I want to be a writer when I grow up. And seeing as I'm 19-years-old, I suppose it's about time I start being that writer I want myself to be.

I welcome you all (or, more likely, the three to four people who will visit this site with any regularity) to my blog.

I plan on regularly submitting random works of poetry, fiction, non-fiction narrative, and my own riffs on the world at large.

Please visit often, and give me feedback, because as Brit Robson said, "[Reader Feedback] is literal manna from the sky for the writer."

My first blog entry contains the recently written piece of fiction below. It's about memories, and passion, and sex.
(Please note that it is most definitely fiction, and anything coinciding with reality is mere coincidence or some sort of deep-seeded Freudian slip on my part)


 

Showing
By Ben Fouquette
 

She was biting her lip again. She had something to say.

“We’ve known each other for a long time, haven’t we?”

“Yeah, I suppose we have.”

We’d known each other for ten years, actually-met at the back of a cafeteria line, two kids waiting for a meal of three chicken strips and a handful of curly fries with burnt tips. She took four squirts out of the honey mustard tub, pumping the handle like she meant it. I remember that well. But what I remember most are those eyes, blue and unblinking. The same ones staring out of the windshield of my pick-up truck as we aimlessly ambled around the city streets of our little hometown.

“Every one of these streets has a memory for me, every one.”
I didn’t respond right away.

She was thinking. Reminiscing.

I broke the silence.

“I know you well enough to realize there’s something going on in that head of yours, something that you want to say.”
She grinned. And blinked slowly, her eyes bouncing from star constellations to neon bar signs and back to me. Her hand reached towards the volume dial of the radio, and the country music softly faded away.

“It’s just that driving through this town, in this truck, with you. It makes me wonder about certain things.”

There had always been those moments that left us wondering. Like our junior prom. She wore a soft blue dress, snug to her body. Her hair spiraled down in loose brown curls. In a room full of intricately woven hairstyles, she had simply let her hair fall down. It bounced slightly while she danced and then would rest quietly on her shoulders and back. She was beautiful, but she was not my date. But somehow still, as the thump of a deafening hip-hop song died down, and Peter Gabriel’s smooth vocals crept throughout the crowd, we found each other. And her arms found their way up across my shoulders, her hands clasping loosely behind my neck. She rested her head on my chest, no doubt feeling the reverberations from my pounding heart. It was a slow dance, but my feet did not move. We stood swaying back and forth in the reception room of the St. Paul Civic Center. My hands firmly grasping her, wanting to pull closer, and knowing that I couldn’t. In your eyes, in your eyes, in your eyes….the lyrics fading away, and our hold on each other slackened. Taking a step back, we caught each other’s stare, then slowly turned and walked away.
That is the kind of memory that sticks, the sort that burn themselves into your head, like a beautiful girl splashing sour-smelling honey mustard onto a red cafeteria tray.
“I know what you’re talking about.”

The brakes of my truck squealed as I neared the four-way stop at the intersection of 14th and Bodie. A left took us to my home, a right to hers. Tonight, I kept on going straight.
“There’s where it started,” I said.

“I remember,” she said. “At the back of that cafeteria line.”

Our former middle school was showing its age. The two-toned red and gray brick was faded, chipped away from years of use. As we drove past it, I could have sworn I heard the excited din of seventh graders rushing from class to class.
But it was night. The school was empty, and these were just memories cropping up, as memories tend to do.
“It’s kind of amazing, really,” she said.

“You have a certain penchant for vagueness, dear.”
She smiled and a reddish hue started to inch across her cheeks.
“It’s just, who expects to find something like this at the back of a lunch line?” she said.

“Fate, you mean finding your fate,” I said.
She neither agreed or disagreed, merely looking forward with a face that even I could not find definitive emotion in. The next few moments were silent. Not an awkward or discomforting silence, but just quiet. And we rolled on, perfectly content to amble through town, wading through our collective thoughts as the night slipped away.
“There’s Bentfield,” I said.

“It looks beautiful,” she responded.
Bentfield Stadium was the town baseball field. It had grass as green as Fenway, and a thick ivy covered the outfield fence. In a town of cornfields and dirt roads, it was an oasis of perfectly trimmed grass, bright white chalk and base hits. It was beautiful, but it took a certain kind of girl to realize that.

“You remember the night we spent out there?” she said.

“Like it was yesterday.”
It was actually years ago, the spring of our senior year of high school, the last night I wore a Waverly Mudhens jersey and played nine innings of baseball on that perfect diamond. My sports career, filled with endless moments of mediocrity, was over. That night we sat and talked with our backs against the centerfield fence. My face was a mess of dust, eye-black, and tears, but she didn’t seem to mind. We talked about our mutual admiration of soft grass, the perils of sneaking a few of her father’s imported beers, and how she was going to have an art studio in New York City and I would be writing novels that could change people’s lives.

“I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been there,” I said.

“It’s a good thing I was there then.”
It was late now, nearly three in the morning, when we drove by Sturges Park, a sorted collection of swing sets, picnic tables, and shadowy places that kids go when they want to smoke Marlboros.
Sturges park was the last place I saw her before we both left for college. She wanted adventure, excitement, and the East Coast. I wanted a safety net. So for the first time since I dared to venture a glance at the back of that lunch line, we were to be apart-twelve hundred miles of separation. She had cried and I just looked blankly off into the distance. For all intents and purposes, we were just two friends. Never had a kiss been shared or a secret desire voiced.
“That was one of the saddest days of my life,” she said.

“I never lost hope,” I said.
And now, just feet apart in the cab of my pickup truck, we had quite literally come to the end of the road. I eased on the brakes as we neared the city limits sign, it was just corn and soy beans for the next 20 miles. Just the two of us parked on a dirt curb in some no-name Midwestern town.

“I love you. I have for a long time,” she said.

“Ten years,” I said.
My neck had never felt so rigid in my life. It wouldn’t turn, it couldn’t bear to subject my face to looking that girl in the eyes. So I just fixed my gaze on the dusty dashboard. The odometer read 111, 874 miles. The “Check Engine” light glowed red, as it had for some time. A quarter of a tank until empty. I couldn’t even turn my head.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

If we’re lucky enough, our blind hands find something to hold on to. Sometimes it’s in the front seat of a Ford F-150, sometimes it’s a lip-locked kiss, so tentative and afraid that you think your fingernails are going to tear right through the denim of your blue jeans. And that moment becomes more powerful than ten years full of moments, and you lose yourself, because all of a sudden it’s not about cafeteria lines, or baseball fields. It’s about awkward limbs finding gracefulness, and apprehension melting into passion, and it’s about making love in a pick-up truck to that girl. And there is no past. But there is a hand gripping a bare shoulder; a humid summer night sending beads of sweat down your forehead, and two bodies saying what two people never could.

Then there is a tire spinning as it tries to find traction in the gravel, and the five-cylinder engine coming to life as a rusted truck lurches forward. And a sun rising in the east, a moon slowly fading out of sight, a boy with his left hand slung over the wheel, and a girl in the passenger seat.