- Keeping Score*
The cards nestled under their noses like a magician themoment before the final act. How they abracadabra amemory out of breath. Call a spade a spade or called it asputtering streak of light.
Pops and Uncle Craig eyed each other from across the table. Blinking like they could communicate the count in their hands through their retinas. Spades be like that. Will have grown men thinking they’re X-men reincarnated at a 7th ward barbecue, like they could turn the porch into the sort of sanctuary that scoffs at what the world says they cannot do.
Mom and Auntie Ness laughed like they had nostalgia smoldering in their bellies. Heads bent backwards toward the sky as if watching constellations playing the dozens behind the moon.
You could tell they had the lead by the way Mom crossed her legs. How the crisscross of her brown beckoned for Pops’s excuses, begged for him to claim she ain’t do nothing but get a lucky hand. How she kept tapping the pencil on the yellow notepad the same way the rain is a metronome against concrete.
She loved to rile him up like that, turn him into the boy she met back when none of them were keeping score. [End Page 580]
CLINT SMITH is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the National Science Foundation. He has published in The New Yorker, The Guardian, American Literary Review, Boston Review, Harvard Educational Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he is the author of Counting Descent (Write Bloody Publishing, 2016).
Footnotes
* Reprinted with permission from Switchback 22 (2015). Clint Smith © 2015.