Come, let me show you around this Lauderdale town of chain restaurants and landscaped intersections. Let me show you the signs full of letters and numbers that mean less than the mass of clouds hanging dark and ominous over the mall.
Put your coffee cup down and walk with me around the quiet corners where I stood and whispered your name. Let me steer you through my wrong turns and describe the missteps and crazed patterns my feet marked on these streets. Walk with me and smell the flowers I walked by talking to myself to not go crazy with loneliness.
If you don’t believe me, fine, I’ll call as witnesses all the mosquitoes that followed me through the swamp-thick air to suck the blood from my willing veins, and they’ll tell you every word is true.
Don’t worry, I know you’re not coming down to this seaside tourist town to sort the wreckage we made of what we had, just as I know you won’t stand with me in the middle of the interstate and stare into a hand mirror at the traffic piling up behind me—every bad decision I’ve ever made coming home to roost.
Flash by Jim Latham
Image by Adam Strong
Jim Latham ditched the oilfields of Alaska in favor of central Mexico, where he hikes volcanoes and lives out of two zebra-print suitcases. Stories in or forthcoming from Eunoia Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Drabble, Olit, and Fiction Attic. Stop by www.jimlatham.com for all the deets; read weekly flash at Jim’s Shorts.
Backwards Trajectory 