Member-only story
Hanging the Sheets
Numbers follow you all your life
You would take my help if you were, say, locked in a burning car, if the sun were not all the way down and someone else were present, if we were not alone in a park and you did not have children close by.
I’m an option at the bottom half of the paper. Something you never expect to reach. If you do, you’ll deal with it then.
Sometimes I wear my prison sweats in public as a profession of faith. DOC 678549. An announcement that says I trust you to remember I’m human.
In Ranger School I was roster number 247 and in military school I was x80094 and in the army I was a service number. I’m made of coordinates so you know where I’ve been.
When you see me, and I see you, and I recognize you’re smiling to be polite, I wonder where you’ve been. While they deny me apartments and loans and jobs, I go on quietly as a silhouette of your imagining, fulfilling the shape of your next fear. Good gossip but a lousy friend.
Sometimes my hands remember love. It catches me off-guard. I have them with me all the time but suddenly I feel them. The same fingernails that peeled paint off walls. The same fists that beat on concrete. The tips of my fingers feel something.
