All the Wrong Words
When I hear you smile, I apologize for everything. The rain, my dollar store umbrella, the eight hours of airport salads and your dead phone battery, whatever high pressure system pushed this all your way the first weekend you’re back in town. You didn’t come all the way out to the west coast, the first time since high-school graduation, for Yahtzee and homemade eggplant parmesan. The bagels and coffee are flat out here, flatter than our Friday concerts in the park. Our drivers are passive and skittish, and the leaves don’t turn brown and orange and yellow. I’ll need to feed Mac better, with a few organic brands you recommend, because his fur is turning gray. But you say plaid looks good on me. Maroon on black, something new.
You’ve got a laugh that catches at all the wrong moments, like a hiccup, when I say the wrong words. I say train instead of bus. The rain drowns the ocean. We watch the ocean from the train stop, you laugh, I apologize.
We’re hungry, buzzing from the five AM coffee, and you’ve got a streak of green in your hair. I suggest a place to eat.
You repeat the name of our favorite diner, piecing together some memory, the reds and high-school gossip mostly drained of color in your mind. “Oh…the red seats and the skylight. I like their fries, but maybe not,” you say. You look up from the bus schedule. “The floors are sticky.”
Yes, and one time they burnt your waffle, and the regulars can be noisy, and they really do need to clean the floors. Three days before graduation, and we came back three days after. You liked their fries.
The rain pours on and won’t stop for hours. A pelican flies up out of the water. It’s too far away to tell if it caught breakfast or not. They’ll catch anything in their beaks, even fish and birds they can’t swallow.
We both went on to study animals, in our own way. Vet school. Bio. The snarling, the wagging tails, the copays and claws; the blood, the double helices, the steroids and proteins I could never hope to pronounce. I never made it. Too much pain, too many diseases and medicines and apologies that twisted my tongue when the outlooks were bleak. I train animals at the local pet store, and hike with seniors from the rec center every Saturday. They point out the native flowers and mushrooms, reminisce about wedding proposals atop the canyon wall. You pushed through. You hunt through vials for antibodies and genetic markers, and raise the alarm when chemicals surpass the healthy parts per million. Huge glass windows, promotion after promotion. I point out the pelican, which seems satisfied, and flies away and into the fog.
“A pelican, not a pigeon,” you laugh, with a shove. The rain stops.
Yes, a pelican.
We review the bus schedule again. Twenty minutes, then we can head downtown, wander, and breakfast will find us. If the rain stays away, we can wander a little while longer.
“You colored your hair. Lime green?”
“Green on one side, purple over here!” You spin your head around to show me. “It’s been a few months. I’m gonna do it again.”
The sun, just rising behind us, fights through the fog. There is a mockingbird somewhere, and a scrub jay, but it’s not clear which is which. The wind quiets a little, and the air warms.
You button your sweater. It’s maroon, and fuzzy around the collar. “There’s this museum near my work you’d really like,” you say, rub your hands together. “It’s about the local fauna and wildlife. You can see the native and invasive species, and those pop-up animal fact quiz things. It’s by the trail that goes along the bay.”
We have that here too. A lodge, run by volunteers. There are postcards and t-shirts, taxidermy models, big buttons that play recordings of the bird calls, a timeline of when the settlers came and wiped out the bears and poppies and forests, and facts about the annual wildfires, close enough to blot out the autumn sky. We’ve been to the lodge three times, we know the trivia by heart, and saw each new shade of paint and our handwriting change in the visitor’s log.
“The trail is super pretty.” You poke my shoulder. “Hey, if you ever come visit, let’s go.”
My ears ring, and a house finch hops by us, happy the rain has stopped. House finches eat dandelions, and other grains, seeds, and berries. The hill is covered with dandelions. Dandelions are in full bloom in May. Your favorite color is yellow. The hill is lit up with yellow, and one gray house finch.
“Hey.” Another poke. “I’m sorry I haven’t written you in a while.”
One thing that’s always brought us together is writing and sharing poetry. We met in English class, frequented the poetry club and open mics, and sent letters in lavender envelopes that we bought in bulk before you moved away. Verses about your semester in Italy, afternoon hikes or homemade coffee, stupid noticings about the Moon. We could never finish the poems, and we never tried to.
“I’m sorry too.”
The glass walls of the bus stop are foggy. There’s an ad for a local charter school, a rehab service, and a new superhero movie. We had a virtual movie night a few years ago, in the early days of the pandemic, and you stayed up until two so we could watch the sequel too. You aced the interview the next day, got promoted. Your next letter had hearts in the margins, and a verse to a poem about finding the end of a rainbow.
“Hey, that scrub jay is coming to say hi,” you say. The bus, and the bird, await us.
“A house finch,” I say, then pause. “Not a scrub jay.”
David Williamson is a mathematician by day, avid reader and writer by night. He enjoys writing short stories, essays, and memoir, as well as digging into data and numbers and the stories they tell. His debut piece, a short story called “Our Last Dance” was published in The First Line in Spring 2024.
