'Laps', by Jake Hargrove
We took two laps around: one for the dog
and another for us, or for something else;
something shared but unspoken. No one
was out. A quiet Sunday night in a quiet
South Austin neighborhood and it was all
just very quiet and dark and there were bugs
and stars too.
My toe hurt. Weed made me too aware
of my body and I found myself stepping
strangely, favoring the left side—the unhurt
side. “One time,” Cam said, “at the beach,
when I was fifteen, my friend’s fifty-year-old
dad got drunk and went around the neighborhood
egging houses. He hit every house on the block
but ours.”
I imagined the plump father figure, sunburnt,
still in floral shorts, lurking about some
rented neighborhood, probably in flip flops,
the hard foam clapping against the bottom
of his heel with every step, like paddles,
or those small propellers on the back of pedal boats—
the cheap kind, light blue plastic bleached by the sun,
dead leaves and spiderwebs sloshing around your feet.
I thought of the way he might laugh
after every egg cracking against brick
or vinyl or glass or perhaps across the hood of a car,
and I heard my father’s laugh, which sounds
much like my own depending on what was said.
It’s not un-obvious what I’m looking for here.
Cam said, “I’m just trying not to fight every fight the same
way I used to, maybe. Maybe that’s how you
get older. Maybe that’s how you grow up.”
“Maybe,” I said. We stopped and I pissed on
someone’s fence. The dog stood close by
and watched and no one said a thing until I was done.
And then we walked some more.
Jake Hargrove is a writer from North Carolina currently living in New York. He has an MFA from Emerson College. He is also the editor-in-chief of Cult Magazine. You can donate to their latest print issue here.