Austin Hall
Windowpane
The girl I like, her name is Summer, and she’s got short black hair shifted to the side, and she’s got black mascara lined around her eyelids, and she’s got skull tattoos on both arms right on her biceps, and she’s smoking Marlboro lights, and she’s telling me to do something that I don’t want to do.
It’s a little cool out tonight, and there’s mist in the air, and there’s fog in the foreground.
We’re at an abandoned dump of some sort, where appliances and buses and houses go to die. Major dirt hills are all around us. There’s a whole forest with all kinds of trees two football fields away, and right in front of us, there are mounds of broken windows and dusty windows on houses and windowpanes, the houses boarded up with peeling paint, the windows shattered.
There are busted up yellow and black buses on our right and left.
There are ceramic dolls and cups and nice china in jigsaw puzzle pieces.
There are stuffed animals, tearing at the seams.
Taking a drag on her cigarette, Summer blows it out to her right, and I’m so aroused. Sniffing it out her pale nostrils, she holds up a bat. “Take it,” she says, “Take a swing.”
I just look at the bat.
“C’mon, man,” she says, and takes another drag, and I can smell bitter almonds for some reason.
“I don’t know.” I scratch my brown hair and narrow my eyes.
With her piercing light blue blues, she tilts her head, “C’mon.” Her voice is softer this time, and her eyes close as she says it. I stand there and look at her eyes, and I’m still.
“What are you afraid of?” she asks me, and stubs out the cigarette.
“What if someone hears?”
“Who fuckin’ cares!” She opens her black leather jacket, revealing her “This is my Zombie Killing t-shirt.”
I tug at my white sweater.
“Look man, you need to let loose sometimes, okay? No one’s here, no one cares, just do it!”
“Why don’t you do it?” I ask, pointing back at her.
“Come here,” she says, and takes my hand. She leads me to a broken window lying on top of a dirt mound. I hear the glass crunch under my worker boots.
“You see that?” She points at the window.
“Yeah.”
“Remember when Rick cheated on me?”
I nod.
“After I beat his ass, I took it out on this fucker.” She points again. “Ask me how I felt after that?”
“How did –"
“Great." She stuffs the bat into my hands. "Take it!”
The Louisville Slugger has brown ridges in its wood. Even in this light, I can see it. I feel it with my hands, and it’s smooth.
“I know something’s been bothering you, Scott. I see it in your face every time we hang out.”
I glare at her.
“Take the bat to the window. It won’t feel anything.”
I look at the bat. She must have planned this, because she’s put a perfect-looking windowpane right next to it.
I bring the bat down on the glass. The shattering shards send shockwaves up my wrist, up my forearms, up my biceps. The sound cracks and ricochets past two football fields away. It echoes and echoes, and I can’t help but smile.
I just look down at the glass window, and it’s completely gone, only shards mixing with Summer’s shards. I look, and for the life of me, I can’t tell which shards are mine and which are hers.
Austin Hall completed his senior year at Westfield State University, where he was the President of Sigma Tau Delta, an English Honor Society, and Managing Editor of Persona: The Literary Arts Journal at Westfield State University. He is currently at work on a novel titled The Demographic. His short story, “Party Boy,” was published in Trans Lit Magazine, and “Intervention,” was published in Black Heart Magazine.