Creative Writing [was: Poetry & Lyrics]

It was not the heat or the closing of school that let him know summer had arrived but the familiar rumbling in his stomach. It hit him every year, usually when he was driving with the windows rolled just far enough down that the wind didn’t attack his eardrums. That rumbling, more an old friend than an ache, told him of the things to come.

It told him of late nights and dark mornings, sleeping only when his adventure-ridden body had taken enough sweat and dirt and beer. Golden-haired girls dancing and smiling those deadly smiles, his glossy eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. Swimming in Old Frank’s pool when he was out running errands, an eye always kept on the driveway. Coming through the front door and starting dinner before mom could smell his breath. Sitting in the back of that black pickup that always seemed a day from death. The Saturday night silence.

That rumbling in his stomach came with no warnings of the harsh sting of summer, the one that at the right time could bite harder than the cold he so despised. He wasted no thought on it. No matter what he did it would hit him in the gut on some night in July and all those sweet sounds of summer would be echoes in the distance.



He woke to a ringing pain so sharp that in a moment of bizarre terror he had to clutch the damp bed sheet to assure himself of his surroundings. Never before had he been in such blinding agony in his own bed. The bruises under his eye and on his chin came as no surprises but when he ran his fingertips down the backside of his head the countless number of welts was enough to make him lean over the bedside and put his face in the bucket again.

That stale taste of beer lingered in the back of his mouth like a cruel taunt. He knew he could get up and brush his teeth but peeling himself from the mattress seemed impossible. Just as he found a relatively painless position for his head on the pillow, he heard the doorknob turn and his stomach dropped.

“What the hell, Tommy?”

He let out a cool breath. Only Brian.

“I had a long night,” he said, rolling over so Brian could see the worse side of his face.

Brian raised a hand to his face and scratched the stubble on his chin like he always did when he was making up his mind on something. “What’s the other guy look like?”

Tommy laughed and sat up. An involuntary groan left his lips and he covered it up with as confident of a smile as he could conjure. “Better than me.”

“Does mom know yet?”

“No,” Tommy said at once. “And she’s not gonna.”

Brian stared at him for a moment and then shook his head, grinning with restrained amusement. He turned his forearm over and began to chip at the dead flakes of skin from his newest tattoo.

“You know how I hate that,” Tommy said, snatching a second pillow from the floor and placing it over his face.

Brian ignored his remark. “You better find a way to make that pillow stick there if you’re thinking mom won’t see.”

As an answer to his brother’s joke Tommy let the pillow slide back to the floor. As he stared up at the ceiling, his left eye blurry with red, he felt like a dog chained up in the rain. The pain wasn’t as much an issue as the restlessness, the growing realization that all of the fire of summer was trapped in a broken shell of a body. More than anything he felt old and that made his chest heavy and his eyes sting.



The sunlight hit him like a brick to his temple the moment he stepped outside. The hangover undoubtedly played its role, but the welts around his head throbbed violently as if to remind him of their presence. As he dragged his feet across the cool grass he began to notice more wounds in various places on his body. He thought it strange for so many punches to be aimed at a person’s lower back but the area hurt all the same. His eyes squinted, open enough to notice the absence of his mother’s car in the driveway, he shrugged off his helpless wish of the rejuvenation of fresh air and limped back inside.

Trigger was waiting in the kitchen and began to bark unforgivably when he noticed Tommy enter. That black beast of a dog could always tell when something was awry, and too often his response was to try to bring comfort in the form of low growls. Trigger always was Brian’s dog and Tommy sometimes wished he had the bond with the animal that his brother did. At the moment he just wanted to strap a muzzle on the bastard.

“Shut up, Trigger,” he said, clutching his head in a desperate attempt to make the ringing stop. In the corner of his still blood-filled eye he spotted the fancy piece of paper stuck to the side of the refridgerator and wondered how he hadn’t thought about graduation yet since waking up. Not only would his mother see his face but the entire peanut gallery would be pointing and snapping pictures and exchanging loose whispers. He looked down at Trigger and met the dog’s wet eyes with his own. “Son of a bitch, Trigger.” The dog barked in agreement.

