On my way home from my shift at the local pizza place, I found myself walking in pace with a man. I didn’t know who it was at first, having caught up to him from behind. I only saw that the man was covered in soot, as if he had emerged from the heart of Appalachia, or from cleaning at another pizza joint with an even worse oven.
I’d just gotten off my shift, filling in for someone who called out sick. The other person we had that shift dropped out last minute over something else that was probably bullshit. Everything was bullshit to my manager though, he was the type who couldn't stick to just one grievance when he got going. First, it was the no-shows, then it was me, because it was my first closing shift and it showed. That was whatever though. I was actually pretty proud that I didn’t lose it. Up ahead, I spotted the folded hourglass of a Diet Coke can. My foot brushed past. Didn’t even kick it. If there has been some ember flickering in my core it was easily snuffed out.
I didn’t know why I felt such an immediate kinship with the man before me. He wasn’t in uniform. I also wasn’t aware of any other pizza spots around. I caught up because he walked slowly. He glanced back at me as I was about to pass, and I made sure my hands were languid and visible when a white smile greeted me.
“Reid!” he shouted. Despite the streaks of black against his skin, the coating that flattened his curls, I recognized my childhood friend Anthony. He was beaming at me, and in a rush I was smiling back at him.
“Reid? My guy, where you been bro?”
“Here the whole time, I should be asking you the same thing.”
We were walking side by side now. Anthony kept on.
“How you been? Haven’t been getting into any trouble have ya?”
“Ah, I haven’t been,” I said. “Keeping my head down, haven’t done anything stupid in a while.”
“Yeah?” he asked, “I see that uniform! Mind slipping me a slice sometime?”
“If I could slip anything it wouldn’t just be a slice of pizza, I’ll tell you that.”
He laughed and swung his hand out as if to clap me on the back. In my mind’s eye I saw a cloud of black particles flying out onto my cheeks and all against my sides. Then his hand fell, following the arc of his arm, back the way it came to slap his thigh. Between street lamps still unactivated, I paused, wondering if a black cloud did puff out. It was on the cusp of winter, a quarter past 6 p.m, and the dimming light was weak. It trembled slightly, holding aloft, far from my eyes, like a poorly tuned magnifying glass, a grainy filter where edges become suggestions and any minutia was a smear, the mere impression of shadows in the dark.
Anthony was still chattering, talking all about the trouble we’d get up to when we were young. “Oh, and what the hell did we do to get Mrs. Ishee cussing us out? She wasn’t even teaching us that year, right? Was it seventh grade? No…”
The way he trailed off I figured he’d realized.
“Sixth, maybe,” I said. I didn’t want to leave him hanging despite myself.
“Nah man, cause remember? That was the summer before I left.”
Unconsciously, my hand felt for my pocket. “Yeah? Why did you end up leaving by the way?”
“Fuck if I know, my parents couldn’t make up their minds right up until the day we moved. We didn’t even get a van or nothing, just tossed out half our shit and took like eight trips for the rest.”
“Ah, crazy shit man.”
“Yeah, insane.”
“Can’t believe we survived that.”
“Yeah.”
We had been walking, I remember a fine sheen of sweat on both our foreheads that gleamed in the summer sun. We’d just hopped the wireframe fence, that was why Mrs. Ishee was screaming, and we were still laughing minutes out, caught up cracking jokes, when some guy almost ran into us. He was brisk and we barely dodged opposite ways as he cut through. Lightly jarred, but still laughing.
I remember the man’s neck, covered not in an even perspiration but a web of striations, the rivulets flowing down to contour his jugular. His hands were in his hoodie pocket and his eyes were a bit wide when we heard a tire screech. The man’s hands left his pockets and the sidewalk around us popped. Then we were running, our backpacks bouncing as the bullets ricocheted past from the street and I tripped amidst the shouts and revving of engines, my forehead slamming into the concrete. Everything rang so close and loud. When I looked up, Anthony was a dark silhouette rounding the corner. I couldn’t see his face. He didn’t look back.
I didn’t see him the rest of that summer. When he didn’t turn up the first week of classes I asked around and heard his folks had moved out up north, been planning to for a while. He’d never told me, and now he was telling me he had so many chances. He'd had eight opportunities, eight back and forths of escalating goodbyes, eight moments looking in the rearview mirror of his parent’s beat up Honda to maybe wonder, maybe think back on… maybe I was being harsh. The results were the same. I thought about that summer, how as far as I was concerned we’d never meet back up, never face each other again, and I was left alone to contend with what remained. I didn't walk past that spot again. It was easy not to, that stretch of sidewalk wasn’t an efficient route anywhere I wanted to go since. And if it was, what was another block?
We were walking, I alongside him, veering off a couple blocks from my usual route. I realized that we were close to that cracked sidewalk, our route running a block parallel. It was dark and I wasn’t scared. Shootouts were rare and no one was out for me. I knew that, just as I felt now this heated sense of inevitability. It was a feeling you carried within. One you grew up with, and its presence or void can always be marked.
That summer I became a furnace, one that continued to burn for years. I’d sent his afterimage, that stupid fourteen year old, all the hatred and resentment I could. It choked me. It burned itself out years ago, still incomplete, whatever was left blackened and insubstantial but downright carcinogenic. Whenever I felt that acrid burn in my lungs I scrubbed deep into the recesses, scraped all the stubborn, ugly bits off. I’d put in the work. It should’ve been enough.
Anthony was looking at me from the side. “You alright, man?”
Why did he look meek now, his mouth shut as if he were leaving it up to me how I should react. I took a breath, felt the air expand in my lungs like bellows fanning the flame. I stopped under a light, and Anthony paused to look back at me. He was picking up more soot. It fell onto him, drenched his outline, obscuring him into just shadow. It covered him, piling up all on his shoulders and the top of his head, in the spaces behind his ears. In the growing silence, I really wondered how I’d known it was him. A shadow and an outline, words that should’ve come but wouldn't.
Anthony stood before me now. How was it that we had been talking this long, wrapped up in an immediate familiarity, and it was only at this point I felt I recognized him? The street lights flickered. I felt the urge to shake his hand, to dap him up, to wring his neck, to shove him as we did when we were young and the streets glowed with new life.