Colin Sturdevant

Park Judases

        Work has ended, we’ve left the glass towers of downtown since yesterday. This is a routine, a repeat, a schedule of wishful-wanting-and-doing. We’re grown-ass-men and we want youth back, and there must be someway to leave manhood, some voodoo or ritual that will bring back extra time to fool around. Who cares if we betray our stature, our nuclear families, can’t go back to our jobs, and arrive home to developed wives’ bodies in our underdeveloped bodies.
        So, we’re at the park wearing summer sweat from 90 degree air, not the kind that just bends, but the kind that bends and traps stiff heat around your body, creating a sweat membrane making us armor clad in our former-rising-from-the-grave imaginations. The cicadas and crickets remind us of dancing, dancing of women adorned by flamenco dresses and stilt legs, and the clickety-clackety hand instruments that go off while popsicle red clothes bloom about in our minds.
        The “famn damilies” and children have gone and streaks of silly string hang about a few trees’ branches, and confetti’s left on the dirt park floor. We drag sticks like chimps, and scavenge wrappers for sealed candy. The head of a cow made of neon colored paper rests near our feet, and we jump smashing the head in, the head of a false god. We’ve found nothing, no candy, no sweetness in the paper mache carcass.
        And the night falls over the park, 90 degree weather fracturing to a lesser degree and our sweat glands no longer suffer, the armor recedes as evaporating droplets and falling pellets of salt water. And again, as every Saturday comes to an end, we place a record player beside the rainbow corpse, and listen, and recite as a false congregation to the noise, “vinyl record, you sound like white noise before the beat drops. It must be the sound of pens scribbling, wise men tinkering and then a ’k’ for ‘krunk’ falls. O, needle fall and please us.” And the needle lifts as we say, “amen.” The cooler air begins to relax over the park, and we soon return to the metropolis as civilized men instead of boys wanting the summers of yesterday back. Park Judases looking for adventure, and youth. Boys betraying man.

Colin James Sturdevant is a senior at the University of Houston studying English with a Concentration in Creative Writing – Fiction. He serves as an event coordinator and host for Writers’ ReVision, which strives to create a sense of community for undergrad and emerging writers. He also serves as Managing Editor for Houston & Nomadic Voices: A Literary magazine.