Like They Were New by Mel Bosworth

On the floor with my cheek pressed to the carpet, I push a fly around with my finger.

“You died, huh, buddy?” I say to it.

Later, I’m hanging off the edge of a power screener in a gravel pit. I’m maybe twenty feet up. My mouth and nose are filled with dust and the back of my neck is sunburned. I’m tightening nuts with a socket wrench as long as my forearm. I crank and sweat and balance on the edge; it’s easier this way—better angles—and safer than standing in the bucket of the loader. The old man dumped me once, on accident, he said, but I was never sure.

I’m tightening toward me, mindful to keep the elbow of my free arm hooked inside the shaker box. I always think of that sailor shit when I’m up here, that thing about always keeping one hand for the boat. Then the socket wrench slips off the nut and cracks me square on the collarbone.

The pain is sickening. It wants me to sleep, to let go, to drop. But I don’t. I tuck my chin to my chest and I wait. I wait it out. Then I finish what I was doing.

The old man comes by later in the loader. He’s been digging in the gravel bank all morning. He drops the bucket, then kills the engine. He leans from the cab, asks if I did a good job.

I’m sitting on a tire in the shade, and for some reason I think about the fly. I wonder when it died, how long it lived. I wonder if the purple knot on my collarbone will last longer, but I don’t know enough about flies to venture a guess.

I tell the old man yes, I did a good job, but I don’t tell him about the socket wrench or what I was just thinking. It doesn’t matter, not yet, anyway.

© 2010, Metazen.

Related posts:

1. Confessions of a Mean Man by Mel Bosworth
2. & the children will grow alone by Mel Bosworth
3. Ruined by Mel Bosworth
4. Two Poems by Jude Dillon
5. Wild Wolves by Mel Bosworth

Tags: February 2010

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 4:00 am