ONE

We sat on the wooden steps at the back of the house and smoked cigarettes watching the tabby cats play between the stringers and the risers of the lower stairs. The wooden steps beveled in the middle, showing the ware of many feet. Paint that had not been worn free peeled and rised from the wood at the ends of each step. Dawn marched against the row of flat rooftops of the neighbor’s houses. We sat there mistakingly waiting to become men. Stephen sat a step from the top, his forearms rested on his knees, his hands clasped but for his right fore and middle fingers holding his cigarette, his stare on the ash. I sat somewhere in the middle, my right foot on the same step, my arm draped over my knee, my back against the railing. We figured some spirit of some other world and religion may appear through the dark of night and render us men so we could get on with our lives. We sat there until the sun began to pull the moisture from the small squares of grasses that lay between concrete paths through the backyard, misshapen with rounded corners by lazy feet and dogs with fast hearts. No spirit materialized within the smoke of our cigarettes or ever arrived at all and so with the sun fast climbing into the sky we retreated into his house to sleep a few hours. So, is that memory? Like every other soul there are more, some darker. That wasn’t the only time we had sat on those desperate, futureless steps. We had a million times. We didn’t really smoke that much, or at all, it was an act for each other to express our maturity and at other times for our friends. We had no money to buy smokes, you just wanted to separate from the house, the authority, the institution and it too gave us the illusion of independence, freedom, adulthood. Sitting in backyards and on people’s porches were like vacations. Those steps were not my parent’s. We, my friends and me, just wanted to be old, we were tired of being kids. Watching the cats was not just a pastime it was a lesson. The cats belonged to a woman who wanted more than we understood. She had eleven. I would love to be able to recite their names but then I would have to admit to being a totalitarian. We could name them A through K. Something silly like that. And I can’t recall her name either. She was as old as the turn of the century and we couldn’t understand her. It wasn’t her acsent, it was