james miller

“Shrill” - Two Flashes

What Does It Take To Be a Moon?

My childhood friend suggested we ride our bikes down to the transmission tower. We brought our lunches, sat on two concrete bases, chewed Welch’s grape jelly. Someone had tied a rope to the lowest horizontal bracing. We looped the end round his bike seat—the wheels hovered about six inches off the ground. We took turns twisting, pedaling in midair. 

My childhood friend found a fist-sized hole in his front yard. I crouched beside him as he turned on the water hose, filled the darkness with gurgle. Half a minute later, three frogs came gasping into our hands, fled through the unmowed grass. We kept the water going, till our toes sank. His dad came out, slammed into the plant-work truck, pulled out for a drink.

My childhood friend showed me a shard of blue-gray feldspar, mute and mild on his smudged palm. It’s a moon rock, he insisted. I wanted to shake him till every coin fell ringing from his pockets. I was ready to shrill the shape and story of lunar orbits, false seas, millennial impacts. His fingers closed round that stone, what had never been a gift.

The Guard

We drive round the old college, the family business—my parents taught here for decades. Their buddies died off slow and steady, and the retirement parties were shrill as coach whistles. Now we’re stuck here too—giving voice lessons, training choirs. She notices the Someburger on the corner. That’s the one with the Jesus tablemats, she says. 

Texas Avenue is mostly empty storefronts now. I point out the husk of Dirty Bay, where there were once open mic nights and cheese plates. The BBQ joint next door is still going, especially at lunchtime when adjunct faculty line up for chopped beef sandwiches. 

The lockdown on campus years ago. A prisoner overpowered his guards, burst out of the police van, fled past Someburger into the state streets neighborhood. For four hours, we waited in offices and classrooms for news, for gunshots. I opened a new file on my computer and wrote about the Chilean desert, getting lost in Calama looking for a Chinese restaurant. I texted her from my waiting: Do you remember what we ordered? Do you remember what we said to the hotel clerk after, in failed Spanish? There was a skylight over our bed, I think. But the stars were not interested in us, that night.

We circle around and come back up Texas Avenue. She talks about the tanks and trucks massed in the parking lot for the nursing department. I counted them that day, she says. As we walked past in the crowd. We slow down for the city green—they used to play Sousa and John Williams on the 4th, Handel on Christmas. The gazebo is still there, where my father once lost out in a beard judging contest. Most of the security fences are compromised—leaning or missing.

Did you sign the contract yet? I ask her. It’s Sunday, but the churches are not yet full. She doesn’t answer me.