Randall Brown teaches at and directs Rosemont College¹s MFA in Writing Program. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Quick Fiction, Gargoyle, Connecticut Review, Saint Ann's Review, Evansville Review, Laurel Review, Dalhousie Review, Night Train, upstreet, and others. He is the author of the award-winning collection Mad to Live (Flume Press, 2008) and his essay on (very) short fiction appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field (Rose Metal Press, 2009).

A Disappointment, Maybe (January 20, 2010. Issue 13.)

Outside the dorm, I caught sight of myself in the window, a scraggly thing, a long grey London Fog raincoat like a sad cape, the Filson hat covered in dry flies, the Timberland boots, unlaced, the jeans made of holes. I had weed in my pocket.

"Hey," she said. "You made it. You an outlaw?"

"Yeah."

At thirteen, I'd run away from home, walked the four hours to my grandfather's house in Huntingdon Pennsylvania. My grandfather had once been a peddler to faraway farmers, the backdrop of his trek endless corn stalks, the smell of manure, plows and furrows.

"Do you want to come up?" she asked.

"Sure."

My grandfather and I had spent the weekends with Westerns, the men tiny specks set against rocks and cliffs and sky and sometimes caves.

She lived in a single, the walls covered in Adam and the Ants posters. The Smiths. The Cure. Melting clocks. Home, the women symbolized in those movies. The thing heroes don't get, not ever, the opposite of the hardness of those cliffs and sky.

"Bruce asked me to marry him," she said. "Bruce Wayne."

I set the baggie on her desk, next to her typewriter. I'd once pretended I had a poetry class and that I couldn't type just so I could give her some money, so I could write about her and have her finger each word. Silly things like that.

"Really," she said. "That's his name."

"I know. It's 25 dollars. I gotta go."

She wadded up the money. I opened the coat pocket, and she shot it in. Never a miss.

"Maybe we could go to the roof later," she said.

That Boston night sky, full of lights that my grandfather had stared at as he wound his way through Amish country, and his grandfather as he dug out the hollow named for my family. Graduation loomed. I'd taken a job with a pharmaceutical company, would be driving those same roads as my grandfather, selling drugs, the only one of my friends college had prepared for the real world.

I walked out the door, down the hall. I felt her waiting behind me, then her quick footsteps as I waited a floor below.

"Off you go," she said. "Waddling this way and that." She called down the stairs. "It's a stupid coat, you know that. How silly it all is."

Freshman year, we'd met, those strange chemistries that sometimes take place. We both saw it, the blue spark that shot between us. We both said, "It's you." Something had happened later, over a summer, a disappointment, maybe, of finding it too soon.

I thought of running back up the steps, kissing her in that doorframe before leaving forever, a tiny hitch in my step. Outside, that whole night of deliveries, I looked up at the roof, and each time the space seemed to shrink until everything felt small, infinitely so.