Our Town
- Apr 26, 2019
- 3 min read
by C. Cimmone
We come here when everything has left. We walk along the broken topped jetty to purge our mind, but the seagulls nip at our stumbling bodies. The waves taunt us with the mirage of being washed back out into sea. Forgotten trees wash up on the shore and we kick at them like fragile children longing for attention.
We come here to belong to nothing — to no one. We come here when all hope is lost. We put our back to the sea and know when the money from our other life runs out, we will be left for the wolves — the decadent wolves who watched us on the day we drove away from this town.
The wolves knew we would be back. And they waited with patience and appetite.
In this town, we use each other: the dying maneuver the dying with hope the necrosis will slow down. We use each other to forget the past. We use each other to avoid thinking about the black hole of our future. We come here to be familiar with each other. We come here to run away. We come after fate has pushed us out of its plans.
People come here when the pain cracks the other life wide open. People come here alone. People come here to wait out time. People do not come here to live; people come here to die underneath the creeping sea fog.
I met him in our town — after I had come back from my other life. He was here waiting, just as I had imagined him years ago. He was being eaten alive by guilt. He said the wolves were knocking on his door.
His eyes were wild and he raced around in my mind like a train on a lost track. Maybe he knew I had come to our town alone, but he didn’t know this town had already consumed me, and all I had left inside to give was nothing for him.
He had been in the back of my mind. He was there, in a vision you have between wake and sleep, pulling a loose thread. In this town, you don’t fall in love — you survive the memories of your other life. Our town is made for the useless, for the worn, and for those, like me, with nothing else to give. Our town is for coming, without leaving. Our town is for the broken and the bound. Our town stands alone, without escape, and on the edge of resignation and insanity.
I guess he didn’t realize he had made it to our town. He thought he was making amends. He thought he was starting over.
What he didn’t know was that this town saw his grin a thousand days ago. And maybe he didn’t know that I had made him up in a dream when I knew everything was ending.
He never told me what he thought about this place. He only said why he felt he didn’t belong.
C. Cimmone is an author and comic specializing in blue and observational comedy, short fiction, and narrative nonfiction. Cimmone serves as contributing author for Arouse Magazine and editor-at-large for Trampset. She also is a contributing journalist for The Austinot and has served as a volunteer reader for The Literary Nest literary magazine. Her prose has been featured in The Fiction Pool, The Penmen Review, GNU Journal, Embodied Effigies, and Belle Reve Literary Journal. Her creative nonfiction piece “Chip” was recognized as the Judge’s Choice in Heart and Mind Zine literary magazine in 2016. Print publications showcasing her narrative nonfiction include Crux Magazine, 2015 Story Shelter Anthology, and Jokes Review inaugural issue. Cimmone’s chapbook When I Was Alive was released via Underground Voices and is available on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Follow her on Twitter @diefunnier
