COMPOSITE CHARACTER

1)

Landon was still a kid when his 37 year-old best friend drowned:

Fulton.

Landon was still too young then to realize now how old he was — a lot younger than Fulton, at least.

He wasn’t sure how they met, or why someone Fulton’s age would even hang around someone Landon’s age.

Landon wasn’t even sure they were best friends, it was so long ago, but they were close.

Landon now only remembered certain parts of Fulton’s face: Black eyes, the dark awnings of his brow, handsome, respectable nose.

Landon couldn’t remember Fulton’s lips, or the voice succeeding them.

Much of [n]othing else.

These puzzling segments surfaced, but the images never seemed to fit.

Landon couldn’t put Fulton’s face back together.

2)

Fulton and his brother sold Landon his first toy gun.

He could remove or replace different parts and sections to create an entirely new weapon.

Any one he wanted.

Landon would lose pieces of it all the time.

The gun just kept getting smaller.

Soon, after Fulton died, all Landon had left was a barrel, a throat vomiting each letter in Fulton’s name like a bullet, blasting his name into a brick wall.

Landon would aim it at the lake where Fulton drowned, the one that swallowed the missing parts he couldn’t recall.

In the summer Landon would go diving for each piece, but his searchlight got absorbed by the same cluster of black holes, the same undertow that ate Fulton.

Most the artifacts were still buried in wet sand.

Landon found more in loss swimming back to shore.

Now, he imagined the fragments he might’ve dug up, reconstructing their details on memory’s operating table.

To remember Fulton any way he could.

If even, with a new face.

Anyone he wanted.

 

 

Eric Beeny’s poems and stories have appeared in Abjective, Corduroy Mtn., Dogzplot, elimae, Ghoti, Quercus Review, Thieves Jargon, Word Riot, and others. He’s a contributing editor for Gold Wake Press. His blog is Dead End on Progressive Ave. (ericbeeny.blogspot.com).