basement apartment: kicking the can

my mom used to lock my brother and i out of the house after we finished our schoolwork (we were homeschooled) so she could watch 'the young and the restless' in silence and solitude. one particularly hot day Brennan picked up a baseball bat and a Mcdonalds happy meal toy, walked down to the bottom of the driveway, threw the figure up in the air, and struck it with the bat, scattering simba into the middle of the culdisac. i grabbed my bat and followed suit. when one of us had sufficiently obliterated a plastic toy, we went scavenging for another. anything that we would never miss, and maybe some stuff we would, burst across our metal bats like tiny glass balls of confetti. eventually our hands grew blisters and our bare shoulders felt like our veins were pumping molasses. we set our bats down, skipping over shards of batman and barbie to the hose. we made mud puddles in the grass to cool our blazing feet and drank until our stomachs made sloshing noises then tried to punch each other to make one of us vomit. i laid down in the grass and stared into the heavens, and i remember wondering how a tree could be male or female like i had heard my mom talking about to our neighbors. i wanted to break more stuff. i wanted to light the trees on fire with a magnifying glass, male and female or whatever they were. i wanted to drive a motorcycle muchtoofast off of a building in a leather jacket. i wanted to be jonathan taylor thomas with a girlfriend i could call "babe". i wanted to live forever, spitting blood, clenching scabbed knuckles. i wanted to tell someone to shut up and not get in trouble. i wanted to be anything but twelve. whatever.