July 16, 2024

Pure Michigan

By Jace Brittain

Photo by Vladimir Srajber on Pexels.com

When pinball was illegal, there, still, still. 1970, 1971. All five of us juniors under Arts and Letters, various: Classics, Mathematics, History, History, Theology. Sundays, we’d slip across the border from South Bend, Indiana for a cold beer. Saint Michael said drunk, “Why don’t we go to Ypsilanti,” drunk we all laughed at the sound of, “to see the ruins of a Normal school, burned down, was like a castle, and burned down,” and sober we arrived at Eastern Michigan University, unburned and whole, pristine.

And so. We carried on, to Detroit. No pinball, there, like I said, we found a place to drink. Michael, more or less, Michael stared at the ceiling, what had been a fire was still smoldering in his imagination, pinging, like uh, across the map: maybe Normal, Illinois, maybe Alva, Oklahoma the great city of murals, New Britain, Connecticut, Terre Haute, Indiana, everything he knew about knowing seemed in flux. I said, “Anyway, we gotta be back in class in,” I checked my watch, he stared, “seven hours.” If, then and there, in Detroit, time seemed to fly, it was just that, on blue highways, at dawn, it seemed a long drive back.

About the Author

Jace BrittainJace Brittain is the author of the novel Sorcererer (Schism) and a founding editor of Carrion Bloom Books. Their writing & translations have appeared in Annulet, Propagule, ANMLY, Grotto Journal, and others.

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