Gambol

Gambol
To leap playfully, romp, skip about by David backer

Ben and Wenzl sit on a curb in St. Louis passing a big can of light beer in a brown bag between them. It's five o'clock post-meridian and teenage girls walk with babies in their arms and homeless people move sick and slowly across crosswalks and men with patches of hair missing from their scalps and boils on their necks mutter to themselves as they lean on brick and grafiti'd walls and a man at an entrance to an alley squats, in plain sight, and wipes his ass with newspapers and stuffs clean newspapers, maybe a day old now, up into his crack. Children gambol around the street corners and the fences around the old buildings wearing clothes that are too big for them and sirens from a police car scream from a few blocks away.
"What would you do if you could get outta here?" Ben asks Wenzl.
"What would I do?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know man."
"You know what I would do? You know that girl works in Clark's Diner? The one behind the counter gives people muffins and says--"
"Hey there..."
"Yeah," Ben says, "her. I'd take her out to the country somewhere, like real far away. To a field of flowers, sunflowers or something, and we would be frolicking, I mean really frolicking, and there wouldn't be no buses stopping short, no addicts yelling at each other, just a big sky and trees and flowers and me and her holding hands, laughing. She'd be wearing a dress, you know, and we'd be laughing our heads off until we fell to the ground or something."
Wenzl makes a noise in response.
Then the children run by Wenzl and Ben and the children are laughing and the man in the alley with the newspapers in his ass pulls up his pants and lumbers deeper into the belly of his alley and the girls with babies are yelling at each other and laughing. More sirens shout from far off and the sound gets louder and louder and the door to a convenience store slams shut and Wenzl knows there's a sunflower somewhere and a girl in a yellow dress laughing on the ground with someone and he drinks his beer.