My niece is finally here. Bunking out in my fancy garage. She’s twenty. She’s both sexed up and toned down her goth-stume style ensemble, since the last time I had seen her, a year and half before. I had taken her and my boys to New York City during the part of summer that makes everybody her whiny little bitch. My niece bore the heat like a country-less royal, dressed in a woeful homage to black victorian mourning apparel. Her Gene Simmon’s “demon destroyer” boots, adding a good four and a half inch cherry on top of her five-foot nine inch glamour ghoul frame. An interesting outfit choice for Yankee Stadium during an afternoon game in August. Us with overpriced tickets to the wrong side of the stadium. Our asses seared to seats in the middle of a heated tussle, against the braggart sun.
She is partial to dark woolen hats. Which contrast nicely against her light eyes. They’re almost clear, akin to the hottest and whitest part of a furious chemical blue flame. My mother and brother had those eyes.. Sometimes during the middle of casual conversations with my niece, she’ll look up from her phone mid-text and afix her guarded stare upon me. More often than not, I catch myself taking a physical step back. It’s a defensive gesture, a inherent inclination to prepare myself for the worst. Not from her, mind you, just from a previous timeline that had come before her. I try not to be obvious about it, as I regularly but delicately force myself to look away.
The past is why I took her and my boys to Yankee stadium. It was in honor of my mother and myself’s summer back in the day, when we watched the Yankees versus the Dodger’s World Series in our teeny town near the Colorado foothills, butt up against Fort Carson, in an apartment complex filled up to the teats with drug addled foot soldiers, and fatherless families hard up and on assistance.
I would always lay on the throw-shag in front of the TV’s. We had a large TV that had sound, and a small TV that had picture. There were 4 stations back then, but really only three, because no one ever counted PBS. It was my job to keep watch for the game schedule in the TV Guide and most importantly to change all the channels on both TV’s. My mother would be in her usual position in her recliner, stoned off of pills, that’d been chased down with an opioid derived injection. Cigarette dangling from spent fingers, a constant and careless threat towards the chair's already burnt and scarred arm.
The Yankee’s were our team from the get go. We both agreed that anything California can go “fuck” itself. During game six when Reggie Jackson blasted a two run homer in the seventh, we squealed together in delight. We both even thought that Bucky Dent was totally tubular, and we agreed to disagree, that Yankee’s catcher Thurman Munson was pretty much “grody to the max...” Wait, I’m sorry that’s not true. These were the things I said to her while she smiled drowsily, her eyes a little less furious and a little more blue. Pretending for my sake, not to appear confused.
My niece is finally here. Bunking out in my fancy garage. I’ve missed seeing those eyes, for almost twenty years.
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