Lucia

The tracks between Campo Santo and Harrison State were overgrown and coated with rust, the crossties cracked and rotting, the rails fenced in on both sides by evergreens that seemed to curl up into the midnight sky like fingers grasping at the Milky Way.  I’d walked the route every weekend for the past year, hopping from beam to beam through the soupy dark and listening for the train that never came.  It was the fastest way back from the smoke-filled apartment Broxton had moved into after graduating, back when he’d thought waiting a year before applying to grad school would give him the edge he’d needed and before he’d decided on weed as a far nobler pursuit than education.  I never smoked with him—the migraines it gave me had put an end to that—but I went for the conversation.

“So, Abraham—”

“It’s Abel, Brox, not Abraham.  You’ve had what, three years to figure that out?”

“That is most definitely beside the point, my friend,” Broxton had said, the muted TV at the foot of his bed replaying the same episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog he’d been watching the Saturday before.  He’d lain sprawled across the covers, marijuana haze hovering above his head.  I sat on top of his scratched wooden dresser, the breeze from the cracked-open window drying the sweat that had collected on my forehead.

“I don’t really think it is.”

“Hush.” He lurched up and stared at me, slowly uncurling a finger until it was pointing up at the stucco ceiling.  Several weekends ago he’d brought in a ladder and tried to paint Van Gogh’s Starry Night on it with watercolors, but it had ended up looking more like a map of the Mississippi watershed.

“Abelline, my young protégé—”

“I don’t think that’s quite accurate either.”

“Will you just shut up for one motherflipping second!”  He glared.  “I am trying to ask you a very serious question and you’re just getting all up in my face here, you get me?”

“I get you, Brox.”

“Thank you.”  He let out a long, slow breath and began again.  “Now, young Abel Hawkins—”

“I’m literally only two years younger than you.”

“Oh my god is your sole purpose here on this earth to agitate me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m going to give you one more chance, my friend.”  He shook his head.  “One more.  You get me?”

“I get you, I get you.”

“Alright, good.  We’re on the same page.  Now, Abel Abel Abel,” he paused, either for effect or because he’d needed an extra second to find the words.  “Would you or would you not consider yourself a romantic?”

“That was a lot of buildup for a very mundane and ordinary question,” I replied.

“Those two words mean exactly the same thing but I’m going to let it slide.”  He sat there for a moment, then shrugged.  “Well?”

“So what you’re asking is do I believe love exists?”

“Oh ye of no imagination!” He fell back onto his pillow. “I’m asking if you believe in the beauty of the universe!  If you feel at one with the wonder of the cosmos and everything in it, if you seek out new things for the joy of fresh experience and maybe, after all that’s said and done, then yes, do you believe love exists.”

“I mean in theory, sure,” I said.  “All of that sounds great, but how am I supposed to believe in that when… how do I explain this—”

“I would use your words.”

“Ignoring that,” I paused.  “Sure sometimes I feel like that, like the world is starting to align or like I’m about to have some kind of, what would you call it… life-affirming experience or something of the sort.  But then everything just falls apart.”

“Do you have an example for me?”

“I—” I stopped, the preceding hours replaying through my head like an old, soundless film reel.  “No, not really.”

“Did something happen with that girl you were telling—”

“You weren’t supposed to remember that.  You said you were high when I told you.”

“I’m never too high to remember a romantic endeavor.” Broxton winked.  “How’d it go?”

“You know me.  How do you think it went?”

“Alright, alright, I won’t ask,” he sighed.  “That doesn’t mean you’re not a romantic, though.  You could just be a hopeless romantic.”

“Sorry, what?”

“A hopeless romantic,” he repeated, drawing out the words as if he were sober and I were the one in cloud cuckoo land.  “Is someone who believes in all that shit I said, all that impossible wonder of the universe and power of destiny and the energy that connects every living being and yada yada yada—”

“Isn’t that just white-girl Buddhism?”

“’—but they acknowledge that they’re just kinda hapless in all of it.  None of the good synergistic shit that happens to anyone else is going to happen to them.  In the grand scheme of things, they’re just cosmically screwed.  Hopeless romantic.”

I remained silent for a moment.  “Yeah, I guess that sounds like me.”

Those were the words running through my head when the train came barreling down the deserted tracks and slammed me into the air.  In one brief moment of dissociation, I registered that its headlight was flickering and broken, a massive crack running down the center of the bulb, and that something that looked very much like my body had just hit the ground beside the tracks.

Then, everything went black.

***

[This excerpt begins a short story titled Lucia — an iteration on an idea I’ve written several times since 2014, but with which I’ve never quite been satisfied. A previous version was titled The Lantern Festival; I’m currently working on another, without a working title. In the end, it’s a bit old, but I think the dialogue in this section is fun enough to make it worth sharing.]