Micro Prose: Reagan’s Motorcade by Joshua Young

Reagan’s Motorcade

i want to tell you this is fiction, but there are shitloads of witnesses. i want this seattle to be that la, that dc, that boston. i want these shows to etch in the pavement so your kids will feel the bass lines. i want these kids to notch gouges in history so journalists write about this, bands forms out of this, & when people talk about the history of music they will not skip the 1980s in seattle.

dave writes,       remember that house in bellingham?

remember akimbo chugging so hard

the walls changed color & beer bottles

rattled out of everyone’s hand.

so many bedrooms, stacks of vinyl, piles of cassettes, & scattered clothes. the record player is going, the cassettes player is on—a mix tape is happening.

dave writes,       who the fuck are the kill rooms?

he wants records, articles, proof.

dave writes,       you keep talking about the bands,

tell me about—

i want to tell him about the kills rooms & black flag at the madison, & how the kids left dents in the wood floors, how they took chunks out of the stage, but i keep thinking about those kids, the next day, how they flooded second avenue with red spray paint, when reagan’s motorcade pushed through, about the way they charged & clung to the black metal of his limo as secret service tried to yank them off, those kids painting whenever they could spray.

Joshua Young is the author of four collections, most recently, THE HOLY GHOST PEOPLE (Plays Inverse Press 2014) and the chapbook Sedro-Woolley Days: A Damien Jurado Mixtape (Midnight City Press, 2015). He is Editor-in-Chief at The Lettered Streets Press and works at the University of Chicago. He lives in the Albany Park neighborhood with two humans.

Photo by Renee Chun