After-School Basketball Game

by Davon Loeb

Kenneth Schipper

Somewhere near the Mason-Dixon Line, close to nothing much—a Wawa, Johnny’s Farm, Smith’s General Store, Carranza Memorial, and the high school where I sat in the gymnasium as red as a peregrine’s eggs—between crosshairs, and hot house tongues, and diesel and carousel and steam—and where their heads were ready to blow, like twenty-gauged loaded barrels. But also in that gymnasium, one of the two of us could jump, definitely higher than the other, maybe higher than the backboard—and when he grabbed the rim, he could hang there, until the crowd roared. And that one was the varsity starter—look at him go. His arms, almost elastic—stretching from one side of the court, to the other, sending assists from under the legs and behind the back. Give him the ball; I bet he’llmake it. He can run. Boy, look at him run after that ball. Steal that ball. Shoot. Though I was the other one, not playingbasketball. And they watched me like a watchful mob—the heavy-duty Carhartt jackets, canvas dungarees, thick-treaded high-ankle boots—uniformed and still at war—camouflaged out in the open, eyes like deep mudded burials—eyes bone-white—sedimentary eyes, eyes full of such history. And under those fluorescents, a basketball thuds, sneakers squeak, tracks around the three-point line, cheers, and then the silence of the buzzer-beater, like the silence when cement sets, like how muscles tighten, like how both of our Black bodies were sweating.

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Davon Loeb is the author of the lyrical memoir The In-Betweens (Everytime Press, 2018). He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Camden, and he is an assistant poetry editor at Bending Genres and a guest prose editor at Apiary Magazine. Davon writes creative nonfiction and poetry. His work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and one Best of the Net, and is forthcoming and featured in Ploughshares Blog, PANK Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Mauldin House, JMWW, Barren Magazine, Split Lip Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Besides writing, Davon is a high school English teacher, husband, and father living in New Jersey. Currently, he is writing a YA novel. His work can be found here: davonloeb.com and on Twitter@LoebDavon.