Home gets farther away every time I go back. I think it's geological.
Every year the town slides another few inches into the past; by the time
I'm old it'll be a Civil War encampment, or four cottages by the creek-
side with Puritans in them.
    But for now it still contains 20,000 people, including my parents, who
I did not see this weekend.
    Did you know you can do that? If you grew up in a city, it has motels,
or a hostel, or an inn, any of which will take you for a price. You can
even pay that price with just money.
    Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

    I got off the bus, physio book in one hand and backpack in the other.
Too cramped to study, I had closed my eyes and tried to name as many
muscles as possible; I woke up, adductors sore from compacting myself, just
before we hit the state line. On disembarking, sunlight greeted me to
downtown.
    Breakfast was at a stylish bland cafe in a spot whose previous occu-
pant I couldn't remember. It had a tremendous front window so that while
eating I could look at people with jobs. Very thoughtful of the owners.
I'd never seen Oak Street at 9am before despite years of drifting there
after school, and the light's overweening broadness didn't suit it. I
chewed the croissant slowly, asserting my proper relationship to downtown
by refusing to have anywhere to go.
    Surprising my parents still sounded like a nice gesture, though I had
phone numbers for a few old friends who I thought might put me up if I
asked. Not staying at home would be a violation of the natural order, but
then, the natural order had a lot of shouting in it. I felt powerful and
delicate, as though all of my ability to navigate the world derived from
the fact that I might crumble at too loud a noise.

    The park. I beached myself on one familiar picnic table. With nobody
around, it crossed my mind to rid myself of the grubby bus feeling by
changing my clothes; I had dug a shirt and socks out of my pack before I
stopping thinking I should. The table wasn't so cozy without friends, and
in fact a number of new signs had warned me that parkgoers could be video-
taped at any time. Apparently someone had taken to shooting at the
bobwhites, which for the first time I felt guilty about never having fed.
    Back when the table and I got to know each other, the birds had seemed
if anything like interlopers. Now I was the intruder to the park-- or the
hunters were, or the city and its signmakers. I no longer even had juris-
diction to say which.

    So I already had the sense that the bus station wanted me back, but I
needed to inspect Oak more closely. It only runs for ten blocks, so I did
the full circuit.
    Identifications eluded me for too many more of the vanished businesses
that I was nevertheless sure I missed. Some of the "replacements" could
have been there all along, though. At 15 my eyes would have glazed over at
some windows that now stood out. Community Physical Therapy. Matthew
Benedikt, Attorney at Law. The Benedikts were new friends of my parents,
he an expounder of political theories I didn't need my father hearing more
of, and she a polite dinner-table nodder. Oh, so polite. I'd lost the
knack. In vain I tried to right my ship.

    Bus ticket, motel room, wake-up call. The driver merrily says "Hello"
to everyone else; me, he just looks at, almost remembering who he carried
yesterday.

written for Lisa Larson while standing up 10/25/08

The words were (Lisa told me) culled from a piece of spam. It's unusual knowing why someone picks their words, though I can never resist guessing. Possibly I deferred using these words longer than usual because I knew they weren't personally significant; when I realized I only had about ten ilnes left to fit in the last four, I hurried through the ideas I had had for those words rather than looking for a new plan which might fit them in more comfortably.

Most of the low-drama details here are roughly taken from my own visits back to Madison, WI. In particular, the short downtown street with a bus station at one end is State Street; I changed the name both because I gather you're supposed to do that in fiction, and because of something I wrote a while back at the other end of the spectrum. But my parents rarely if ever shouted, and while I don't remember what all the alienating new signs in Vilas Park were about, it can't have been guns.

The line about paying with "just money" was supposed to be cashed in at the very end, but when I got there my ideas all had maudlin phrases like "feeling penniless", and the clock was ticking.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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