A THING by AJ MAIORANA
You Return to Your Childhood Home
The air conditioner is broken again, so you sit on the front step, bent over yourself, rolls of fat tucked under the loosest shirt you could find; an eyesore with an old, shitty cooler of beer. Years from now the kids running by will laugh about the stranger, who they’ll remember with a white tee covered in mustard stains. How many strangers do you remember? How many still exist as half-real things, checking over their shoulders, a burning cigarette in hand as they wait at someone’s front door?
None of the neighbors are familiar anymore. They had all left or died at one point or another. Your mother is the last holdout on the block, too stubborn or lazy to consider moving away, even when her favorite stores closed down. Even when her legs stopped being able to carry her past the street corners. You imagine her as a neighbor, one that some people believe doesn’t exist anymore, her presence in the open becoming more and more scarce as the years went on. The people who knew her personally dwindled down to nothing.
The adult inhabitants of houses will ask each other if they remember the woman sneaking outside to stand in line for the ice cream truck, but that was so long ago now, and the ice cream truck comes by less often, and the children are all grown up.
The pavement is different too. Dried gum and oil stains had crusted the pebbling concrete until the city replaced the sidewalks with a smooth, clean surface -- pristine as a fresh coat of snow, far more comfortable against your bare feet.
Every so often, a stiff breeze rolls down the street, which is more than happens inside the house. The merits of “cross ventilation” are as solid as a gust of hot air. The wind blows gaps in the warm smell of trash that comes through the screen door. You wonder what the neighbors already whisper, what stories they’ve already shared between themselves. Across the street, a man hovers on his threshold staring at you through his screen door. He guides his son through the door, never taking his eyes off of you. You wrench the cap off a bottle and tip it in his direction with a smile.
AJ Maiorana (he/him) is the non-fiction editor for JAKE and has had work published in Gutslut Press, Bulb Culture Collective, and Mr. Bull Bull. He is a one-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is still on Twitter @ExtraSauce_.