AUGUST
kelly schirmann
paul lined the concrete floor with trashbags of it and we set about trimming while he ate pills and drove his truck into town for a couple more cases of gatorade.
the two new romanian girls sat at their own table drinking water and when we offered them a hit they made faces in foreign languages that still meant no.
at ten we realized he’d probably found someone to stay the night with so we said fuck it and took the tanqueray down to the river and got shitfaced and skipped rocks across the sandbar.
we weren't allowed to make cobbler in the kitchen anymore so we filled our beaters with blackberries and put them in each others' mouths and rubbed them on each others' bodies and our brown skin got torn by vines and we mixed the blood with blackberry juice and couldn't tell.
when we got back paul's truck was in the driveway and the garage radio was up the loudest it could go. we found him there, wildly high, figure-eighting around the trashbags with the new girls in the fluorescent lights, yelling through the distortion about elk on the freeway, the fucking wounds in our chests.
Kelly Schirmann
http://richardmanuelismyspiritanimal.blogspot.com
Kenyon College Commencement Speech for the Class of 2005
David Foster Wallace