ONE TIME DAVE

The holiday lights and sounds wafting up from thirty stories

below lapped at his bare toes. From his rooftop terrace view

the edges of intruding lower arches prohibited full exposure

of the city's New Years Eve revelers, yet their cheers cloaked

Dave in loneliness. The humid air hung thick, he thought,

thick enough on which to float. He tested the ephemeral

cushion with his feet. The blue neon clock tower at the beach

glowed 11:59:00 PM, 11:59:01, 11:59:02. His thoughts

stretched, thinning like the last passing moments of the year.

And then this idea of a new year. Of starting over. Erase the

past like a bad dream never remembered is what he wanted.

His mother labeled him the late bloomer though eldest of her

twelve children, but he felt like a loser. Until she happened

along. She with the home-wrecker breasts between which he

slept and dreamed. She with the heart and mind that sucked

him in, captive along with his eight brothers, even the three

sisters had been drawn to her essence when she entered the

room.

Then gone, as mysteriously as she had appeared, her memory

a cancer entwined around his bones as he watched the others

go back to their own lives and forget.

Over the ledge of the brick terrace wall, legs dangling in the

full bodied air, he wiggled his toes. On the loneliest night of

the year he pushed off from the wall onto the thick billow of air

and floated at first, his shirt inflating then ripping away from

his thin body.

With increasing speed he dropped feet first past a swirl of

twinkling red and green until midway down he turned and

contorted his body into a beautiful majestic swan dive, so

was his need to be seen, to prove he had not disappeared

though he knew that he had.

Faces in the crowd rush at him, the thick air enfolding him,

protecting him, and with his last thought he wondered why

no one had told him it would feel this good to be rid of it all,

such was the effect of the massaging pressure against him

as he plummeted downward.

In the crowd stood a young woman he had never before seen,

strands of her long red hair sticking to the stem of her

champagne glass. His eyes locked onto the glistening bubbles

in her fluted crystal and at 11:59:59 PM he disappeared into the

sparkling brew amidst welcoming cheers.

Rising, he broke through the liquid surface as the blue neon

clock tower glowed 12:00:00 midnight. Suddenly the lights

were too bright, the sounds too harsh and he cried as firm hands

wrapped him in a soft blue towel. Without the burdens of the

past he was much lighter. Small and newborn.

Surrounding faces shed tears as those same large hands lay

him on the breast of that beautiful redhead and she cradled him

gently, firmly against her and he only able to accept that feeling

of a requited longing stemming from a desire he understood not.