Strawberry Creek

Clare Flanagan

We meet up, past midnight, in the brutalist coliseum. All the lights are on, but there’s no one in the stands—just a gaggle of feral cats, irises halide-bright, fur bristling in the silver marine chill. I’m on the plate, you’re on the mound, and you’re throwing curveball after knuckleball after slider, your face too distant to betray any expression, and I’m glad, because it means you can’t see me either, striking out, ugly-crying, my body swung sideways by the weight of the bat. Because this is a dream, and in the dream I’m not me, I’m the one who says fuck it, it’s over, and you toss your glove into the dirt, and we walk out through the visiting-team tunnel, into the parking lot’s moonscape waste, under floodlit billboards, snarled overpasses, towards the late-night elevated train. This train is famous for its robotic voice, and for the piercing scream it makes while lurching into motion, but tonight we ride in silence, the rails snow-quiet, neither of us feeling like there’s anything to be said. We sail north and disembark downtown, near the park where we used to eat hungover lunches—back when the reservoir was full, and the foothills weren’t burning, and I knew a pure and uncomplicated desire, something I could express with the ease of a dialect, wielding cognates and conjugations with unthinking facility, and I remember once hearing that when you’re really fluent in a language, you can speak it in your dreams, but now the creek is full of a small, red fruit I can’t recall the name of, taut skin, starlike seeds, and you look at me, and I look at you, and I feel nothing—just the seismic thrum of the next train, streaking heavy and soundless overhead.

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