Love & Darts (9781937316075) by Jones Nath

Author:Jones, Nath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: darts, short stories, grief, mortality, endoflife, chicago authors, male relationships, indiana fiction
Publisher: Smashwords

SPARROWS

I wish you had known Marylyn. She tried crying alone on dry nights in the attic. But no one came to ask her why there was all the sobbing and moaning so there was little point in indulging such drama. She forced herself to be sullen for a while, but she kept forgetting and smiling anyway, regardless of having charity teeth.

She wasn’t much of a girl. She was the kind of person who was afraid of standing on her own two feet. Not because she didn’t trust her feet, but because she knew the world was quicksand. That timidity was her presence. Her hair was a nasty old brown color like shoes that have never been polished and have walked miles and miles in the loose limestone dust alongside the road. Long and straight, like any girl’s hair should be, but stringy and hers had a habit of getting tangly. Brushing takes time and patience. No one who’s starving knows time and patience.

One of the boys at school used to laugh at the way her shoulders jutted straight out from her neck. He called her Razorback Marylyn saying her spine and shoulder blades reminded him of his daddy’s razor. It was just another mean name made from harmless nothing and a bit of prejudice. You know how it is; she was poor. And she knew it. Once you know it you can either give up or move on.

I guess she sustained herself the same way desert plants do. Conservative. Very conservative. Not heedless. She took smiles from strangers in the supermarket as love, and made friends with the people she saw from a distance on a regular basis. Shop clerks, crossing guards, bus drivers—that sort of thing. Just like a desert plant, never expecting too much and adapting, compensating as a result. But not dead. Not at all dead, and in a slow scraggly way moving on in life. No bitterness, no pain, but still dirt poor.

High school was hard on Marylyn. There was no room for her in the well-dressed crowd of whispers and giggles. No one wanted to waste her time on a girl who didn’t have anything bad to say about anyone. They called her weak and noncompetitive; said she would not thrive. She had nothing against them.

She spent her lunch hour with her brother and his friends under a sycamore tree near the baseball field. Every day five or six of them sat there in the root dust smoking cigarettes and talking about cars. In the winter, when they couldn’t sit down, they’d shield themselves from the wind with that big tree. Their wet feet coiling away from the slushy mud, they still smoked cigarettes and talked about cars. Marylyn didn’t smoke. She just sat, or stood depending on the weather, and listened. The boys rarely paid much attention to her. They had too many different cars to dream up and then smash to nothing in their minds using all their reasons for impossibility.

Do you understand the desert? No.

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