Courage, My Word.

Fragments of teenage memory

The challenge prompt - courtesy of Kayleigh Thorpe :
A sparkler burns for about forty-five seconds. That’s your scene.

Not the length of your piece; the length of the moment inside it. Whatever happens has to begin when the sparkler is lit and end when it burns out.

It has to be night. There has to be a sparkler. The piece ends when the sparkler does. 400 words - shorter might be better.

Include the smell of smoke. Anywhere in the piece.

Daylight teetered in those last moments before the inevitable darkness when she lit the night’s first sparkler. The rich smell of charcoal smoke hung heavily in the humid evening air. Canada Day. One of many public gatherings dotted across the GTA where we, the huddled masses, banded together on the shores of Lake Ontario to take in every community’s fireworks display, from Hamilton to Kingston.

Whether inspired by the four sneaky beers already down my throat, or Gord Downey’s unmistakable croon lofting into the stratosphere from a nearby car - Courage (For Hugh MacLennan), we’ll never know. Either way, I was a moth, powerlessly drawn toward that hissing magnesium beacon.

Abandoning my teenage tribe and well-positioned folding chair, I paused only to hook two Molson Export bottles from the cooler before wordlessly padding off toward the curly mop of brown hair in a burnt orange tank top and cutoff jeans, Teva’s slapping against my heels with purpose.

I can’t even remember exactly what I said when I flopped down beside her, burning sparkler stuck in the grass between us. Still, it must have been A-game material, because my first impression of her face was the shadows of flashing aluminum reflecting from her toothy smile.

I think her name was Jen (a reasonably safe bet in those days, there were at least fifteen in my graduating class). If she told me her last name, that memory has long since surrendered to age and alcohol. The clink of Molson bottles and the acrid smell/taste of burning sulfur dominated the final few seconds of the sparkler’s fuse, creeping lower as we exchanged our most important details at the time—where we went to university, what we were studying, and our idealistic post-graduation plans.

Kingston, being the farthest east along the lake, fired the evening’s opening salvo, a willow burst of white, painting the sky to our left, the familiar distant pops arriving a second later. Neil Young took over the evening’s soundtrack, the opening riff of Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World belted out across the water toward our American neighbors. I recall wondering if the self-crowned park DJ was a genius, acutely aware of the song’s deep irony, or, more likely, mistook it for the superficial patriotic anthem the chorus suggested. Either way, probably Jen’s head landed on my shoulder, just as the sparkler went dark.