harkback | Matthew Heiti
  • Persona
  • Publications
  • Productions
  • Projects
    • GRAVE
    • 8BITMYTHS >
      • TABLE OF DISCONTENTS
    • SATURDAY MORNING RE:RETRO
    • WORLD WEARY ADVENTURES >
      • THE BARBARIC PRACTICES OF ELECTION DAY

Ouch

3/21/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
e drags the bike up to the edge. It’s about twenty feet down. Enough to end it if you wanted it bad enough. The sun’s a bloody thumbprint. Smearing down, down.
 Rooftops now where there used to be trees.
    He drops the bike in the dirt. A child’s toy, even then. A museum piece, now. The frame barnacled in rust, the milk crate cracked with age. His kids had never bothered with it much. But he had never bothered much with them either. Even less as they got older. Drifting like icebergs or galaxies. He held them in his hands, swaddled in blankets, kissed their skin. But he could never feel close enough.
    People make promises they can’t keep. Politicians, presidents and prime ministers. Human beings, too. I love you. I will never leave you.
    Afterwards, it was all science and misunderstandings. We would never hurt a boy, they said. All we had were walkie-talkies. But he remembers looking down the barrel of a gun. Monsters in plastic suits. A child’s imagination, they said.
    The promises broken.
    I’ll be right here. That’s what it had said. The man in the moon. It had pointed at his head. Right here. And then it left him anyway. Never came back. Never phoned.
    For years, every time he got sick he wondered. When a pain would hit him out of nowhere. Were they still connected like two tin cans and a string of twine. When he was lonesome. When he farted.
    But then he saw the scans. The doctor didn’t notice. She slipped out of the room to take a call and he flipped the file open. Held the glossy sheets up to the light. There in the center of his brain: another small planet in orbit. Growing.
    The moon is rising. He picks up the bike and sits on the seat, rocking back and forth on the wheels, kicking dirt down on the rocks below. He pulls the red sweatshirt down over his gut, puts his feet on the pedals. His knees are so high he’s practically fetal.
    For years he’s dreamed of flying through the sky, swimming through the milk of the moon. Now he’s falling through space. That glowing finger jabbing at his head. Not a lie, a threat. An invasion. I’ll be right here.

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    8bitmyths

    Remember when you were a minipop, and you saw that film, you know, the one you loved that never had a sequel? Well, let's say it did. And it was just like you imagined it, only a little bit worse.

    8bitmyths is a series of polaroid fiction that digs through the relics of not-too-distant popular culture.
    The heroes of youth, specifically that neon-hued era of the 1970s and 80s, are exhumed in all their orange shag and velcroed glory. The intent is not to celebrate, but to drag these characters, limping and shambling, into the present – to show the cracks in our idyllic vision of childhood, and also the power of a darker world than we could ever have dreamed. 


    Table of
    Discontents


    Archives

    September 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015

    Categories

    All
    Cartoons
    Comics
    Commercials
    Films
    Food
    Holiday Specials
    Music
    Toys
    TV Shows
    Video Games

    RSS Feed

© 2023 Matthew Heiti. All Wrongs reversed
  • Persona
  • Publications
  • Productions
  • Projects
    • GRAVE
    • 8BITMYTHS >
      • TABLE OF DISCONTENTS
    • SATURDAY MORNING RE:RETRO
    • WORLD WEARY ADVENTURES >
      • THE BARBARIC PRACTICES OF ELECTION DAY