A Little Lucky in the Evening
by Isaac Zisman
Lucky stands at the end of the pier, staring off into the wild expanse of the west, or maybe it’s just New Jersey. It's all back there, the thick of it, life as it was and is and soon again shall be, but for now he's stuck on this shifting island, and the sidewalks don’t even have parking meters anymore to lean on.
Time was, when the smell would come up hot and salty, the exhaust puttering off the edges of some dine-in floating monstrosity, Lucky would say to himself that this was fine, fine, and the golf balls would go tinking off the metal poles holding up the netting of the great enclosed driving range to the south, men under flood lights whacking away and hoping, what, to hit the end of the net? To get a good crack at one and have it go sailing through, out into the Hudson? Some nights and some years passed. The long arcs of the white balls remained. The men remained. The lights remained. The pier remained.
And here comes Lucky, lucky as he ever was which is to say not so much, listening to the fleshy thwack and the wet sucking of the floodwaters receding. He doesn't smoke anymore. He takes his coffee in cup and saucer. He has a sensible bedtime and he puts in the hours.
On the walk home there's a dark street with a thick canopy of trees, the cicadas screaming out the last orgy of the summer. Possibly, he heard, they're eating each other. From the low window of a brownstown, Lucky sees a wash of rainbow lights and hears the strained hum of a bluetooth speaker with the bass turned all the way up. He looks in and he sees, seated politely in dinner party formality, a group of six well dressed, well toned toney types, all on couches eating canapés and passing around glasses of wine and on the large square coffee table before them is a small orb of light, rocking and twisting and splashing the walls and the sitters and the table and the leaves of the big elm outside with colors. Big colors shot out on fine filaments. The whole reverend Roy G. Biv. The light rotates and turns and shoots out its lasers and the sitters sit and seem to reflect a little and take small, appropriate thoughtful sips as if to say: Oh yes; or Ah; or Right.
And Lucky feels a cold wind blowing across his collar and his hands going tingly in their pockets and he turns again to look, once more, one more time, back at the river. And there’s a smell on the air of woodsmoke and ash and water and ice, but layered-like, stratified like a shroud of rock wall and dust on the side of some distant highway. The fire there, always there now, from back there, out west he means, and the water here, displaced, transformed, thick and eastern and haunted somehow, as these things often are. Because the summer’s gone, been gone for a long time now, the great elm bare, the gutters sticky with its wilted molt and black leaves and orange tinsel. And the rainbow light coalesced into a full spectrum whiteness throws itself out across the skeleton tree and the street and the brown walls darkening in the cold air. And inside, expressionless, the sitters sit, and put down their glasses and their little bits of food, and folding their hands in their laps, turn their faces toward the source.
Isaac Zisman is a writer living in New York City. He’s working on his first novel, Usurper. Find him on social @octopus_grigori.
