Here

The bark of the tree I’m leaning against bites into my back as I stand on the outskirts of what was once the Eloines’ family land. The fifty acres are now county property. I take a puff of the cigarette and observe the festivities of the thirtieth annual Duck Tape Festival. This place is, after all, where the headquarters once resided. The carnival trucks still pull up here, funded by the supercorp Duck Tape industry, even though its headquarters is probably now in some thriving urban center.

There’s a burn that hits the back of my throat as I take another drag from the cigarette. I blow out the smoke and tilt my head to watch it dissipate into the clouds. I want to follow it.

Closing my eyes, I feel this heaviness deep in my chest. Then it’s rising, past my shoulders, above my head, and I find myself going all numb and light, until I’m not really me anymore. I’m floating up, up, out of myself, watching the bodies below. I keep climbing towards the sky until I can look down and see blobs instead of the people. The blobs are probably weaving their way through thin tents now, showing off elaborate Duck Tape outfits and crafts, holding outstretched arms to partners to dance to the live band, and chattering in lines for sketchy food trucks. It’s their obliviousness—their contentment, their settlement—that should anger me, but I’m Above and can’t feel a thing.

The first time I went Above was when everything turned to shit in Iraq. I was there, and then suddenly I was flying up, so far up until I found myself drifting in the quietness of blue sky. Above.

There wasn’t any pain there.

There wasn’t anything.

I come back down.

Shifting my weight onto the hip without scar tissue, I take in another long draw and hold the cigarette out to my youngest brother Sammy. I let the smoke es cape my lips and float up to the graying sky. He shakes his head and kicks a stray chunk of gravel from who-knows-which carnival station set up. He’s always twitch ing, and he does it now, his shoulder jerking up and down.

“This shit’ll help you relax,” I say as I bring it back to my lips.

“Nah, Marisol will kill me,” he says, and I nod, knowing she would flip out if he started out on Camels at fifteen. Even though Bibi used to go through a pack a day.

I watch the Witch’s Wheel ride start up again, its lights blinking and turning into one circular blur as it picks up its pace. I take another drag. It’s all the same, as if I never left. Sammy eyes me, his shaggy hair falling down past his forehead. “You good?” he asks, one of his eyebrows raised in concern, and I see the kid like he was at three, running around in diapers making that same face when Bibi was having one of her episodes.

I drop the butt down and dig it in with the heel of my boot.

“Yeah, I’m good,” I say.

“I’m glad you’re home,” he says, and I think about responding but another voice breaks in.

“What the hell man, I’ve been looking for you guys,” Lukas jogs over, his blue button down shirt creased all down the front. “You just dipped, Jer.”

I push myself off the tree and stand up straight. I’ve still got an inch on him, although he’s nineteen and still shooting up in height.

“Thought you were trying to find Rose,” I say.

“You guys want to get elephant ears first, though?” Lukas asks, which really means do I want to buy him an elephant ear?

Sammy shrugs, so I go along with it.

We are reunited with the swarm of roaring people with Lukas barging his way through to get us to the correct food truck. I grimace as the one tent to the right trumpets loudly (again) as a player attempts to land a ping pong ball into a fish bowl. I just want to go back to Bibi’s, well I guess Marisol’s place now, and have a smoke under the dim lights of the back porch.

Halting at the arrived destination, Lukas turns back to me. “Man, this line is so damn long. Can you just stand in my place? I want to find Rose before she leaves.” He does not wait for my response. Instead, he slaps me on the back and saunters into the herd of people gathering around the band to the left of us.

Screams ring out, and I instantly reach for the gun I am used to having at my side. But my hand comes up empty. I look up to the sky, void of incoming enemy fire and the sounds of choppers overhead. The only shrieks here are from kids giddily clinging to the safety bars of the Cyclone Spinning Seat ride. Get your head straight, man.

“Hey,” an upbeat voice rings out behind me, but I keep my eyes forward on the flashing lights dangling from the piss yellow food truck.

