A19
Collective Memory
Excerpt from collection:Call it Awash: Stories and aphorisms.

july

Busses break down.
Nobody had told August that busses break down
and it was an unwelcome surprise.
The driver looked like she could be many things —
a chef or a teacher or a manager at a grocery store
— but a mechanic was not one of the things
that it looked like she could be.
However, like all people faced with a broken down automobile,
she followed the ritual of
popping the hood and staring at the engine,
as if the act of staring itself might grant some insight
into the intricacies of automobile engines.

After a minute or so, she spoke into her radio and re-entered the bus.
She informed the passengers that another bus
would arrive in ‘bout-a-half-hour, and that they could transfer to it then.
August was feeling particularly adventurous in that moment, though,
and after some quick head-math, he found that walking home would
get him there about the same time as waiting for the next bus.
He stood proudly, as if the people around him were hoping he would stand,
and walked off the bus.
This wasn’t a part of town he knew well, but he could find his way home.
Adrenaline rushed behind his eyeballs and through his chest,
warming him throughout even though he could see his breath
pile out of his nose and mouth before him. He stepped deliberately
and could not fight a smile that crept across his face.

The sidewalk was broken, fettered with tree roots pushing it up
from underneath. Muddied plastic cups and old strip club pamphlets
littered the streets, and blackened gum
and blackened cigarette butts made a mural in the ground.
August found it beautiful.
In five minutes of his trip, he saw the bus that would have picked him up drive by and keep driving.
In this short time, he had walked by about fifteen people sleeping or trying to sleep
within a few feet of him. As he continued they asked him for help or for money
or just held their dirtied hands
out at him, so he mumbled non-words and walked more quickly.

The cold was starting to get at him;
it started with his ears feeling like white-hot icicles.
Then his nose and face froze over as well.
His fingers dug deeper into his pockets,
but the air snuck easily through the stitches in his jeans.

The shops he passed by were things like
Get Cash Now
Eastside Pawn Shop
EZ Liquor and Cigars,
Payday Advance and Tattoo, and
Ross,
and these were all closed.
August was walking as fast as
it can still be called walking.
He stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk and,
leaning forward (and feeling like someone was chasing him
all of the sudden), broke into a run.
He heard a deep-ringing laugh echo across the street
and the sound was all around him.
He heard a young girl screaming in the direction he was running toward
and he stopped suddenly. She screamed and then screamed louder
and it bounced off the Ross and the liquor shops straight
into August’s conscience.

He wondered if he should wait until the screaming stopped before he kept walking.
He thought of a different direction he could take to get home.
The screaming continued, loudly and painfully, as if the girl was tortured by someone.
He thought of his name. He thought of his mother.
Scrambling for a weapon, he reached for his ring of house keys from his back pocket
and held them between his fist, so that a key stuck out between each finger.
Fear warmed his face as he took heavy steps toward the sound.
Another scream. He ran toward her, his vision blurring at the sides as he focused on her voice.
He reached a dark space between two buildings where the screams came from,
and he saw a young woman lying down, the lower half of her covered in blood.

Her pregnant belly bounced with quick breaths and sunk when she screamed.
She wore an old denim jacket covered in holes and dirt, and her pants and
underwear were in a pile of trash beside her.
August thought she might be 20 years old.
He paced toward her and away from her several times,
considering how and if he could help her.
“How can I help!” he exclaimed more than asked.
“I don’t fucking know!” she yelled. “I just need it out of me!” the woman lurched out at him between breaths.
His common sense overtook him and he ran toward her,
placing his hands on either thigh and looked at her face to see if she reacted.
She didn’t.
“Breathe slowly! Breathe on my count! One…Two…Three…”
“Shut the fuck up.” And she breathed quckly and loudly. Her hands were covered in sticky blood
and her crotch was covered in shiny blood and being pushed out from the inside.
“I’m sorry! I’ve never done this before I don’t know what to do!”
“Goddamnit shut up and get this thing out of me!”
“Then breathe slowly and push!”
She took a deep breath and scrunched her face until it turned a deep shade of blue.
He could see the top of a bald and bloody head force its way out of her and the girl
screamed with a man’s voice. August filled up with excitement and felt it tingling across
the back of his scalp. He smiled widely and inhaled, “That’s it! Here he comes!”

She pushed for another minute or so,
and August’s hopes went into the emerging child’s tiny body.
This was his heroism; this was the rise in action in August’s story. He delivered life.
He brought a child into the world; another protagonist for its own story.
Without him, there would be one less life in the world.
This is what his mother had named him for:
August, The Proud Deliverer.
His smile infected his whole body, his whole person was made up of excitement
and fulfillment. It was lighter than he had ever felt.

Finally, he could see the shoulders and instinctively he pulled the child out by the armpits.
He wiped blood and other juices off of the newborn’s face
and looked at him with all the pride of a father.
The mother caught her breath on her cardboard bed.
“Do you have a name for him?” He asked the new mother.
She rocked her head “no” across the ground.
August thought about a name for the boy,
still attached at the belly to his mother.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“August,” he said.

“Then he was August.”
He waited for the child to breathe, or to squeeze its eyelids together,
its arms were limp and its legs were limp. August noticed then
that the child’s eyes looked much bigger than a newborn’s,
and the rest of it too small.

“Is it a boy?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I thought so. I could tell.”
August began to cry, and the mother asked if she could hold her son.
He wept with his whole body—he could remember the last time
he cried that way and it had been a very long time.
“He’s dead.” the boy whispered between whimpers.
“I know, I know.”

He stayed with the non-mother for about an hour in mostly silence.
She told him that her pregnancy
only lasted about six or seven months; she wasn’t sure.
She told him it was better this way.
She comforted him over her dead child.
August cried the rest of his way home.
Nobody asked him for change or help or held their dirtied hands out to him
as he cried on his way home. He tripped several times on the broken
sidewalk but made it home eventually,
wishing all the time
that he just waited for the second bus.

Ruth Crimson-Forde