Zelia Jameison
Fiction Executive
At 7:02pm, the lights from an overhanging billboard buzz, then
flicker on neon green and illuminate half the trailers
planted askew and paneled silver like alien pods.
The billboard is an advertisement for a golf course that
no longer exists—
and a warning to real estate agents that teenagers like to
throw
plums at the space between the comic tee and hole, and
hypnotize themselves with the way dark purple juice
spills
down synthetic polymer and into steel grating.
For decades, a man has watched the sun come up over
the plain
and stayed silent when boys are scolded for stealing from his
blossoming trees.
But silence is kindness compared to the hard days of labor his father enforced, when
he was younger than those boys and watering
fruits that never grew.
And every night when he is alone,
the old man stands under the glow of the billboard
and lets the liquid sugar drop on his balding head;
imagining paradise is something like that golf course he never visited:
Out of commission but still advertised at night.
But isn’t all of life made from things that don’t last?
From dying crops to faltering friendships;
the melting of snow giving way to dandelions that
children
snatch from the soil that has felt the pressure of
thousands of feet
as people run away from the places that raised them,
and across the street, to where a dog is lying,
warmly indolent in summer’s sweet air.
All the people I never knew well enough to disagree with
were kind people, I thought.
And roadkill had mourning families,
and my heart was a fruit’s pit, nothing more.
But a dog will wait years for its owner to return and
that kind of kindness is real and true.
It’s across the street and flickering,
like a billboard in a trailer park stained with plums.