I miss hockey.
I miss
Darryl shook his head. Poetry wasn't supposed to be that straightforward. You had to cover things in like, similes and metaphors and stuff like that. But what was another word for "miss"?
I wish I could
That was even worse. Darryl put down his pen and sighed. Poetry was hard. What was it his sister had said? "You should write about what you care about. Oh wait, you don't care about anything. Except football." Then Chelsea had tossed her hair and gone to her room to listen to screamo. His sister's goth tendencies were annoying, but they made her an expert on poetry, right?
Well, she wasn't an expert on him. Otherwise she would have known it wasn't football he really cared about.
Goddammit, he was just going to write whatever came to his mind. Darryl already had an A in English; one lousy grade on a free verse poem wasn't going to drag him that far down. He picked his pen back up.
I miss hockey.
Even though he hadn’t played since three years ago, when his family had moved to the States.
I miss being on a team
But that was ridiculous, because he was on the varsity football team here, wasn't he? But it just wasn’t the same—
with Dougie and Bobby and the other kids
named after their parents’ favorite hockey players.
And how on the weekend they’d come to my house
Their old house, obscured by the thick woods, so people visiting would always drive by and get lost and have to call for directions—
to skate on the backyard rink that Dad would build every winter
from plywood boards and a plastic liner from the hardware store.
He’d flood it overnight with the lawn sprinkler
Man, it would take forever to flood. He remembered pestering his dad, “Is it ready yet? Is it ready yet?” And his dad would roll his eyes and say no, but smile, like he understood wanting to take those first few strides on that new smooth ice.
Darryl's dad didn’t seem to regret moving south for his job. But dammit, didn’t he miss the backyard rink too? He'd really seemed to enjoy building the thing every year. Never mind that no one thought Darryl was going to become a pro hockey player, or that Chelsea was going to become a professional ice skater. It was purely for the fun of it.
Now they lived miles from any rink. Miles from Canada.
and it’d freeze all smooth so we could play shinny,
either with a goalie or without.
If Dougie, their lone goaltender, couldn't make it, they'd just mark goal areas with piles of snow at opposite ends of the rink and have at it. Darryl and his friends never thought about what position they were going to play; they all wheeled wildly around the ice, rushing at the puck or dropping back when it looked like they needed some defense. They'd bang into each other, slash at each other's sticks, and generally have the time of their lives. Even Chelsea would join in once in a while, and she played dirtier than most of the boys.
(And sometimes my mom would watch from the doorway
with a cup of tea in her hand.)
So when it looked like they were winding down, she'd bundle everyone inside the warm house and give them all steaming mugs of hot chocolate, like she always did. Always used to do.
But my favourite was skating out there alone.
Just me and the sound of blades on ice,
Not "sound" really, but sounds…smooth scrapes, sharp ones, the crackles from the imperfections of the natural ice. Familiar sounds, though they were becoming less and less familiar with every winter spent in this dry town—
just me, practicing moves,
blowing by imaginary defencemen,
playing the angles on imaginary attackers.
Or just circling the ice over and over
until the snow got too heavy
At which point Darryl would hop off and head to the back porch, knowing the whole family would have to shovel off the rink the next day—
or until the sky got too dark.
Though seriously, sometimes he'd skate then too. Forwards, backwards, circles under the rising moon. As an eight-year-old, as a thirteen-year-old—circles that grew wobblier as the day came closer to night. Sometimes he was lost in thought, and sometimes he wasn't thinking at all, just listening to the sounds and feeling the cold air and not having a care in the world. He’d only leave the rink once his mom yelled at him to come inside, and that she really meant it this time.
Kinda funny to think of his younger self out there, toque jammed on his head and jacket zippered up tight, skating long after everyone else had gone inside. But he hadn’t thought it funny at the time; it was just something he did. He wasn’t even exactly practicing.
The ice just
It just—
felt like home.
Darryl put down his pen and looked out his bedroom window. The sun was shining bright as ever.
He blinked twice. He gritted his teeth. Then he put the poem in his backpack, got up, and went downstairs to watch TV.
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Not much of a writer but my good friend persuaded me to join here and enter this contest. Sorry, this was kind of a niche story, wasn't it? My prompt was "Your story is about a football player in a house creating random poems"--proof that I can take anything and make it about hockey.
EDIT: Sorry about the weird spacing issues; it looks totally different from the preview! Don't know how to fix them...