“Hi, yeah, hey, excuse me,” the voice says again, this time lightly tapping my lower back, and I turn around to find myself looking down at a small-framed wom an. Bold eyes blink at me from a face that has seen too many sun burns. Her white shirt, which has moth holes on the bottom and two on her left shoulder, has a print of two cherries right in the center. They may have been a bright red a long time ago, but the color has faded into an exhausted brown. Her button lips open to a smile, revealing a tiny chip of the tooth left of the front ones.

“Hi,” she says once more, reaching her hand out.

“Hi,” I say back, sort of cautiously.

“I’m Nina,” she says as I take her small hand in mine, surprised by the feel ing of hardened calluses on her palms. “You’re Marisol’s brother, right?” she asks, her hand slipping from mine and stuffing itself into the back pocket of her jeans. I’m used to people knowing me as one of Bibi’s boys, so it kind of takes me for a spin. The realization that Bibi isn’t here anymore suddenly seems more real.

She leans forward slightly, lowering her brows a little and looks at me, really looks, as if she is trying to stare into my soul or something. There’s something about her that doesn’t seem to fit with this place.

I try to brush off her intense gaze with a laugh that sounds too forced. “Yeah, I’m Jeremy.” I reply, my chest weirdly tight.

“Yeah, I’ve heard.” Her lips quirk into a little side smile, and she juts her chin up slightly, revealing a small scar on her neck.

“From where?” I ask and find my voice catching in my throat. My buddies would be all over me if they could see me mucking up my first normal conversation with a woman since being shipped out.

Before I say anything, a little girl cries out “Mama!” and wraps her arms around Nina’s leg. I don’t hide my shock well. From how young she looks, I’m guessing early twenties, I wasn’t thinking she had any children tied to her. Especially because when I eye her fingers they don’t have any rings. Nina opens her mouth, and I am not sure whether she is going to introduce the brown-eyed thumb-sucking girl staring up at me or if she is going to make an excuse, but I never find out because another voice interrupts.

I try to find the face that would match the gruff smoker’s voice, but the only person looking at us is a fishing-pole skinny thirty-something-year-old-man. He spits a wad of chewing tobacco onto the ground. He has a rough looking beard and small eyes too close to his pointed nose.

“We’re going home Nina,” he says, waving his hand which holds a white plastic cup in it. A disheveled toddler, whose eyes are the spitting image of Nina’s, stands by his feet.

“But I want to stay!” the girl clinging to Nina cries. Nina rests her hand soothingly on the back of the girl—her daughter.

“Go with your dad,” Nina encourages. She looks at the man, who is looking me up and down with eyes that look like they want to fight, and I sort of want him to do it. It’s been a while since I have had a real good fist punching brawl, but then I look back at her. Her jaw is clenched even though her mouth is smiling.

“I will catch up with you guys in a second,” she says and waves at the smaller one by the man as they turn to walk away.

“Always having to put up with your god damn antics,” I hear the man curse under his breath, his back to us, and Nina’s expression falters for a moment before recovering.

“Well, Jeremy,” she reaffirms and seems to shake off that last encounter with a change in stance, “I hope to see you around.”

“Yeah, you too,” I say, and I mean it. I watch her turn away, unsure what lines can or cannot be crossed, and watch her back as she follows after her family. I expect for the waves of people to mask her, and with it my view of her, so I decide to shoot up just real quick into the darkening sky.

I am half-way up, when something weird happens. The air around me gets thicker, and I can’t go up any further, as if something is pushing on my shoulders. The clouds are above me, but I’m stuck below. I look down. Still, the people are only little indistinguishable heads fending for themselves in a world below. But then my eye catches a face near the parking lot as it turns to look over its shoulder. I can see her dirty blonde hair and her neck. I can see the two little holes on the left shoulder of the off-white shirt. I try to zoom closer in on the scene, but I realize I’m getting farther and farther from the clouds as I focus on her.

Suddenly, I’m thrown out of Above.

My knees bend from the sudden jolt of it. I wasn’t prepared to leave. My bearings are off now, but I ignore that. Straining my neck, I attempt to catch a last glimpse of the woman.

She is out of sight. Gone. The town has swallowed her up. But I picture her pursing her lips as she scans over her shoulder, me walking up to her, her face breaking into that grin.

Standing there, my feet feel heavier.

Grounded.