’s a little piece of me in the stratum of silt and limestone, waiting for the photograph to be over. Waiting for the evolution of place. Waiting for all things to condense into one solid mass.