a pecha kucha* after Sly & the Family Stone

Runnin’ Away
“I’m about to head to the corner store, pick me up a pack of Black and Milds real quick. I’ll be back in, I don’t know, ten, fifteen minutes.”

This was what he told his little boy and his little boy’s mother, a shelled smiled forced across his face, a lumping dryness in his throat.

Just Like a Baby
He began measuring distance and time by each heavy step he took closer towards the bus station and away from the tiny apartment complex, drawing wide-eyed breaths, deep from his lungs, like a creature fresh out the womb, umbilical cord still uncut, adjusting to a different world. Above, there was a static dark and the night’s calmness reminded him of those whispered flashlit ghost stories his sisters would tell when everything was quiet and unmoving.

Everyday People
He asked her, he said, “Momma, you think that everyone stares at the same sky. I mean, the same stars and the same moon and stuff?”

And she knew what he meant—what he couldn’t and didn’t want to and didn’t need to quite articulate. She said “No, the sky is different for everyone.”

He glanced over at her from the passenger seat, saw the sparse brightening and darkening of her face—quick spurts of different features—then turned his head back again, without saying anything, and continued looking out the window, at the sky.

Time
It’s hard explaining abandonment to a boy who’s still having trouble grasping the concepts of addition and subtraction. It’s hard understanding why the thunder comes after the lightning streaks and not before, at those times when the sun is just starting to go down, giving way to a ashen moon that’s hardly full enough to even be howled at and the rain falls in what feels unending, leaving deep mud colored puddles where the street and the curb meet, the kind, that when walking, one has to take a little leap over in order to avoid getting their shoes wet.

Poet
As a child, he’d lay in bed late at night, a slim layer of Alabama heat plastering his back to an unsheeted cot. He’d wonder about who he was going to be. What type of man. And all the things he’d accomplish. His older sister’s head resting sideways next to his on the same flat pillow, body motionless—in a stormless sleep. He’d close his eyes, still staying awake for a while.

Everybody is a Star
He thinks to himself, as the nighttime scenery slides by, streetlights blurred orange, objects on the roadside fuzzed, unidentifiable: maybe everyone meets in the middle of it all, though, all that space. He’s heard that people name stars and follow and wish upon them. But, then too, he’s heard that patience is a virtue and that good things come to those who wait.

Luv N’ Haight
First date. They ate ice cream outside. Brown got on their tongues with every lick. They took short strides, laughing to each other as though under some sort of influence. An earlier rain still dark on the sidewalk. He rambled on about how gorgeous she was to him—this kind of poetry that landed somewhere between the pre-rehearsed passion of a jazz café’s cool spoken word weaving through intricate bongo and conga rhythms and the blank-eyed veteran, alone in a closed grocery store’s empty parking lot, slightly drunk, musing, out loud to himself, about some brown haired beauty he conquered love with, when he was a soldier, stationed in Saigon, bold and much younger, and she, something more than a recollection.

(You Caught Me) Smilin’
He was a boy raised by four women, all of them in love with Sidney Poitier, for different reasons, though. She was a girl who cared too much about her make-up. He played baseball with broomstick handles, using trash can lids for bases and, for a ball, anything small and round enough. She dreamed in black and white about love stories and other things she barely understood.

Sing a Simple Song
Sometimes, choruses can’t even tell a fragment of the story. Still, sometimes, that remains the only part that’s remembered. Like on cold days when the nearly invisible clouds hovering in front of a chap-lipped mouth turn into fear. Or when this skinny little girl, a wood chipped viola squeezed against her chin, strokes a tune a bit too familiar, with the frazzled hair of a worn out bow. Cheeks and nose light pink, body starting to shiver, she’s looking for a donation. There are bellies to feed and ends refusing to meet and a pair of brown eyes, exactly like his own, that just stare soberingly back.

Brave and Strong
She’s a woman who wears make-up, now, for different reasons, though, raising a boy who cares too much about baseball. She wants him to dream like Sidney Poitier did. Told him to look for where the black and white meet, that small space, to sometimes believe in the baseless, and that life is a love story filled with things he, at first, may not be able to handle. Unsure on how much she even thought what she was saying was true or if he understood it all. But that’s not what’s important.

Hot Summertime Fun
He wanted to carry her in his arms down that motel’s hallway, all the way to their fourteen-dollar-a-night room, but she was either too heavy or he was not strong enough. Outside, a draping humidity had fallen and the trees were sparing with the wind, mimicking and reacting to its subtle movements. Like most things, it depends on who you ask. For instance, was that blind bluesman, shrouded in a gray haze of cigarette smoke, warm gin running through him, like some second form of blood, his hollow body electric guitar pressed to his chest, as though it were trying to converse with the space between his heartbeats, was he born without sight or, at some point, did he just decide to stop opening his eyes? Either way, she walked down that narrow hall.

