The last time he spoke to me was Easter Sunday. I knew the day because a man in robes was preaching behind a slow rising sun on my little television. The sun had just started rising, bathing him in a divine glow he didn’t deserve. We were in my old bedroom from when I was a kid; my parents couldn’t stand us living on the street any longer. The room stayed as I had left it, with this ancient little television that had a picture of me from ten years ago sitting on it. I was smiling in my soccer uniform, holding the ball at my knee, all superimposed against a flash of lightning.
By Robert Hyers.
She didn’t mind the trains, quite the opposite. She wasn’t one of these mindless objectors; she knew that nuclear power was the future. The trains made her feel plugged into that future, made her feel modern and forward-looking, while everything else in her life seemed to belong to the past. The trains were on a journey to tomorrow.
Robin got his leg chopped off jumping a train when he was twelve years old. They found his black leg sticking straight up in his white, Adidas sneaker by the railroad tracks. Wait, maybe it was just his foot. Shit, I don’t remember. Robin was cool, though. One time, he took off his wooden leg in gym class and knocked some dude out cold with it. BANG, whipped it right over the mother fucker’s head and this guy was on the ground like Robin’s peg-leg was Cassius Clay and his skull was Sonny Liston taking a grand bow toward the mat.
Like last week, I tried to put my hand on her shoulder. She spun around she bit my ear saying, “Get a fucking clue you bastard, fuck off.” It is not like I am a stalker or anything. I just go the same places she does. I was following her the other week and without thinking I walked into the women’s changing room at the town pool. Twenty naked nipples of all shapes and sizes stared at me in pointed disbelief. She said, “You asshole creep, go…to…hell!”
I ran into him on the street soon after I got back to town and I didn’t care anymore about ethics only dick. He looked at me like I had been in a car wreck. I scared him because my soul was disfigured.
Ben’s insisting we pick all the worms up one by one and move them onto the grass. I can’t believe he’s even touching them. He hates anything squiggly. I’m pretending not to notice how he squirms, and squeezes shut his eyes whenever there’s a worm dangling from the tips of his fingers.
It was empty outside by the sinks and the inside was graffitied: doodles, fantasies, invitations, scrawled in mainly black on white partition walls; not a bright white in itself but cubicles play tennis with whatever white there is and gain something in between, like the hall of mirrors at the palace of Versailles.
That overturned waste bin. The graffiti on the wall, like an indecipherable curse. Several cigarette butts in the earth around the tree. A folded newspaper on a park bench. A small ball floating on the pond. The stain of lip gloss on the rim of a cup. A child’s sock hanging from the fence. A bloodied glob of spit. The scar of tyre-marks on the tarmac. Dampness on the pillow. This story. 
The adults left us. Left us in a dark room with nothing more than a glowing screen and our imaginations. I remember some of them walking outside to smoke a cigarette. They stayed out there a long time. Talking. Sometimes laughing. Mostly staring at the playground equipment cemented into the sand box.
Today I will run up to her. At the corner of aisle three and four, in front of the week’s featured cereal, I will catch up to her and ask if it would be possible to spend just one more hour with my husband on his birthday, point-blank. I will ask. I’ve rehearsed it a million times. By heart and I know my lines.
