Goal
James Hartman
My old best friend doesn’t see me. There’s no reason to believe it could be me that he’s cut in line. I moved six years ago and said I’d never be back. That’s what he still believes and it’s what I believed too, until my ex-mother-in-law called me last Friday and said Kristina had died. She never woke up. Her mother said everyone has been destroyed. Her mother said Kristina was happy, she was fine, she had “gotten past everything.” Her mother said toxicology is still pending.
Darren has gained as much weight as I’ve lost. His arms and legs are puffed and his belly arches like a globe. Darren always twisted his jersey off whenever he scored and hurled it around on his fist, his teeth chopping at the air like he was devouring something. Our senior year we never won a single game in which Darren was fouled in the penalty box and our coach ordered me to take it. Penalties are momentum-swingers, but for us they violated something irrevocable. Darren argued our coach every time, his face popping red as he screamed.
The past keeps cutting.
Darren was fouled eight times in the penalty box our final season, the last time just before the first half of the Division I National Championship ended. From the white hash, I spiraled the ball into the bottom right corner for a 1-0 halftime lead. But in that game, as in the others, our communication malfunctioned. As defensive center-mid Darren talked the most, but he was too furious to relay commands and our attacks never generated any harmonized coordination, exposing holes in our shape the other team exploited on counter-attack. Our strong back line, fortified by two first team All-Americans, barely kept us in it. Fatigue eventually dismantled us. In the 88th minute we allowed two quick goals. Once again, Darren never apologized. Long projected as a second round draft pick, he was never selected. I went 16th, to our hometown team. But two months into my rookie season the diagnosis of a rare autoimmune disease ended my career. Kristina was the receptionist for my rheumatologist.
The funeral starts in thirty minutes. The church is two blocks away. The line moves forward. He still hasn’t noticed. He drags his head around on his neck. Darren has always been impatient. Darren said he and my wife had just started on the pool table when he texted me the first video. It lasted one minute and forty-two seconds less than the five-minute video he sent next. Both showed Kristina on her back atop the green felt, her arms slung above the spray of her silky red hair as if she were hanging. I panicked because I thought she had been drugged. But Darren cleared that up. “Don’t worry, I didn’t dose her,” he said, and turned the camera around on his chopping teeth. “She didn’t have to be, partner.”
Two people are ahead of Darren. Besides taking three steps forward, he hasn’t moved. I have not moved at all. All the ifs have me ensnared. If my body hadn’t deteriorated, I wouldn’t be in constant pain. If I hadn’t been in constant pain, I would have had sex with my wife. If my constant pain hadn’t made me irritable, I wouldn’t have called my wife a selfish nymphomaniac just because she wanted to be intimate with her husband. If I hadn’t been so skilled at penalties, our coach wouldn’t have ordered me to always take them. If my body hadn’t deteriorated, I never would have met Kristina. If I had never been so skilled at something that made Darren feel so inferior, he wouldn’t have targeted me as his vengeance against the world. If Kristina hadn’t suddenly died, I never would have returned to my hometown, trying to repair something the past had so spitefully cut.
Outside the cafe window, the wet thatch of evergreen softly gleams. More people drop in behind me. They wait for me to move forward. It would be so much easier to drop out, get in my car and drive the nine hours back to Philly and tell my brother he was right, I never should have gone to Ohio. Maybe then I could move out of his basement. After six years, maybe then I could truly move forward and figure something out. When my brother asked me why I had to attend my ex-wife’s funeral, I said I needed to understand. “Why she died?” Tim asked. “Why any of it,” I said. He nodded, said he knew what I meant. But I wonder if he really does. A successful environmental lawyer who translates laws that will tangibly impact the preservation of our planet—how could a man like that understand how invalidating it is to live in the bottom of his house and coerce my dysfunctional body every miserable morning to work the only job I can get, slapping meat after meat between bun after bun that will only harm person after person.
The two people ahead of Darren leave. He steps forward. The barista asks what she can get for him. I watch my old best friend drag his head around and around, and I realize that he is not actually wearing a suit. Thick red cargo shorts almost grip his puffed legs, and a brown t-shirt arches over his globed belly. He keeps scratching the top of it. His head drags around the other way. Curiosity tightens the barista’s eyes—or annoyance, that after all this time he still doesn’t know what he wants. Her eyes slide over, and they loosen on mine. Darren stops dragging his head. Then I pinch the slack knot in my tie snug against my neck, and step forward. Darren looks over. I can feel the blaze of his stare. His head jerks hard, like he just can’t figure it out, as I move toward the barista, hoping what I want will come to me.
James Hartman’s fiction appears in December, Raleigh Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Litro, Mount Hope, New World Writing Quarterly, and elsewhere. His fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best Small Fictions, and was a finalist in New Millennium’s 54th Annual Short Story Award. His scholarly work is featured in The Hemingway Review. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Eastern Kentucky University, and lives in Pennsylvania.
Table of Contents for A Formal Feeling