In Time
There was a period, maybe, a week or so, where the sunsets and the sunrises and the days and the nights all seemed to be an undivided strain, the same piece of thread, moving in and out. They were wind chimes waiting for him to come back. Mom: desperate to keep a straight demeanor, telling herself things that didn’t quite make sense. Son: five years old, struggling to find some sort of grip on what was happening.

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
He swacked this kid in the face with a sharp rock, a chubby blonde haired boy, one grade older than him, who had too many toys, but wouldn’t share. Blood dripped in a continuous line from the corner of where the boy’s right eye and nose met. Uncorking all his aggression and letting it flow, he hit the kid again, harder, and the older boy began to wail, from deep down, like the end of a gospel hymn, dropped to the ground and Momma gets sad for no reason—except, only in her eyes—and the bearded homeless man, who stands underneath stop signs with a cardboard square hanging from around his neck that reads Will Eat For Food, singing Woody Guthrie songs, out of key, missing a lyric here and there, he holds a shiny stolen knife in his belt at all times, because, who knows, one of those winters might get too cold for too long, or there could be a day where he’ll need to see what has become of his face.

Babies Making Babies
They moved together, like a symphony with no conductor, beneath them, the thin sheets rigid, mattress, unyielding. The sky was starless and the shiny half moon seemed to be winking at a joke it remembered from some place simpler, a time that those two teenagers, cocooned in each other’s sweaty flesh, would later pray was real again.

Keep On Dancin’
She started to fix Mac n’ Cheese or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for every meal. She looked like a stump searching for its limbs and that was only in her face, black bags under her eyes, irises rubbed red. At first, he’d say things like: c’mon, Mom we had Mac n’ Cheese last night. But then, after a while, he simply let her place those thin white paper plates in front of him and, taking small bites, ate in a gutless silence, thinking about the sounds certain letters made when put next to one another. This followed the nights becoming nights again and the days, days again.

Spaced Cowboy
He watched the rain crawl down the bus’s cold windowpane, each drop an immigrant escaping the sky, seeking, in this world, some unexplainable something. He tried not to consider life. Or the skinny brown haired girl across the aisle, dead asleep, snoring a metronome’s steady pulse, her head in her hand. He thought she was too young to be riding alone, that their stories were probably from the same collection.

Stand!
“It’s ‘cause I axed him for the toy and he’s got so many and I jus’ wanted to play wif one for a little bit, the transformer. He wasn’t even playin’ wif it. I axed him real nice, said please, but he wouldn’t let me. He jus’ kept sayin’ no. So I guess that’s why I hit him. I know it was wrong and that shoulda done somethin’ else”

That’s what he told the principal.

I Want To Take You Higher
Above them: a cloud of Black & Mild smoke, floating like some ghost with nowhere left to haunt, not sure when or where it had lost its shadow. They laid, bodies bare, in an undone hush, the only sound being the soothing wash of their two separate breathings. Shifting into him, she said, “Hold me.”

All this felt long after he couldn’t pick her up, another attempt to enact something worthy of the big screen and unlit theaters.

Family Affair
Soon he fell asleep and the bus rolled below them all, its melody, soft and sightless. He got off when he woke up. He had no bags, just a brown leather wallet filled with cash and a few cards that had his name and picture on them. He didn’t know where he was and not until he’d been seated in a local diner did he think to ask, where am I? The waitress, a middle aged woman, with short blonde hair and Ireland’s flag tattooed to the left side of her neck and a name tag on her chest that read Barb, fast said some name with a pronunciation he couldn’t understand. He asked her to repeat it. At the same speed, she did. He still couldn’t pronounce it. For a second, he considered asking her to say the town’s name one more time, slower, so he could lean in and really listen, but instead, he paused and choose not to and just ordered his meal.

Que Sera, Sera
“Dad’s not comin’ back, is he?” he said, staring at his bedroom’s wall, as though the peeling paper’s strawberry pattern had suddenly revealed this secret to him.

She set the book she was reading him in her lap. She said: “No. I think, from here on out, it’s just gonna be you and me.”

She looked down at the open book, its words were indistinct, foreign almost, maybe now, more so, simply unimportant.

“I think you might be getting too old for these.”

Closing the book, she stood up. Looked at him like someone gazing at folding metal and breaking glass, that blinkless split second of acceptance right before the airbags deploy. Walked to the door, murmured something similar to goodnight, and turned off the lights, dragging her entire palm downward over the switch.

Will Nunnery was born in Madison, Wisconsin and has lived there his entire life. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gone Lawn, Yes Poetry, Xenith, and Verse Wisconsin. Currently, he is a creative writing student at Concordia University St. Paul.

* Pecha Kucha is a Japanese form of presentation, where the presenter puts together a show of 20 slides, based off or inspired by a topic, letting this topic take them wherever it may and reveal a larger idea or truth. What makes Pecha Kucha unique is its pace; the presenter is given roughly twenty second per slide, making the presentation’s total time around six and a half minutes. In “Somebody to You”, sections of prose are used instead of slides and Sly and the Family Stone’s songs and song titles are the inspiration.

Photo by Hitchster