The Decade I Learned Everything— by Tracy MoriN
Artwork by Susan Cohen
1989: How to Start a Fire
Five years apart, two doors down. Julia in middle school, I a third-grader—both thick-thighed, family-neglected, we glue to each other like wax layers. Splash in her polyethylene pool, inching closer curious chickening out. Page through magazine piles in the shed on rainy days: her father’s collection. Nineteen-eighties bushes grow lush, unapologetic. In bed, I touch myself, naughty and new-born.
“Hold this.” Julia hands me a sales-circular scrap in the pines beside her bedroom window, flicks the lighter. The flame courses too quickly. I fling the paper. It lights the woods on fire, charcoals her house’s vinyl siding. I run home and pretend not to hear the sirens.
1991: How to Stay Safe
A dead man lobster-sprawls on the sand beside the spot we splashed this morning. My father is sea-shaped: island-born, longshoreman. Swam us strong past the deeps, to the shallow stretches, where the tall waves curled like pencil shavings, tossed us squealing in sand-scratch whitecaps. I am a child, alive.
Miami Beach paramedics bark: Stand back. We timeshare rubberneckers struck solemn. An ambulance deflates in the resort’s driveway, where the drowned man first blasted in, free as vacation. All rush and bluster silenced. I curl to my father’s leg. The dead belong to no one.
Shrieks ping-pong the swimming pool: known depths, still surface. Once, Mom set me free there, my eyes closed, and I paddled straight into the arms of a stranger.
1994: How to Make Friends
Point Pleasant, down the shore. Nadya and I, new best-girlfriends, tangle wrists in our black-and-white photo-booth strip. She still wears braces, will turn beautiful next year what seems like overnight, find boys to blot me out. Her parents slurp clam shells empty at the pier restaurant. We shimmy off to starve and smoke Newports in secret, gull squawks and oceanspray pricking our pores. Funnel cakes and saltwater taffy swirl the air. Every ground unsteady: Boardwalk’s uneven planks shift beneath bare feet; sand sifts through chipped-polish toes. We pass palm readers, gold-chained chest hair, jangling arcade games, oversize stuffed toys for suckers. Our hearts toggle—pinball-quick, marine serene. Our lips press and open like breaststroke swimmers every time we say more.
1999: How to Leave Home
The world might end this year, but I’ll be back in New Jersey by Christmas to catch it. I’ve driven away two dozen times this summer. Escape-wired, college-packed: Letters to a Young Poet, Sam Goody gift certificate, glitter jelly bracelets.
My last night home, T.J.’s white button-up half-lit on the lawn, his shape stagnant, clotted with shadow: the safety of past, choking my new Florida address in hand. We will always have belonged to each other, these few midnight-meeting months. I wave into the night’s pitch, slow-drive by. Goodbye. He’s standing in mist, or maybe it’s August humidity and wet teenage cling streaking the one a.m. air between us. He never wrote—the greatest gift, so I can forever picture him young.
Tracy Morin is a Mississippi-based writer and editor who has been a hand model, rock-and-roll drummer, and boxing ringside reporter. Her work has previously appeared in The Rumpus and Necessary Fiction, is forthcoming in NiftyLit, and received an honorable mention in the New Orleans Review's 2023 Micro Essay Contest.