Neal Friedman

Forest Hill

Forest Hill First we traded dreams, and I had something good, not the one where the bus sped on the bottom of the pool, taking in water, everyone swimming up to the air bubble at the ceiling to gasp for breath except for the driver who seemed to have evolved gills, sitting in his transit uniform, looking straight ahead, holding the pedal steady against the muffled noise of the motor underwater, no, and not the night where I heard the shot that killed Candy (Candy?) from two houses down, knowing I shouldn’t have left her with the crystals (crystals?) alone, the first time I had ever held a real gun, no I would probably never tell anyone about those, despite writing them down in a lost notebook somewhere, no I would tell her and her mocha brown eyes the one with young Stalin, this one I could take out of my rolodex of night tales and share with the confidence that tonight the world had seemed to catch up to its brand of craziness or at least was headed that way as the bar tender stringing Christmas lights from the ceiling dropped ornaments on the floor and belly laughed, jolting us out of our stumbling conversation and sending me into the golden bubbles flying through my glass of beer, occasionally looking up at the figure of a night owl perched in the corner of the room watching over us.