Hometown Nostalgia, 1988 by Jenn Powers

The night chases, grazing its skeletal finger up the length of our spine. But we’re too young and we’re too fast. Our wheels are left spinning in the yard as we sprint into golden-lit kitchens, alphabet soup simmering on the stove. Life is safe. Life is a mixed tape of math tests, kiln-fired clay, and Pizza Fridays. We wait for the school bus with vampire-bitten necks. Black and orange streamers billow from blue lockers, glitter hairspray clouds up the girl’s bathroom, and drops of fake blood stain porcelain sinks. We swoosh through piles of brown leaves, singing Halloween songs we learned in music class. Older kids, teen wolves, hide behind hemlock trees to snatch away our Snickers and Twizzlers. We egg them. We get cuts from Jack-o-lantern knives. We scrape our knees sprinting from toilet-papered houses. We’ll forever remember the hermit with the gun, flash-lighting his yard to search for our bodies pressed into the earth like the dead, like the caskets and ashes from our elderly aunts. We bike down cold roads, flashes of blue television in bay windows, meaty stews and burning chimneys on a breeze. We listen to the cemetery crow scream about the passage of time but we don’t understand it yet. This is forever. This is immortality, we think. This is our hometown time-capsuled in autumn. But look how the goldenrod is already dying. Look how the lids of our coffins lift beyond the distant hills, the smoke from our candy cigarettes gone with the black wind.

Jenn Powers is a writer and artist from New England. She resides in New York and is currently working on a mystery thriller. She has work published or forthcoming in over 70 literary journals, including Spillway, CutBank, Witness, Gemini, Lunch Ticket and Prime Number. Her work has been anthologized with Running Wild Press, Kasva Press, and Scribes Valley Publishing, and she’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She’s also a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Binghamton University. Please visit www.jennpowers.com for more information.

Photo courtesy of Jenn Powers

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