Growing Up Dead in Texas

by Stephen Graham Jones

“You know how it is being seventeen, stupid as a jackrabbit and twice as horny.”

You always look for the moment you grew up, I think. Like it’s a thing that happens all at once. But sometimes it is.

It’s what we all want, to exist like that, so deep in the moment that that moment never stops dilating out and out. Like being inside a balloon forever inflating. That sound of fullness. That feel.

Are they going to get married someday? It’s what you always think. What you can’t help but think. What I was already thinking, holding a girl’s hand at a football game. It’s not what you really want, though. What you really want, on top of a module like that, a girl billowing her shirt out so you can duck into it, get your cigarette going, is for that moment, for the two of you, to last forever. To live in the balloon.

it has to be the same thing I felt one bad night in Austin, trying to merge onto a fast street deep in the morning: that if I just make one mistake here, one understandable bad judgment, the kind people make hundreds of times each day all over the world, then nothing will matter anymore.

At six-thirty in the morning you talk to everything.

Jonas will promise, sure, always keeping his hat brim down, his voice different, and fifteen years after that, he’s still never put that saddle across a horse’s back. Doesn’t know where it might take him, what sunset he might have to ride into. Fall out the other side of.