Late and Foggy | Kristi Dalven

We lived a few years near a record store and a donut shop on streets named for trees and plains and women. Chaparral. Mahogany, Hazel, Juniper, Cherry. Americana Way and Fir. Two connecting bus lines could get you to the beach. You could put rocks in your pocket and wade out into the water. You could hide in a library but only on Saturdays. The record store closed down soon enough, disappeared by tapes, or compact discs, Walkmen, progress, Memorex. Digress, regress, ingress. Free transfers disappeared one day too, but as with so much that vanishes, I can’t be sure of the exact when. 

I rode my bike to that record store, elsewhere, everywhere, that day possibly or the next, farther than I should have. On the radio they’d said he died. Was dead and gone. Bang bang. What was I? I was twelve or eleven. I wanted an album. His. Him. Screaming in my ear. Round the corner. Round the block. Round the town. A circle. A square. Roads and sidewalk. The usual mix. Where did I go. A bicycle. A killing. A girl. Sound or fury. Grief you don’t know is grief to call it what, a bike ride then, when the word you hadn’t fingered wasn’t yet concentrate, substance, nameable shape, scar or ink, only good grief Charlie Brown. Or so it seems. From far away. That donut shop. Jelly and cream. I roller skated the smooth sidewalks surrounding deserted stores like I was a ballerina, sat on a junked skateboard and rolled. Far from the road. Desolate compound, mirror glass, empty parking lot. The bike was blue. The skates were white. A donut was thirty-five cents, give or take.

Kristi Dalven’s fiction has been published in American Literary Review (which nominated her story “O Negative” for a Pushcart), Another Chicago Magazine, Pleiades, Third Coast, and Drunk Monkeys | Literature + Film; and her essay “Native Witness, White ‘Translator’” appears in Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing as Transgression (University of Virginia Press). A recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation fellowship, Kristi was born in Long Beach, California and is on Twitter @KristiDalven.