Once You Go Back: A Novel by Douglas Martin

Author:Douglas Martin
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Coming of Age, Lgbtq+, Southern, Gay, Fiction
ISBN: 9781583229446
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2009-09-01T14:00:00+00:00

19

Field Trip

THEY ALL LIVED TOGETHER, a bunch of men, there at the fire department we leave school to go visit. They had to, I’m telling you, even sleep there, and I’m thinking now I might be one of them. They had a real Dalmatian, and the pole you slid down, just like you see on TV.

Then splatters of hail, like gravel from the sky, rain down against the windshield of the car. Our mom is yelling at me from the front seat, stop screaming like a little girl. I don’t say anything. For the rest of the drive through the rough weather, I sit quietly. She just wants to try to get us home safely, trying to concentrate on driving through this mess. The excitement bursting has been gathering all day now. Once we get home, I go into my room and shut the door. And I wouldn’t let you in. I don’t want to play with you. Not now.

Before we moved to the new house our stepfather helped us get, we would run outside up and down along the red bricks of the three small apartments that joined to each other in one longer building, A, B, C. C, B, A. We took our crayons out there, to color over the bricks, because we wanted our house to be painted. We colored in the lines of the mortar, filling in that whiteness that sealed the building, there like sand, holding the bricks up on top of each other so they wouldn’t fall. We scribbled in our Goldenrod, Dandelion, Feldspar. We defaced this property that wasn’t even ours, and our mom was so scared then she screamed. We had to find a way to get off all of those marks. We had no idea what the landlord was likely to do once he saw this, no idea what might happen. He could kick us out of there. She was so scared he was going to take it out on her, somehow.

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