by Tom Prime
A "short story"
We grew up on an asphalt black mouthed hill with a tongue filled with white people's families. I don’t remember when the forest fell but I imagined it to be once populated with the greatness of violent sacrilegious natives combing its gnarled and blackened earthen stomach. I imagined where we rushed about among the sparse etchings of ravaged limbs, a free world, existing symbiotic with every color of dirt and moss and rainbow through dewdrop. We crafted crude, innocuous idols of death's wizened finger. Bow and arrows and bombs of old paint and gasoline, ours was a world of hidden wars, forts of plywood and wings of cardboard refusing to extol our battle against the clenched fists of science with flight- the arching womb of innocence. A long plastic intestinal drainage pipe ran down our muscular eye of reality into the earth beneath the suburbs, dense with the power and authority of a world separate from our own. Curry smelling immigrants separate, disconnected, impossible to understand but forgotten quickly with parental cautionary reproof- the dangerous world of escaping adversity. The run off of British Columbian grey skies seeped like long strands of dirty black and greasy hair down the monumental adolescent hill- half a kilometer. My brother and I lacking maturity and physical understanding looked down the black snake mouth and thought as thin and wispy and as careless as the shifting winds. Climbing into the coiling rubber walls among the sludge and evaporating rainwater we looked into the great eye of death and turned away.
