Parthenon

CW: Suicide, child death

They want to close down the parking garage again. People keep jumping. Imagine it: downtown in the summer air, the sound of the radio and the smell of food, any kind of food you want, Thai or burgers or Polish sausage but most of all Mexican—and then the impact, right in the middle of it, bones shattering into flakes, flesh smearing on the sidewalk. Who will it be this time?

People live here because the land is cheap and the woods are beautiful and the schools are good. The city grows and changes like a body. Somewhere in the spleen is my high school. When my mother went to that school, it was surrounded by farmland and smelled like cows and cow shit. Some students got caught fucking in one of the fields and people freaked. When I went, we thought we were in the middle of nowhere because the only fast food restaurant nearby was Taco Bell. They put a Popeyes in my senior year and people freaked. Did you hear about that boy, the quarterback at that same school, five years after me? Died in a hit-and-run. Less than a block from my old house. He was a child, wasn’t he? We were all just tiny little children.

Take a walk with me; we’ll go to the state park. The trails are clearly marked, a blend of packed dirt and wooden bridges over gaps and mud. Pass by an empty can of beer, discarded in the grass. Climb down to Devil’s Icebox, a limestone cave carved with water and, frankly, too much time. Summer’s heat retreats as you stand at the mouth, and the cool air gets under your shirt, across the back of your neck, and it seems to speak in tongues, says, “Go further, go deeper, come home!”

Kimberly Potthast is a Missouri-based author who received their MFA from the University of Missouri St. Louis. Their work has previously appeared in wigleaf and The Citron Review. They volunteer as a reader for Black Fox Literary Magazine.