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Edited on Thu Aug-09-07 01:07 PM by BlueIris
"The Cord"
The campground grew gray and fragile, the orange tents dimmed, children's voices were like a powder on the air. We were full and waiting for night to fall fully, for its flap to unfurl and allow us our gathering around the Peterson's trailer, where Saturdays, a sheet was hung so that movies could be shown.
Oklahoma, South Pacific, Damn Yankees, musicals each and every time, their characters rippling in the man-made lake’s breeze, each plot seemingly orchestrated around one central, barely discernable semen stain (that made everything bearable), and unwitting bugs drawn to cleavage and open mouths.
I wanted reality, at twelve. I had three ravaged beer cans which proved that bears lived near. I had seen stringers of gasping pan fish knotted to the floating pier. Baseball teams singing in showers made me want to gag.
But my mother adored them, and I was indeed privileged, now allowed to wander without a flashlight, pee at will in the woods, and crouch beside the inner glow of tents, within inches of many a voluptuous silhouette. As long as we had musicals, I was free to act in my own movie—the one where I patrolled that complacent outpost and singlehandedly faced down the local toughs.
And the girls—almost larval, sleeping bags zipped to the chin beneath a moon like a paper plate nailed to a tree, its handwritten message too faded to read— how tender and vulnerable their faces were.
Is this what memory is? A long extension cord stretched into the dark? I've never known better, since. Each move, then, dictated by fear and romance, the one-dimensional, ghostly nature of being young and finding oneself projected on the earth.
—Mark Cox
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