June, Reimagined

by Rebekah Crane

“No. George Bush is ruining my life. The oil industry is ruining my life. Hell, my dad’s girlfriend is ruining my life. But you, June, you may have been a thorn in my side, a pain in my ass, a benign growth on my face, a really bad cold sore, the person who let all the ants escape from my ant farm, but you could never ruin my life.”

Matt Tierney wasn’t just her best friend. He was a physical place—the safest June had ever known. Safer than her own house or bedroom. Safer than herself. And she had run away from that. But she had a good reason. Matt had said June could never ruin his life, but he was wrong.

“I know I look like Shrek, but I was quite dashing in my younger years.”

“You’re rash, June. You jump before you think.

Had she not just spent an entire week getting so intimate with rain that it knew her body better than her high school boyfriend had?

She had come to realize, in the past few months, that emptiness had a sound. The absence of Josh in the house was louder than when he had played Tupac at full volume to get amped up before his Friday night football games.

“Look around. This place is full of stories.”

“What makes stories interesting isn’t what you see on the surface,” Eva explained. “It’s all about what characters are desperate to hide. Then they have something to lose.”

“I can give you a fancy camera,” Ms. Flores once said to June. “But no matter how good the equipment, it still only takes pictures. It can’t see. Only you can do that. That’s the job of an artist.”

June vividly recalled Matt with his freshman-year homecoming date, Vanessa, who, while Matt was wildly convulsing to the tune of “Come on Eileen,” asked if he was having a seizure and whether she should put a spoon in his mouth.

i also wildly convulse to “come on eileen”

But the most interesting aspect of Eva’s room were the sheets of paper, fifty-two in total, lining her wall like a mismatched quilt of white rectangles and black words. Each was the last written page of one of Eva’s unfinished stories. The wall was a homage to ideas never seen to completion. With a few of them, Eva had gotten so frustrated she had stopped midsentence, printed the page, hung it on the wall, and never looked at it again—like a dangling conversation cut short.

The cold on her face and the wind in her ears were welcome distractions. She tipped her head skyward, arching her back, letting the wind blow over her. Her ears were too fogged with noise to hear the voice in her head that constantly nagged at her, the shame that dripped like a leaky faucet in the back of her mind. It all went quiet. June lifted her arms toward the sky.

Speaking about Josh in the past tense still felt unnatural, made it sound as if her brother was no longer Josh, when to June he was ever-present, always infinitely himself.

It felt unfair that no matter how big the life, we all reduce to the same small pile of ash.

because while every living, breathing human carried the weight of grief and guilt in some form, only a few created a permanent harbor for it.

“I’m sorry” was never on time. It was always too late. Those two words haunted June.

She lowered the camera. Lennox was like a Van Gogh painting. He was a distinct, concrete image, complete and whole, but on closer examination, June saw all the individual brush strokes, a vast palette, each conveying a feeling that made him much more complex.

She knew what Matt was doing. If June was going to be reckless with her life, Matt would join her. He wouldn’t let her drown on her own. He would hold her hand until the end.

Matt had always stood carefully outside the claustrophobic closet, but he suddenly stepped inside, cigarette and all, and June was choking on him. The safest person in her life was suffocating her.

But that’s the thing about dogs. They don’t care about your past. They don’t judge you when you’ve had a bad day or month or bloody year. They still love you even when you’re a complete shitbag.”

“I have no fucking control in a used bookstore.”

me neither