Yell Jump and I Will Jump with You
by Matthew Mastricova
My most treasured memories happened on the floor above me. It is Christmas and the night after and the night after with my brother and our cousins, sprawled across a suburb of air mattresses in my aunt’s basement. The off-key belting and shuffling feet of our parents knock against the floorboards as if to call us. In these memories, my sister is still a baby or not even yet my sister. In these memories, the adults are wine-drunk as they relive seeing Bruce Springsteen sing at the Meadowlands. Some of these nights I rise to meet them — for a drink, a snack, a glance at the people my parents were before they raised us — but I am too young to stay longer than a few minutes. They are loud and embarrassing and they are yelling for Rosalita. They yell jump and I jump with them and they yell jump and I jump with them and they yell jump and, actually, that’s more than enough jumping for tonight. I return to the basement but continue jumping in my dreams.
Grandparent after grandparent after grandparent died. I added “Born to Run” to a mix CD I gave to my high school crush and it didn’t matter that he never listened to it — love could not distance me from the hydraulic roar of death. Nobody was drinking into daylight anymore, even as I began to develop the taste for it. My mother’s hips were busted. My father’s back, blown. At family gatherings, I played “Rosalita” and “Badlands” and “Thunder Road” over the speakers, hoping that even for a song’s length I could will them back to the large unknowable children I would find dancing above me.
I am 29 years old and have visited my parents more this year than I have in the past three combined. The reasons are myriad: I am single for the first time in six years. We are living through a pandemic and my parents own a house. They own a yard! I am afraid they might get sick in a way that can’t be cured. One night, we — parents, brother, sister, me — sit on the porch and drink slowly into the night. We talk about our plans for when the world stops trying to kill us so hard. Through my crappy phone speakers we listen to Darkness on the Edge of Town and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, and my mother says we should go, as a family, to see Bruce in concert. My dad says it’s too late for that: The Big Man is dead. Clarence Clemons is dead and there will never be another concert that sounds like the E Street Band. My mother’s hips will never again be just bone. My father will never wake up and not catalogue the illnesses that unsettle him daily. My aunt will never unbuy the house in Florida where she now spends her Christmases, and my sister will never lie in the basement of our aunt’s old home and hear the sounds of our parents’ love hammered through the floor. I don’t want them to die. I want them to call out to Rosie forever, to call her to step through the door. And into what doesn’t matter. Just step through the door. Jump a little higher. Please. Jump.
Matthew Mastricova is the fiction editor for Third Point Press. Their work has appeared in Catapult, Joyland, Redivider, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.
