The man in the chair

The last time I felt the rain, I was huddled under the abandoned garage in a beach chair, one with two pockets on the side for your beers. You laughed as I ran back and forth into the puddles forming on the cracked concrete of the driveway, not caring that I was barefoot and that your belly was starting to peek through your shirt.

I used to hate that, people who wouldn't go anywhere without shoes. I remember burying my feet in the sand of the islands not too far from here, ones where we would go every summer. The rain felt even more real there. I played games of drip drip drop with the sky and my sisters until you would call me inside to watch the sun drip into the horizon from your view on the recliner. You said it was melting like my favorite popsicle. None of the other kids liked the orange popsicles.

I wasn't like the other ones, and I remember being mad that you treated them the same as me. I guess I should see the viture of that now, but I remember being alone at the age of nine while locked in the coat closet with a bloody lip and bruised knees and thinking: I'm melting away and you don't care.

The other ones laughed at me after that. I sat in my mushroom chair with a book in my lap, squinting at the whipping wind and branches from the storm while you got high off the generator's gas as you kept us alive. I decided to use candles anyway, maybe to spite you? You treated the girl from the mountains the same as you did the boy of the sea. Don't you realize that I looked at you differently than they did?

Now they're all gone, and with them you as well. I ride my bike past the rebuilt house, the ashes of which that served as the colosseum in which I fought the others for you. I threw out the beach chair along with the mosaic of the barefoot man when you left. I figured if one was to die the other had to go with it.

I don't know if I killed the boy that day. I had killed you, and now its hard for me to remember the last time I felt the rain. You shroud the summer days with a mist that can still make me perspirate in fear. A fear that every barefoot memory of you might be wrong, and that you were the one who killed the boy in the first place.