Fiction

On the first day, I told Shadman that his true love left the house every morning at seven thirty three in order to empty the garbage.  She stepped gingerly over the double layer of bricks that separated the pavement from her family’s garden, in whose corner there was a trash can where she deposited the remains from last night’s meal.  Usually the plastic Key Food bag would leak grease at the bottom and have noodles hanging off the over-stretched handles.  At seven thirty seven she’d be outside again in order to lock the door and run around to the front of the house to catch the seven thirty nine bus which carried her to Kings Highway and, I presume, beyond, but I didn’t tell that part to Shadman because it wasn’t part of our promise.

In school everybody called Shadman “Brown Bear” for all the obvious reasons.  The promise I had with Shadman was for me to tell him one thing about his true love each day while we sat in my backyard doing whatever it was we always did.  We were ten then when we started it, but this game went on for a long time.  Shadman couldn’t find out about his true love himself of course because he lived 15 blocks east, closer to Flatbush, and she took a bus to school, far away.  But she was my next-door neighbor.

The first time we saw her together was the second time I had seen her, and she was long legged and dark haired enough to make us both turn the corner and hide in the bushes while she was still three houses down.  As she approached we furiously elbowed each other silent, thrashing leaves into each other’s eyes.  I got a thorn stuck in my pinky.  When she walked by, head turning neither to the right nor to the left, a scent of crushed wildberries overcame us, and her hair was dark like Shadman’s mother’s, and straight like lines drawn in glass. 

The second thing I told him was that his true love was a girl.  When I had started saying this, prefaced by the statement that I was going to say the second thing about his true love, Shadman’s eyes had gone wide like he was about to hear the Word or the announcement of Lebron James’s signing with the Knicks.  When he processed what I’d said his eyes got narrow and he hit me hard in the shins with a whiffle ball bat that I’d made heavy with many-colored duct tape.  I got angry and instead of telling him about the intricacies of her skin I said that her father wore a button down shirt to work. 

I saw her father leave for work every morning—he drove.  He came out of the house by the front door, suitcase and tie flying, throwing the papers he was always clutching to his chest into his car through the back window.  Shadman’s true love always waved goodbye to her father from the front door.  Then she would gather her books for the long trip to wherever school was hers.  Sometimes she would peek her head out the doorframe to eyefollow his vanishing car under the trees and I imagined that she could see me, peeking through the curtains, but of course she never did. Then she’d go take out the garbage. 

The third thing I told Shadman was that once, her glasses had fallen off when she went to push her hair back.  I told him that when she grinned, the edges of her cheeks went up towards the corners of her eyes, and her eyelashes bounced up and down.  I said that she wore a blue bracelet on her right wrist.  Number six was that when she was in the shower, she sang “Stitched Up,” the John Mayer song.  It was hard for her to keep her voice low and raspy like his, and I imagined her cupping a hand over her mouth to hit the low octaves.  Seven turned into a field trip, as I showed him the corner where she got on the bus every morning.  This was the same corner that was home to the foul pole of mine and Shadman’s home run derbies.  For the eighth thing that I told Shadman I said that she was Asian, and he scoffed at me and said he already knew that.

Before I told him the ninth or tenth thing I asked him if he realized that I got the idea for this whole charade from a movie, one of my favorites, in which a shrimpy circus owner tells the actor who plays Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars that he’ll tell him one thing about the girl of his dreams every day as long as Obi Wan repays him in constant servitude.  The things that he told him went like this: