Burbank Academy 1960
by Jamal Lee

“BALE'S got real bad issues,” Tilden said of his distant cousin, “and hasn’t got the proper wiring that a boy typically falls out of his mother’s hole with. Mr. Stillwater showed up pretty quickly once he heard his dog start barkin’ and damn spilled over with wrath at Bale’s disrupting of his whole arrangement with Gertrude and me.”
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The night he told her he wished she would stop wearing her hair the way her sister wore her hair, she cried, and said, “But I wore my hair this way first.” He did not want to see her cry. He hated the way they—the sisters—cried.

Meandering through the comforts
that are everywhere, one notices
a yard sale of a retired dentist
his chair the centerpiece.
It sits leather-bound on a gravel driveway.
We circle it expectantly.
Its arse cushion sags
like the middle of some prophesy.
The round floor plate has a crack
and the arm rests display indentations.
Someone has taped a paper sign
off center, on its knee-jerk back.
It reads," This chair was once used
as a prop on the early sci-fi film,
THE JOURNEY TO URANUS, and performed
service to humanity thereafter as an
indispensable savant to the Captain's bridge."

I am at mum’s place with Clive and Gerry. They’d wanted to go past and get some money out of her change jar for hamburgers and maybe scare the dog for fun. I didn’t want to, I’d usually tell them I’d pay instead but it was the day before my cheque went in so off we went.

Mum flushes pink and happy when she sees us, it hurts my heart a bit. She puts and fusses and places and clutches our hands with her papery ones until we pull away. I see she has taken to wearing my brother’s ring again but I don’t want to say much so I just look into her grey eyes and tell her, It’s good to see you, ma.