DARE
Andrew Blackman
One by one they went, small bodies dodging death. Cars and lorries streamed past, sending the spray of a half-forgotten shower up into the chilly evening air. Jon knew that inside each of these cars was a person, or perhaps a family on their way to dinner, but he couldn’t match this information to what he saw. The road seemed like a creature, hostile and alien, screaming in anger as the boys dared to cross it. He dragged the back of his sleeve across his eyes.
‘Y’alright?’ Darren shouted in his ear.
‘Yeah. Something in my eye. ’sgone now.’
It was no use, of course. A quick hand gesture from Darren to his friends in the central reservation and they were all laughing at him, shouting over the roar of traffic that he was a pussy and a mummy’s boy. Jon turned to complain, but Darren was gone, his thin little legs sprinting across the three lanes to join the others. Horns moaned, rubber screeched on tarmac. A Porsche in the fast lane was going too quickly; Darren had miscalculated. He stopped, teetering on the edge of the lane as he’d done a couple of years earlier on the edge of the highest diving board until another boy had pushed him in. The stakes were higher now. The boys stopped laughing and watched, silent, as Darren balanced between lanes, the cars missing him by inches, the force blowing him back and forth like a sapling in a storm, the horns blaring angrily until he found a slight gap and ran to them.
Jon was alone now. All the others had made it across, and were laughing and slapping Darren on the back and lighting cigarettes rolled from the pages of school exercise books. Jon stood on the hard shoulder, staring at the constant stream of metal, unable to see a gap. He thought the drivers would slow down after what had almost happened to Darren, but of course they were different drivers. The Porsche was half a mile away now. It wasn’t like in town, where all the shopkeepers remembered you. Here there were no memories, no consequences.
The other boys studied him with quiet interest, smoking their roll-ups, perhaps wondering if he would make it or perhaps just remembering their own first times. Jon looked back over his shoulder at the green fields and the small stream where he pretended to fish, and beyond it the town where his mother would be working late as usual. Then he turned back to look at the older boys, waiting for him on the other side of the snarling river of metal. With a deep breath, he crossed his fingers and ran.
Andrew Blackman is a former Wall Street Journal staff writer, now working as a freelance journalist and novelist. His first novel, On the Holloway Road, won the Luke Bitmead Writer’s Bursary and was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize. His second novel, A Virtual Love, explores themes of identity in the age of social media. His short stories and essays have appeared in Post Road, Spark, Switchback and Monthly Review among others. He blogs about writing and books at https://andrewblackman.net.
The Lantern
Brooksie C. Fontaine
There was a moment on the beach where I experienced my own death. I don’t mean a near-death experience, I mean a moment where I stepped outside of my life, and into that forever-lasting instant right after you die.
Death is timeless, and it’s happening right now. Your future self is watching you and your past self is imagining you, and everything you ever were and everything you are and everything you’ll ever be exists within you. Death is just that moment where it all comes together, and you’re finally one person, complete, your whole life happening at once.
I was fourteen, and I’d cut away from the party to where my sister stood on the damp sand.
I don’t know why I gravitated towards her. She and I didn’t get along at the time, not at all. She blamed me for breaking up our parents’ marriage by being difficult, and I blamed her for stoking our father’s hostility towards me at seemingly every opportunity. We were horrible to each other.
But she was holding a lantern, which she’d apparently stolen from the party, jack-o-lantern orange and flickering in the night. Her white skirts blew around her, and her black hair whipped around her shoulders, and she didn’t look like my sister anymore. She looked ethereal.
I had been wearing a tuxedo, but I’d left it draped over a chair somewhere inside. I was left in a button-down shirt with a crooked bowtie, my long-ish dark hair sticking up in the salty ocean wind.
Girls were starting to like me – in fact, I’d gotten my first girlfriend over the summer, and it was making me insufferable. When other girls flirted with me, I flirted back, and felt mature in that naughtiness. I knew my father did it too. I figured it was a rite of passage for every desirable male.
I was becoming someone I’d have hated just a couple of years ago – and yet, something about being on this beach was making me feel new again. As if I was being baptized by the warm-cool August wind, and all my sins were being blown out of my pores and into the cloud-blotched night sky.
I stood behind my sister, the lantern flickering in her hands like a heartbeat, rim-lighting her with white-gold.
The gentle wave-tips lapped up around her feet, and I realized I was standing next to her discarded shoes, white kitten heels in the dry pale sand.
I took off my dress shoes, shiny as black olives, and my socks, and set them next to hers, neatly. I rolled my trousers up past my ankles, and stepped into the wet sand. It was cool against my soles, and it tickled, shifting to accommodate me.
I’d tried alcohol for the first time that summer – really tried it, not just a sip, a bottle, then two – and thought that the weightless, guiltless feeling of being drunk was how life was supposed to feel. It was so nice to be bothered by nothing, worth the embarrassment of vomiting into the sink while my friends laughed and my girlfriend looked disgusted.
But the ocean breathed new life into me that night.
I felt it lap over the tops of my feet, I felt the sand between my toes. It was a living thing, and when it touched me, I felt connected to everything. I felt connected to my sister, and to my parents, and all the pain and joy and love that bound us together, and it hurt, but rising to the top of that hurt was a happiness that made me want to cry out, like blood rushing back into a long-numbed limb.
I stepped towards my sister, the wind blowing against my face, like it was giving me one last chance to turn back. But I leaned into it, and into all the pain we’d caused each other. I wanted it. I wanted it all.
I reached towards her shoulder, and she turned around in the instant before I could touch her, like she’d felt my presence.
Her eyes were startled, blown open wide. She looked like she’d been shocked.
The wind whipped around us, and blew the lantern from her hands. She didn’t try to hang onto it.
We stood together, and watched it dance.
I kept expecting the lantern to crash into the sea, but it just rose, lifted higher and higher, to and fro in the gray-dark wind.
It got so small it became a flicker in the night, but it didn’t sink. It had become something alive, and it moved with a mind of its own.
My sister and I stood side by side, and I knew then that this would be what death would be like for us. This was death for us – we’d somehow stepped out of our lives, and into that timeless moment that always exists, where you can see your whole life as a single entity.
I could see my past, and my future, and my present, like I was standing outside of it.
I could see my sister, and she could see me.
I could see myself approaching her on the beach, and I could see us walking back towards the party, together.
The lantern finally disappeared from sight, a flickering spark extinguished from view.
I looked at my sister. My sister looked at me.
“Want to head back?”
“Sure.”
Our voices sounded new and old, like we were getting used to them again.
We stepped from the sea, onto the sand of our lives. Both of us knew we’d never speak of this moment again. Even now, putting it into words feels unnatural.
But whichever of us went first, I knew this was how we’d find each other.
On this beach, fourteen years old again. Our lives dancing on the wind in a single, complete moment, which we could see clearly for the first time.
Brooksie C. Fontaine is a coffee addict who got into college at fifteen and annoyed everyone there. She is a teaching assistant, illustrator, and MFA recipient. Her work appeared in trampset, Bending Genres, Eunoia Review, Literally Stories, Aureation, Report From Newport, Boston Accent Lit, the Things Improbable anthology, and more.