the crump -----------------Kathleen S. Tieri

He hadn't really thought too much about his friends' comments until the night he, braving the rain, which was more acidic than usual, dashed out of the corner drugstore with a single dose, a dose that had set him back nearly his entire month's pay. He went down to the harbor that night, to try to watch the stars, yet the purple light pollution hung in the sky like a velvet drape, an opaque entity that strictly disapproved of his mortal habits and wonderment. Years before, his father stood by him as they watched fireworks from that spot. The fireworks flew into the air, exploded brilliantly, and, before they could touch the ground, they had vaporized. One day not too far after that, his usually pleasantly drunken father had told him, "This is the best time in your life, and it's also the easiest. Things only get harder from here on out, I assure you. Sometimes they get so hard you feel like you almost regret remembering all those good times, and it sickens you."

He was seventeen years old. He had broken up with one girlfriend, been in two fist fights - winning both - and had experienced one car crash, which did little more than dent his fender. He was a practical youth, spending much of his time studying. He considered himself to be a man of reason in the making. Yet, time-to-time, he remembered what his father had said, about being sickeningly carefree, and shook his head time and time again upon remembering the advice. He'd had none of that. His life was free of pain, difficulty, and trauma, and when he realized that, he also realized that the possibility of feeling any one of the numerous bad things on this earth was quite real. Forgetting his pressure to do so, he gave in to life's inevitability, and swallowed down his chances of remembering.

All the world around him seemed to spin for a few moments, and then, hitting him hard, he felt as if the hand of some god or demigod were pushing him to the inelastic ground, flattening him. He tilted his head back to scream, yet it occurred to him he had forgotten how, and, out of seemingly nowhere, the gravity of the invisible Milky Way pushed even through the light-polluted purple clouds, which seemed to drip down over him, erasing his mental catalogue of all now-foreign sights and sounds. When he closed his eyes, he saw himself, no less, no more, as the center of a universe ready to be reborn from what was once his known world, now collapsing into itself in a space as negatively infinite yet immensely tiny as one full-grown man's body to a forgotten galaxy.

Tim Rogers

thiecramp

Kathleen Tieri