Free Boarded Windows by Dylan Hicks

she’d draw your attention.”
    “I don’t remember any gingko trees in Enswell.”
    “But I saw some raindrops like that the other day and thought of her. So this is it,” he said, parking. I leaned against the car while he studied the bank for two or three minutes. “Can you grab me the SX-70?” he said.
    “What?”
    “The SX-70, please.”
    “What?”
    “The Polaroid in the glove box.”
    He took a photo of the bank, and did a few dozen squat-thrusts. “Okay, let’s split,” he said.
    “You don’t want to go inside?”
    “Not really.”
    “You want to stop for lunch at all?” I said.
    “Let’s just grab sandwiches at a gas station.”
    “A lot of those sandwiches are slimy.”
    “This place isn’t happenin’ for me right now, okay?”
    About twenty miles out of town, we stopped at a gas station where I bought sandwiches in triangular containers while Wade altered his Polaroid photo with the rusty fork I’d seen in the glove compartment. The sandwiches were slimy. The rest of the way home we took turns naming professional or notable collegiate football players. To make the game more challenging, we had to circle through the alphabet, forward and backwards, him saying “Grady Alderman,” me saying “Fred Biletnikoff,” him saying “Jimmy Conzelman,” me saying “Tony Dorsett,” him saying “Bill Earley,” and so on. We were allowed to skip X. The first person (me) who couldn’t come up with a name lost. I challenged some of Wade’s names—a few seemed patently fictional—but each time he unhesitatingly offered corroboration: always a position and a team, often a jersey number or a metaphorical description of the player’s style and form, maybe a bit of human-interest trivia, the marital history of some ancient Canton Bulldog or Rock Island Independent, the stray border collie that really taught him how to run. I held a few of the suspect names in mind, and, sure enough, they turned up in a football encyclopedia. It was hard to know when Wade was telling the truth, and I think one of his tricks was to make some truths sound like lies, so that if you discovered enough of his seeming lies to be after all true, you might start to think that everything he said was true.

The Origin of the World (1)
    I MENTIONED ABOVE THAT THE WOMAN I’VE BEEN calling my mother, Marleen Deskin, wasn’t my biological mother. This fact was never kept from me. Martha Dickson was my biological mother. Between my mothers’ names there’s obviously much similarity—alliteration, assonance, consonance, and so on—and perhaps this similarity (unfortunate in the present context, and I apologize) readied or at least encouraged my mothers’ short but important friendship, since all sorts of superficial similarities can at least briefly make a friendship seem inevitable.
    At some point in my antememorial days my mother Marleen must have sat me down for a bowdlerized version of the following story, beginning, it may have been, with a tenderizing plate of runner-up brand cream-sandwich cookies and a gentle yet distinctly portentous prelude. I don’t remember these cookies or this prelude, but neither do I remember a time when I didn’t know something of my spectral biological mother. I do remember two times on which she, Marleen, told a more or less complete version of the story: (1) on a road trip to the Grand Canyon during my twelfth summer, and (2) in the kitchen while she made a taco salad during my sixteenth spring. Fragmental-anecdotal parts of the story came or were drawn out on several other occasions. Certain fragments came out with relative frequency, such as the part about Martha’s homemade embroidered blouses, how ineptly they were sewn, or the part about her copy of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, how and where it skipped. (No doubt Marleen repeatedly recalled this skip as a reflective joke, and would be pleased to know I finally got it.) As I grew up, the story and its fragments got darker, more