By E. Robert Pugh

Flood within, flood without. The Valley floor accepts the rain, flows it through the streets where I sought you: a friend, a brother, a ghost, a gap—memories dulled by ten wide years, renewed by surprise. These eight miles of straight are the runaway between openness and closure, a heart unguarded and a situation unchanged.

You, now, and who exactly awaits at the table near the back where we often holed up, minds full of polyrhythms, mouths full of jokes, glasses full of steam on nights —those moments and the peanuts we made, the howling and the lost time reflected upon as I slalom through the traffic cones, the spraying flood of storm drains, the potholes become ponds.

Words heard before. You, the flake, the friend who cancelled last second but showed up first minute, until you were angled and reeled north into the marine layer and the cold summers of circumstance and opportunity, gutted and mounted and kept in the plastic valley by a life you came to love—a life I tried to understand through posts and stories as you began to dematerialize, memories replaced by the lessons I had to learn.

Until a delayed response became a never response.

Until you deactivated, cutting the last and final tether.

Until most definitely you musta meant became most certainly you don’t give a shit—never gave a shit, our friendship a sun-bleached façade hiding snide comments and judgment, concealing that you were a self-obsessed miscreant seeking only passengers. 

And probably are, brought low into the smog once more with the scales of wonder and regret held in balance enough to push me to say yes, into the rain and thankful for every red light, with curiosity and the urge to tell you what I couldn’t in every dream where you appeared, my change muzzled, unable to show you that I’ve become a tree.

The hope that the last second would come and you would not. I could drink a beer in peace, then return home to the tiny sturdy life that you would not understand or expect from me, the wild one once full of confusion and panic, now full of what you probably wanted to see outta me this whole time. 

Flood within, flood without. The place where we once were, its crumbling asphalt, its stubby trees dripping with my wish to not recognize your car.

But of course, there it was.

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E. Robert Pugh is an emerging writer of flash fiction and short stories based in Redlands, CA. He was recently published in the New Feathers Anthology.