WTMMG
by Benjamin Eric
He never drives with the window open. Today he does.
The weather is pleasant. It is rare for temperature to have a perfect balance, whether you are measuring in Celsius or Fahrenheit.
The old neighborhood is green. Radiance from the lush vines is juxtaposed to the city’s concrete, and the sprouting nature gives the gray and black blocks an illusion of invisibility.
His friend’s music plays through his speakers. One hand is out the window with spread fingers to let the breeze slip through like a stroke in the ocean. Tires roll through memories of their youth. He exerts the speakers to make sure psychedelic sounds can travel, because he knows sound is not similar to light, which is so fast it defines our sense of instant. He wants to make sure the music can travel no matter how slow.
Perhaps it moves so slow that it can fade to the past.
Perhaps the music will crawl back fifteen years and meet the two boys in their youth and intersect at a particular moment in their lives. Even if the sound is faint to the point of being mute, maybe they will still hear a whisper that will plant the seed for the song to bloom.
Does the present own a collage of sounds that crawled back from the future?
He brakes at the corner where the two boys would catch the city bus to their special education school. The catholic school kids would laugh and call them retards. Back then, ‘learning difference’ was the politically correct term for the neurodivergent. The normal kids did not care.
In his car, beside the bus stop, he turns the volume dial to the limit. He plays “WTMMG” (Will This Make Me Good). If sounds can travel through time, he hopes the boys hear that song. Maybe that is what gave them the confidence to give the finger to the catholic school boys who got off four stops before them.
###
Despite the nice weather, he lays in bed. He is tired. “G.O.M.D.” (Get Off My Dick) plays and a hush proceeds the fading instrumentals.
His room is quiet. He tries to listen.
There are noises he hears. There are a few he can’t identify, like creaks in the house.
Maybe, he thinks, they are from footsteps that belong to whoever will live in this house some day. Will he still live here years from now? Is he hearing himself walk in the other room?
He squints his eyelids and forms a droplet in his socket. He tenses the muscles around his brows, creating a prism of light patterns like a crystal sitting under the lingering sun.
The sun is over ninety-three million miles away from him. He continues to play with the light.
Because light is not like sound. Light is not slow.
Light gives us our concept of instant.
Benjamin is a writer whose stories have been featured in New Plains Review, East by Northeast, Prometheus Dreaming, Querencia Press, and Suburban Witchcraft Magazine. He will also have photography featured in Months to Years. Previously, he was a member of The Washington DC Comedy Writers Group. WTMMG is inspired by 'Will This Make Me Good,' a studio album from Nick Hakim (a dear friend since childhood).