Slim Slow Slider

The screen door creaked open and slammed back into its frame. The sound cracked like a bullet across the sky. Tommy found his brother in the backyard, in a tent, with a lantern, a radio, and a broken-stringed guitar. The tent door—the flap, really—was laying open on the lawn. Tommy peeked inside. Will stared back, eyes wide.

‘How long have you been out here?’ asked Tommy.

Will shrugged. ‘Couple hours?’

It was nine at night. The sun had set, the horizon in the west was still holding onto the last shades of deepest blue. 

Will had come home at noon. It was a celebration and a relief. He had been gone ten months. Now he was home. Will poked fun at himself. ‘I’m back,’ he had said earlier, ‘just a little loopier.’ The doctors called it a short jumble of letters. Will preferred the old terminology. It described what he was feeling more accurately. He felt so.
His mother had fed him to bursting. His father regaled him with everything that had gone wrong around the house since he had last been home. His aunts, both blood-related and not, fed him more. His uncles told him they were proud of him and anything he needed, just call, kid. They were all happy to have him home, ‘in one piece,’ he heard a hundred times. 

‘Can I come in?’ Tommy asked but crowded in the tent anyway without waiting, feeling like a cat squeezing in a shoebox. He sat cross-legged with his brother. The radio was playing a song he didn’t know. It depressed him in only a few notes. Will was plucking at the four remaining strings on the acoustic guitar. The guitar’s body had a significant split down the side. Will was playing a couple notes along with the song on the radio. 

‘Trying to learn it?’ Tommy said.

‘Yeah,’ said Will, trying.

‘Haven’t heard anyone play guitar around here in a long time.’

‘I haven’t been home.’

They laughed. It came fast and left shortly.

The yellow lantern light lit the tent’s walls. The boys’ shadows loomed around them.

The summer crickets played their legs in the grass somewhere out there in the night dew.

‘Everyone go home yet?’ Will asked.

Tommy snorted. ‘No.’ The aunts and uncles never left a get-together before 10 PM at the earliest. There were still cigars to be puffed on porches, orange embers to glow and ash to drop. 

Will plucked at the old guitar strings. The music coming out of the wooden body wasn’t as golden and full as Tommy remembered it. He wondered the last time the guitar was restrung. 

Will stopped and looked at his fingers. There were red indents where he had pressed chords. He held his hand under his nose. ‘Copper,’ Will said, remarking on the old strings’ sharp smell.

The song on the radio ended with a strange abrupt chaos. Tommy thought it bizarre. Will clicked a button on the radio and the song restarted. He set his fingers back to the frets and attempted to play along.

Tommy listened. It was a miserable song, he thought. Really something sad.

Will hesitated on one chord and looked at his younger brother.

‘What’s up?’ asked Tommy after a moment.

‘I was just thinking about the Ninja Turtle game we used to play at the Willows,’ Will replied. 

Tommy smiled, thinking about it, remembering hours they had spent at the Willows down at the beach. ‘Yeah, I remember.’

‘I used to think we put fifty dollars worth of quarters in it every time,’ said Will. ‘It probably wasn’t more than five bucks.’ He played some coppery guitar strings with the radio’s melancholy tune.

‘We never got past the third level,’ Tommy remembered.

‘Remember when a Turtle got hit too many times?’ Will looked at the fretboard. ‘Shell shocked,’ he mumbled. ‘I feel like a turtle without a shell,’ he laughed. ‘Nothing to absorb the shocks.’

Tommy wanted to say something to help. He reached inside and nothing of substance came up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I shouldn’t have gone for a walk.’ Will stopped playing. He left the radio playing.

Tommy had seen Will sneak out after dinner, after their mom and aunts filled his stomach.

Will said, ‘When we were driving back from the airport this morning, I saw Lu down near the beach. Thought I’d take a walk down there after and maybe catch her if she was still around.’

Tommy’s insides knotted themselves. This is why Will was out here in a tent alone, with a lantern, a radio playing an anguished song on repeat, and a guitar on its last leg. 

Will went on. ‘I’m down at the beach, sitting on the wall…’

Tommy couldn’t look at his brother. He knew what was coming. Not in what form, but he knew what was coming–a blow to the chest.

‘And here comes Lu, riding on the front of a white bike, some guy behind her peddling.’ 

The song ended. Will didn’t start it over. The cricket symphony screamed.

‘She was laughing. They were coming from the Willows.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tommy broke in.

‘You didn’t do anything.’

‘Yeah… but…’

‘Something you coulda mentioned?’ 

‘Yeah…’ 

Will watched his brother who couldn’t look at him. ‘I still woulda had to see it.’

‘Sure.’ Tommy lifted his head. He had the makings of tears in his eyes. ‘She see you?’

‘What are you gon cry for?’ Will asked, genuinely curious. 

Tommy shrugged. ‘It’s just some shit you don’t need after everything you’ve been through.’

Will laughed to himself. ‘I’ve seen my best friends burned into nothingness. I’ve smelled them die.’ He hit play on the radio and that gloomy song started again. ‘But the way she looked at me, riding by on that bike…her face…We were both the most dismal humans on earth right then.’

‘He’s just some asshole,’ Tommy whispered.

‘Not to her,’ Will said. And he placed his pained fingers on the fretboard and played along as best he could.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘She looked like she was dying.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘At that instance, she was dying.’

‘I’m sorry, Will.’

‘I think I’m dead.’

Lost horns sounded somewhere far away behind the singer’s voice through the radio.

Will said, ‘I think maybe I died over there, and now I’m dead here.’

‘You’re alive.’ Tommy felt some tears make their way down his cheeks and he quickly squashed them away.

‘Dad used to say he worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle how bad life can be…Here I am.’ He laughed. The song played between the brothers. Will was getting the feel for the chords and when to strike them. ‘You can go in, Tommy, I’m fine out here.’

‘Okay,’ said the younger boy. He was certain he had failed his brother. ‘I’m sorry, Will.’

‘It’s fine,’ Will assured him. ‘Just don’t let that screen door slam again.’

Tommy nodded and left the tent. The song and Will’s guitar faded into the dark. He opened the back door, stepped inside. And remembered a second too late. The screen door shot a bullet into the night sky once more. 

The shadow in the tent flinched. Another guitar string snapped.