He spent his twenties the star of a bad novel. How strange and unworldly to age that way, his twenties like another planet. While the sun did a slow roll in those dimly lit years. 

Was he a hero? He couldn’t tell. Just because everyone looked real, and there were bar scenes and wing men, which made him feel like a hero—was that any kind of proof? Feelings prove what? 

In an early scene, there was a promising opportunity to linger with a lover who might be more than just a dalliance—but he needed to leave, time and space his ready excuse, a man in the pull of the planets. Stupid, sure, because the lover was amazing, but the story he told he believed enough to tell.

In one scene, he acquired a friend. In another scene, he got in a cab, and there was a cat in a shoebox, and the cabbie gave him the cat, and so he had a cat. The cat was a girl he named Fireball, a sidekick name, but the cat lived on another planet too, because that’s a cat.

And the more he drifted toward his future, the more Fireball lived alone, the way a cat does, walking the countertops and the windowsills all night because that’s a cat too, a night terror unto itself.

In another scene, he could have left. Opportunity and risk. Values he didn’t understand defining him.

Regrets followed. When he became desperate, he regretted not leaving. Lesser opportunities, more regrets. People.

In one scene, he was shaving and singing into the mirror when someone was hurt in the courtyard. 

In one scene, there was a new lover who stayed. Fireball didn’t like the new lover, and the cat would piss on the lover’s clothing overnight. He had to make a case for his cat as an independent being and not an extension of himself, not an indicator of his feelings. That didn’t go well.

Toward the end of his twenties, too many scenes were the same. Was that science too? Data? Fantasy? He began to want out, off-world, to change his name, to be anonymous at work, to wear a uniform.

In a late scene, he stood and faced a cloud-swept moon from the rooftop of his building, and he could see the potential of a life beyond his own. So he made a decision: he walked away. He did it. He gave Fireball to his neighbor, the single mom with the badly behaved terrier. Consequences? Not when a man walks away.

Which means that he made himself ignore the problem in the woman’s apartment, the dog and the cat antagonists, and her son, his sometime friend, who would grow up into violence but think of it as comedy. 

A boy who would learn cruelty as something natural.

+++

Alan Michael Parker is a writer and cartoonist, and the author of four novels, and eight books of poetry. His awards include the Balch Prize, the Fineline Prize, the Medwick Award, the NC Book Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and two inclusions in Best American Poetry. In 2021, he judged the National Book Award in fiction; in 2024, he will judge the PEN/Faulkner Award. He holds the Houchens Chair in English at Davidson College.