prompt: blur, title: association by guilt in misc. flash fiction

I’m conflicted about the role I’ve fallen into in, as a lore-keeper for all my home-town’s darkest open secrets, the things that everyone knows if they were there at the time, but sound absolutely as if fantastical delusion to anyone who wasn’t. On the one hand, it’s nice to be remembered for something, anything, to have a social purpose. Sometimes it makes me feel smarter than I really am and that’s usually a nice feeling. On the other hand, I don’t want to seem like a bummer who just focuses on the worst things. I’m incredibly enthusiastic about the good parts of this life, this place, however those things seem to be dwindling in numbers. You won’t meet a man who loves the art his friends make more than myself and will certainly never meet a man louder about that.

On the third hand though, the imaginary hand and also the most important of hands, of course, it just makes the chunks of my years spent here seem like an asynchronous blur of starts and stops. Moments of horror frozen, stretched out to near infinitude, forcing the good times and mediocre times to shrink away into a thing so small you could drown it in a backyard kiddie wading pool.

I’m graduating middle school and my cousin’s being murdered. I’m a middle-aged man and his killer is now considered a pillar of the community, having never seen real consequences for his crime. The town jeweler is being murdered by a serial killer, fast-forward he’s “falling out” the back of a triple-locked paddy wagon to his death under suspicious circumstance. My father was down the street working in the liquor store the cops would later use to frame him for a crime so they could blackmail him into quitting City Council. They’d shared a prom limo in high school.

One classmate ODs on lighter fluid, another blows his arm off building pipe bombs in hopes of blowing up our school. Have the Catholic priest and football coach been run out of town yet for having molested teenage boys in other towns, after being placed in our community by powerful friends with no mention of pasts? Was that last year? Two decades ago? Did they find that body of the city worker’s girlfriend hacked up in the basement, while he was on a sudden “vacation” in Florida? Will they ever admit who burned down the high school in the mid-Seventies? What year is this? Who was I? Just because it actually happened doesn’t mean any of it makes sense.

They’re closing down the city pool with my grandpa’s name on it, so they don’t need to increase taxes for the local idle rich who couldn’t spend what they have in three whole lifetimes. Another dark day to add to the piles, I guess. Your grandchildren won’t believe that things like city pools ever existed. They’ll think I’m some crazy old liar when I tell them but I’ll just be old and crazy.