Time

An excerpt from Starlight Desperado

In 2016, I arranged to meet my friend Misty at our old elementary school. The playground was empty. All the swing sets and slides were long gone. There was still a crude map of the United States painted on the asphalt, but weeds grew in the cracks.

The blue metal doors on the first grade building were unlocked. Misty and I slipped inside and walked down the dark, silent hallway together. The air was cool and damp. It smelled like a neglected basement. All the linoleum tiles had been removed from the floor, leaving behind gritty concrete. A wad of pink insulation hung from the ceiling.

“What happened in here?” I asked, pulling out my camera and taking pictures.

“They’re about to tear it down,” Misty said.

I shook my head. “That’s a tragedy. This is a sweet, magical place. They should leave it here forever.”

“I know,” said Misty. “It makes me sad.”

Misty cuts down trees for a living. Her Facebook page is filled with pictures of her grinning and holding a chainsaw. She has large blue eyes and a long, brown ponytail. When she smiles, she looks like she’s keeping a secret. That day, she wore a pink button-down shirt, faded blue jeans, and cowboy boots. A string of white pearls hung around her neck.

She pushed open the door to Mrs. Goodley’s first grade classroom. We walked inside. It didn’t smell like new crayons and pencil shavings anymore. It just smelled like mold. All the desks and chairs were gone, but the green chalkboard and the intercom speaker still hung on the wall. At the back of the room, there was still a wooden shelf for lunchboxes and a row of brass hooks where we had hung our coats.

“Do you remember the Buffy and Mack books?” I asked her.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Buffy was a panda,” I said. “And Mack was a rabbit. Or maybe it was the other way around. I remember a picture of them having a picnic. They were always having picnics.”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember that.”

We drifted out of Mrs. Goodley’s room and back into the hall. We wandered through the first grade building, peeking in classrooms and restrooms. All the toilets had been removed and hauled away. There were only black holes in the floor now. When we reached the other end of the building, we pushed open the doors and walked outside. We walked along a breezeway, stepping over bricks, tangled cords, and broken pipes. I stopped and took a few photos of Misty in the sunlight, planning to draw her later.

We came to the next building. Again, the doors were unlocked. We walked down the hall and slipped into the classroom where Mrs. Foldes had taught. I remembered her elegant necklaces and the smell of her perfume. The room was empty now except for a poster of a cartoon apple taped to the door. It said, “Teachers take time, explain, assure, care, help, encourage, reward.”

“I wonder how many years this poster has been here,” I said, pointing.

Misty laughed. “I don’t know. It’s pretty old.”

We rambled down the hall, opening doors and taking photos. Even though the visit had been my idea, I moved with cautious excitement, worried about what we might find. Misty charged down the hallway, brazen and unafraid, grinning the whole time. Her cowboy boots thumped on the bare concrete.

She yanked open a closet and pointed a flashlight inside. We found giant rolls of colored paper, the kind teachers use to decorate bulletin boards. She pulled out a roll of green paper and let it fall to the floor with a loud thud.

“I wonder how old that is,” I whispered.

“It’s still clean and dry,” she said, stooping to examine it.

“Fascinating,” I whispered.

When we stepped out of the building, into the warm sunshine, I took more photos of Misty. Then we walked across the cracked pavement to the fifth grade building.

We visited Mrs. Cromer’s classroom, the room that was once a science lab. At the front of the room, there was still a tall counter with two sinks built into it.

I know that buildings are just inanimate objects made of wood, concrete, and steel, but I tend to think of them as living creatures. I know it’s ridiculous, but I feel sad for empty buildings. I imagine they’re lonely, that they miss the days when people walked around inside them. I tried to be quiet, not because someone would catch us snooping through the school, but because I wanted to treat the school with reverence and respect, the way you would behave in the hospital room of a dying relative. I felt like Misty and I were visiting an old friend in the final stages of a long illness.

We stepped into the cafeteria. All the tables and chairs were gone, but the front counter was still intact.

“It’s so little,” I said. “This lunchroom seemed huge when we were kids.”

We walked behind the counter and into the kitchen, the place where ladies in white uniforms had once cooked hundreds of rectangular pizzas in clouds of steam. Misty and I stood in the kitchen, looking at the broken pipes and ventilation ducts scattered on the floor.

We chatted for a long time about lunchroom food, fall festivals, book fairs, Halloween parties, and field trips. Finally, we drifted outside and returned to the spot where we had parked. We stood next to her pickup truck for a few minutes, talking some more.

“So you write books?” she asked.

“Yeah. I self-publish them on Amazon.”

She smiled. “That’s pretty cool. Do people buy them and read them?”

“Not really. I still have to work a regular job. I drive a forklift in a recycling plant.”

She shrugged. “Well, as long as you have fun writing them, that’s what matters.”

“You’re right,” I said, looking down at my shoes. “But I still hope people buy them one day. I want to get out of that recycling plant. It’s a nasty place.”

I gave Misty a long, tight hug. I told her it was good to see her again. I said I would draw her soon. She climbed into her pickup truck. I slipped into my Buick. We both drove away, leaving the school behind.

A few months later, a demolition crew knocked down the school with bulldozers. They reduced the campus to a bleak, muddy wasteland. My friend Justin posted a photo of it on Facebook. My heart sank when I saw it. Every time I visit the town where I grew up and drive past that spot, the landscape looks wrong. There’s a big void where a school should be.

***

When we first enter the world and begin our journey, we eagerly absorb everything we see and hear. We establish our picture of the world, but we don’t realize it constantly changes. Movie stars die. Music genres fade away. Subcultures disappear. Words and phrases become obsolete. Bulldozers knock down familiar buildings. Time moves faster than we expect, pushing us further and further from the world we first knew. One day, we look around and find ourselves in a different world.

When I was a kid, my parents took me to visit elderly church members sometimes. Their homes were like musty time capsules. Their living rooms were packed with old furniture, old photo albums, old pianos, old ceramic figures of animals, and old glass bowls full of hard candy. An uneasy feeling crept over me. I wondered why old people didn’t throw away their dusty artifacts and upgrade to new, modern furnishings.

Now I understand. Elderly people are refugees stranded in a foreign land. They struggle to cope with a strange world that doesn’t make sense to them. Of course they cling to familiar objects. Their furniture and trinkets are lifelines to their world, the world that disappeared.

You've been reading an excerpt from Starlight Desperado, ? 2018 Matthew David Curry. All rights reserved. The book is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.