Tommy supposed he would get an actual look at his face now rather than gauge the damage with the ends of his fingertips. When he flicked on the light in the bathroom and looked in the mirror his chest got heavy again. The swelling was no worse than he had thought it was but the frozen vacancy in his eyes seemed to belong to a stranger. It wasn’t quite death he saw in his bloodshot pupils; there was some life in them, some potential. But it was the potential for things he thought himself incapable of that he saw in those eyes. The longer he stared the more he realized it was not emptiness at all: his tired eyes were alive with the bitter darkness that replaced a boy’s innocence when it was stripped from him.

He truly wished he could rid himself of such heavy thoughts. He wasn’t blind to the silliness of his all, that his youth could seemingly be shattered in a sloppy volley of drunken punches. These dark notions had been forming in his mind long before the beating, that much was clear. But for the catalyst to come now of all times seemed to cruel. He splashed himself with enough cold water to numb his senses. Only when he felt the familiar tickle of damp fur against his leg did he turn off the faucet and raise his heavy head.

“I’m a damn mess, Trigger.”

The old black dog nipped at his ankle before retreating into the kitchen, surely having heard Brian barrel down the stairs. Tommy felt absurdly embarrassed at the idea of his brother hearing him talk to Trigger.

“A mess indeed,” Brian yawned. He peeked through the curtains and when he saw the space in the driveway he smiled and danced to the refridgerator from which he pulled two beer bottles from their mother’s private supply. “You want one, slugger?”

Tommy shook his head. Not only did he not want a beer but the sight of one waiting for him in his brother’s hand made his stomach twist.

“I guess that’s two for me then,” Brian said. He flicked the bottle tops into the garbage can and froze, looking at the paper on the side of the fridge. “Big day tomorrow,” he said, clearly trying to convince Tommy that he hadn’t just been reminded of the graduation.

“Yeah,” said Tommy, subduing his limp as well as he could as he walked across the kitchen.

Brian hopped up onto the kitchen counter and with one nod of his head Trigger was at his feet, barking with glee. After taking a heavy gulp of the first beer Brian looked over at Tommy. “So? You excited?”

Tommy was silent. He wasn’t ignoring Brian’s question as he was sure Brian thought he was. Truthfully it was a question he always thought he would be able to answer with an immediate yes but for some reason now he was uncertain.

“You should be excited,” Brian went on, slapping an empty bottle on the counter like a trophy. “Don’t worry about the bruises. There will be so much going on, nobody’s gonna notice.”

“Yeah, I know.” Tommy wished he had his brother’s forwardness, if only so he could verbalize all the wild and unclear thoughts racing through his head. He wanted to tell his brother that it wasn’t the graduation that worried him but what came after. He wanted to tell him about the fear that had been creeping up inside of him, the fear that the fresh start he once prayed for would come and swallow him like a crashing wave.



When his headache began to subside he drove with Brian down the street. They lived on the edge of Towbrook, Connecticut in a neighborhood without a scent of the wealth and glamor found a few miles north.

The town was as dead as one with so many lights could be. The neon sign that hung like a warning over the convenient store at the end of Tommy’s street flickered incessantly but was always dim enough to go unnoticed. Tommy mentioned it to the guy that owned the place once but he only got a blank stare in return. Sometimes Tommy felt like he might be the only human being that knew that sign was there, or at least acknowledged it.

The rest of Towbrook was as slow and discouraging as that sign and that store. In the summer there was something about the stillness that fascinated Tommy. All the rich folks hushed behind the double-doors of the country club, the streets belonged to boys like Tommy and Brian. If there was one thing to resent about Brian’s maturation it was that Tommy was slowly losing someone who saw the town the same way he did. Brian’s love for cold beers and glowing girls was still strong, but where his eyes once ignored the happiness of the town men in their fine black suits they now sparkled with admiration.

In the winter there was nothing about the town that fascinated Tommy. The dead plants and stiff road kill littered the streets, victims of one dirty wind or another. The cold wasn’t the worst part of the winter – though Tommy hated it with an angry passion – but instead it was what the cold did to those men and women of Towbrook that made his blood curdle. Nobody ever said anything about it; sometimes he wondered in soft panic if he was the only one that recognized it. To Tommy the change was so clear that he often bit the side of his lip to keep from shouting about it. When the cold wind blew into Towbrook it replaced so many little things, so many essential things. Smiles faded too early, grudges held firm too long. Doors slammed where they once closed, men shouted where they once spoke. A sinful thickness lingered in the air, always giving Tommy the grim idea that the winter’s effects behind closed doors were far worse than what he could see in the open. The wealthy were not built for the cold, this Tommy learned at all too young of an age.