Snapshot ‘87, by Sheldon Lee Compton
Huddled up to a split-end oil barrel half loaded with chunks of coal plucked from the belt, its insides on fire, George fought off the urge to take two more pills. Instead, he charged three coal scoops, stood and held two pills for more than two minutes, took a female connector to the mouth of the mines to a man everybody called Torch, loaded the barrel again and felt warm, even when the guts of the barrel went black and cold. If anyone came looking to steal cable or tools or batteries, he didn’t notice.
He felt nova-like, bursting in all directions. He could split apart and send flying a blast of blue uniform, arms, legs, a chipped tooth from a high school fight, a birth-marked left shoulder, a busted backbone sent careening into the night. He felt kinetic, the way Julie could once make him feel during an argument, the same way she could make him feel during sex, trembling with a basic emotion older than either of them and longer lasting.
The night sky mixed with the tops of the trees leading up and away from the mine, and George didn’t look at a clock until four hours of the shift had went past in a wave of coal dust and dizziness. While trying to keep his balance on the walkway crossing over the belt line, he felt the pill bottle pushing into his leg, reminding him that within that bottle was relief of some kind, and then, beyond that, oblivion. But it wasn’t oblivion George thought about when he shook two more pills from the bottle and stood thinking for more than five minutes about chasing them with two waters from the supply shack.
His little boy slipping behind the kitchen counter. Russell with his little hands fumbling with a drawing before it was time for George to leave for work. Coloring lightly in circles, adding two large ears and then two smaller circles inside for the eyes. A looping frown for a mouth. Russell holding the drawing up to him, the crayon face there dripping large, oval tears and crossing the looping frown.
His own father, standing in the doorway outside the bedroom he and Russell had shared for the past three months since everything that happened had happened. Then on the front porch where the two of them stood, shadowselves against the kitchen window, close to one another while listening to the sounds of winter floating there, a backdrop for their silence, the rattle of the warming truck off in the distance.
Julie smiling at him at him across the kitchen table, pouring them glasses of whiskey. Later the whiskey bottle between them on the bed, singing songs to one another. Julie hiding the pills after the second surgery, crying as he yelled, accused her while she begged him for quiet, begged him not to wake Russell, sang songs to herself while he slept in the living room floor.
