Free Prodigals by Greg Jackson

memory of the match was perfect. By the time I thought this Vicky had flown home and our relationship had begun the rapid crumbling that would leave it scattered at our feet. I would like to say I didn’t watch the video again, or many times after. That others didn’t have to intervene. That I didn’t have to burn the damn thing and spend years finding different ways of describing what it meant to feel “hollowed out.” I wasn’t hollowed out, was the thing. I was brimming to the exclusion of all else with this sickly joy. And even then, when I’d burned the tape and moved on—even now—I wake up at night with the image of camera flashes hot on my retina, the tidal roar of the crowd in my ear, shifting weight lightly from side to side, gazing placidly into the eyes of my tall opponent, listening for the chair umpire to come through on the speakers high above.
    That’s how it begins.

 
    Epithalamium
    Hara had to think there were better ways to say fuck you, although it did take a certain ballsiness, what he had done, in the middle of their divorce no less, and she could see, in fact she couldn’t not see, that the flip side of this prickishness was the quality she loved in Zeke, loved best in him perhaps, when she did love him, and she did love him—she still did—she just hated him now too. Yes, she would probably laugh about it when she stopped being angry. She was always smiling inconveniently in the throes of anger, like the very notion of fury in lives such as theirs dragged a subterranean absurdity up into daylight. But first she would milk her valid rage for the drops of acid in it, the drops with which it had become her job to dissolve Zeke’s teasing, so that she could have her part in the cruelty, so that they could pretend they were hurting each other and were equal in this.
    Of course she was glad for the company, which made it all a bit awkward. It was rather fun having a companion, another presence to leaven the melancholy of cold gray days. On the hardwood of the living room, below lights dimmed to embers, Hara and Lyric moved through their vinyasa poses. The day at that morning hour was often no more than a charcoal disclosure, the islands rough-hewn ribbons in the fog. On mild afternoons they kayaked out to the smaller islands or explored the rock and shell coves into which the ocean ran. From the beaches they took smooth stones, worn colored glass, and the green and ashen domes of sea urchins, laying them on shelves and window transoms. Lyric did the shopping, for which Hara gave her money. When Lyric returned one day with a jigsaw puzzle, they set it up on a painted table looking out to sea. Then in the evening they would spend an hour or two coaxing forest from piecemeal green, a frame for the puzzle’s meadow, so that finally the wolves had something to run across.
    Lyric made Hara feel girlish. It had surprised her how much she liked the girl. Hara even felt at times that she were the younger of the two, for while it was true what Lyric had said of herself—that she didn’t know anything—the faultless quality of her spirit made Hara feel petty and irascible and about nine years old. And of course what you assumed people traded for such uncomplicated happiness were lives of a certain ambition and regard, but it was Hara, wasn’t it, who was forty-two, childless, performing a job she liked about as much as washing semen from underwear, and getting divorced?
    Maybe she had made an error long ago. Maybe she had profoundly mistaken the terms of the exchange she was making. It wasn’t envy Lyric brought out in her, no. It was more that Hara had stumbled on a kind of play , as if they were sisters left alone by their parents for the first time to explore the different ways a day could be deconstructed. She had never had that with Daeva, of course. The one time she recalled being left under her sister’s capricious