The Slide by Kyle Beachy

Author:Kyle Beachy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780440338215
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-14T10:00:00+00:00

so far no faeries. our search has moved to swizzerlund. we got bigger nets and sharper focus. carmel says you'd be a better kisser if you put a little less heart into it. not sure yet if i agree.

loves.

—a

I deleted the message quickly, but this didn't have nearly the effect I'd hoped. Las Vegas, fall break of senior year. A haggard, early-morning, still-up kiss as just-up joggers and elderly tourists provided context. Following a river's flood of white Russians and much financial ruin. Audrey was asleep in the room six of us were sharing. Carmel and I stumbling from Caesars and sloshing our way to Mandalay Bay, the far end of the Strip. The kiss itself was mostly to signal that we should turn around. An awful kiss. We stopped cold and stepped apart and I felt as if I was staring into some warped mirror, a grotesque and unfeeling reflection of myself—Audrey's other, and potentially realer, love—the gorgeous robot who kissed like she spoke. A wholly soulless and trite moment of imagined desire. Its only sliver of pleasure was that of fulfilled convention: to kiss Carmel was to acquiesce to history and expectation. Complete the unsaid contract of boyfriend and girlfriend's desirable friend. And so a tiny sort of relief for the deflation of that balloon, the release. And then: repulsion and regret and certainty that Audrey would surely find out. Balloon of fear and shame that had floated since that kiss and had now, here at the computer, exploded into a sharp gust of wind, the stink of transgression aged eight months. Stench of my own putrid notions of What's Okay to Do to a Young Woman Who Loves You with All of Her Pure and Wondrous Heart.

Carla left the house humming and, as if choreographed, Richard arrived seconds later. A flash of charred gray suit through the side door, vanishing into the bedroom, then reappearing in jeans and a polo, spinning the car keys around his finger. His shirt was tucked neatly into jeans held up by a needlepoint belt: a series of red birds and yellow bats against a navy blue background, a single black stitch border around each color, giving the whole thing a vaguely digitized look. Needlepointed by Carla sometime in the eighties.

“You get behind the count to Ortiz and you're in trouble. Throws that slider that breaks in the last eight feet.”

On these rare nights of nonwork activity my father would drive his second car, a silver 1979 Datsun 280Z. The body showed minor signs of wear, enough flaws to save it from the boring sterility of a too-prized thing. These included a rather noticeable dent in the roof that both was and completely was not my fault. The black leather bundled around the base of the stick shift was cracked but clean, Armor All-ed to a semireflective sheen. I always wondered if it was morbid to think, even abstractly, about the day I would inherit the Z.

He drove us to Sportsman's Park, a small restaurant in Ladue named after the former stadium of the St.

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