Kicking Cars

So the man stood with arms outstretched to face the woman, and he yelled incoherent things about geese and whiskey and dinosaurs and a restaurant that neither had been to. 

There was pavement all around them and occasionally a light fixture standing tall above them, illuminating the ground and their whole figures. The light frigidly shone, and as it cast down, it made him shiver. She shivered too. Between the thoughts that jumped from his tongue, he thought of how she shivered and how much he didn’t want her to. 

He saw her tears, those too illuminated by the lights. And beyond the tears, he thought that her face was beautiful and did not deserve to be struck with the shrill harshness of his voice. It was beauty only found otherwise in the greatness of the Earth. Of the Rockies and the Grand Canyon, or all the other places he knew. 

Yet she didn’t believe it and in good faith she knew she had to leave. Among men and women, she was lowly. She thought of him as among them, and she turned away. He gazed at her velvet hair and hoped that it would turn away again, and their eyes’d meet, and suddenly everything was alright.

He was going to say they were fools. What they think is nothing. He wanted to say please, please look at me. Look. He wanted to say it’s not over. He longed to say you’re beautiful. As beautiful as everywhere that is beautiful. And he needed to say I love you. 

But nothing was said, and she was gone, and he’d spend the rest of the night kicking cars in solitude. 

Your Graduation

The asphalt was cold where they sat. The boy didn’t mind, the pants he wore were thick enough and sagged as if they had too much fabric near his ankles, but the girl beside him wore only a skirt, leggings, a cardigan, and a t-shirt he’d bought her at a shoddy venue some weeks back. The parking lot was dead aside from the two who sat. That November was cold and the frost in the air froze every noise that floated from either of them. She heard the periodic sips from when the boy drank the drinks he’d brought for dinner. He heard her quiet sobs that passed through the fabric of the cardigan’s sleeves, and although imperceptible, he knew the sounds of tears soaking in fabric and dropping on the asphalt were there.

He paused from sipping on the drink. It wasn’t best to interject, but he’d grown weary of the silence and made his folly by opening his mouth. “I don’t think they hate you. I think they’re just surprised. Surprised you’re a guy, I guess.”

The words slipped from his tongue in betrayal of all he believed and the tongue could do little but circle his lips to wet the dryness. The girl paused her crying, briefly wiping the tears that lingered on her face with the tear-stained cardigan and affixing a piercing set of eyes on the boy’s face. He looked in the distance instead. Without words, only the thudding noises of disgust in one’s leaving, the girl stood and shuddered in the cold. 

She spoke after a little while. “I’m done.“

He stood. In response, she backed away. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

Her shudders came from both the cold and more weeping. Perhaps he hadn’t, but still the words were said, and they pricked at every surface of her skin. How could someone she loved think to even say something so recklessly? He tore down the walls she’d built—ripped apart her being. The boy tried to console her, but every sentence and step he took toward her only made the girl move farther away. They stood with the width of a street between them, and so the boy yelled and shouted, but the air had grown so cold that the words froze before she could hear.