That morning at Rincon marked a change in my relationship to the dinosaurs. Fewer and fewer would muster when I called a session until I stopped doing it so much. Felt like I was bugging them.
“Get out of here, pervert.” He doesn’t get out of here. People watch from their small islands of striped towels and coolers.
We think about shaving and razors and haircuts and the whole fashion of manipulating the body into approved shapes. We wish our teeth were sharper, stronger.
I listened to their conversation and paced a circle around the fire. Drank my beer. I didn’t know who Dayna was but something sounded heavy and neglected in the other guy’s voice.
Sometimes, we talk. Sports, TV—that sort of thing. Every so often, he invites me for drinks, but I always make up an excuse.
You ain’t never punched nobody before. But you know how it’s done. You’ve seen enough movies.
Like the Ship of Theseus—was it the same skateboard if the deck was different? In my mind it was part of a lineage.
Fall asleep. Wake up to darkness, the sound of tiny nails on cardboard. Find the mouse, dead for real this time, before work.
Every hour or so, we fell silent to watch metal beasts bellow and tumble into the night sky, forgetting about the bug bites we collected on our ankles.
He would sometimes repeat it under his breath. Chops, have to have chops, have to have chops.