Ringside

by Benjamin Buchholz

MARCO, 56, shirttails, looks toward the JANITOR.

Janitor mops, pauses, mops again.

MARCO

The devil stole my baby. Black toenail man, curl-toes, chipping golf shots barefoot in the big park. We swinging, high-up, higher, with the rusted red of the chains spread like pollen or amnesia in the air, some sunset, that night, me and my baby, baby girl, she on my lap, the sunset swirling through a cloud of chain particle, sound silly and high, and the devil out there in the knee- deep grass chipping clods.

JANITOR

Go home.

MARCO

He had potato eyes. He had fishing line fingers, glossy and long and sparkling all over his chest like a chandelier. He had a circle of burn around him, easier to chip from such rough, that, the scorch, how’s I knew you see he was a devil and not just,
say, a martian or swampman. My baby says, hey potato-eye man, what is that on your tongue?, you look like my dad when he’s been at work late, all sharp smelling, I can smell you from here, come closer, come, I’ve made up a rhyme about you, see? And she unfolded a bit of rhyme, tucked there under her dress-hem, a triangle of note, love-note, whatnot, with the same swirlygig letters linked swoopingly one to the other she used to send me. What’s you got devil letters for, I says. Who says devil letters? Me. At the apex of the swing, which was our plan all along but together, together, she jumped, and ran, ran right up to the edge of that gray smoky burn circle, the tweed cap askew on his devil-horns, the britches baggy around his goat heel spindle legs. Stop, I says, stop.

JANITOR

I’m locking up.

Marco reaches into his shirt, retrieves a much-folded sheet of paper.

The janitor turns off the lights.

MARCO

(reading)

Last night was beautiful . . .

(not reading)

Last night! Shit. And beautiful with a big heart to dot the i . . . the swing went up, up once more, I launched, up and out and forward sprawling windmilling with my belly forward and sinking rhapsodically, flapping arms like wings, fingers like feathers, feeling the whoosh of the air, sailed up and up and out beyond them over the burnt circle, over that beastie and baby with him toeing up to the line of his ruination, looking in on him, wanting. And I flew, and flew, far beyond them, over the seesaw, over the slide and the soft landing wood-chip area, over the Seven Eleven, over the near houses, clapboard-
sided, over the newer bric-a-brac fenced along the highway, up into the night air where I saw him stagger with her, catch her in his embrace, liquid her, limp, his big black bat-wings stroking the air and lifting them away into the starlight.

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Benjamin Buchholz is a US Army officer. His work has appeared widely in the last two years. He's featured in the current issue of Tarpaulin Sky and Hiss Quarterly, and at other places like Identity Theory, Annetna Nepo, Action/Yes, Chiaroscuro, Tryst, Gambara, Harness, The 2River View, and GoodFoot. For a full bibliography and other oddities, please see www.benjaminbuchholz.com