by Graham Robert Scott

That night at Franco’s Pizza, every object showed signs of mortality. The pool table’s northeast leg, propped on a yellowing paperback. The floorboards, buckled with old water damage. One of the sticks, missing its tip. For five games we passed the remaining cue between us, and then made our way home, where we fumbled our way to the switches as the house creaked in the cooling air like a ship at sea, and Zach gave me a one-armed half-hug before heading off to change for bed. Seated below her mantle, I watched the stairs as though she might descend to meet us. She always said the sound of the wind passing through the Bradford pears reminded her of the Monterey surf, but I didn’t really hear it until that night. Zach returned in pajamas and I wondered how long I’d been adrift on arboreal waves. This affliction of slippage, of falling into flow states over the smallest of stimuli, had bedeviled me since two men in crisp Class A uniforms stood on our doorstep, unmoving as Buckingham guards, their stillness easy to mistake for serenity. Zach placed in my lap a tablet encased in a red rubber shell and smudged with thumbprints, and then he nestled in against my shoulder as I translated thickly accented videos on three-rail kicks. By midnight, he was dozing peacefully, a bead at one corner of his mouth. I looked for her features in his face until the phone buzzed—my mother, wanting to know what Zach might like for his eleventh birthday. Maybe a pool cue, I replied. I didn’t explain why the boy might be enthralled with billiards. How chaos only seems to rule the table. How aim and a good stick could rule the chaos. How that might seem a comforting idea. I carried him, heavy though he was, to his bed and laid him down. Watched his chest rise and fall. Curled up on the floor, just for a minute, and then it was dawn, and breakfast, and school drop-off, and then after-school pick-up. The Sun was warming my left arm and Zach was filling my ear with the events of the day when Mom followed up, One-piece or two? Zach answered two, I transcribed, I hit Send, whereupon I became mesmerized by the peculiar homophone alignment of my Cue email queuing, an echo of moments in childhood watching my digital watch click over to 12:12:12, back when people wore such accessories. It felt like: a portent, a conjunction of worlds, a fortuitous alignment of cue, nine, and pocket. Time slipped. A block of college student housing rolled by. Zach said Dad. A horn bleated.

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Graham Robert Scott grew up in California, resides in Texas, owns neither surfboard nor cowboy hat. His stories have appeared in Hobart, Necessary Fiction, Barrelhouse, Pulp Literature, and others.