Telling Cleveland By William C. Blome

Cleveland, if I can’t tell you, why, then, who the hell can I tell? And I think it’s something worth telling. I don’t for one minute picture myself binding shit like this to my innards. I don’t, in other words, see myself in some scramble to fit corks into all my bodily openings just to imprison the essence of a vacation tale.

So Jasmine and I watched sharks in Freeport after dinner. We had foregone nice mints and flavored coffee to push out from our table. We had signaled to the waiter that we were going outside to span the balcony and watch hammerheads swallow pancakes and documents the maître d’ was going to toss out like flat bouquets into the churning water. I estimate, Cleveland, that this daily ritual lasted a little less than fifteen minutes the night we were there, and as it drew to a close (as the maître d’ gestured goodbye to the fish after flipping a final flapjack and a closing page), Jasmine suddenly yelled down to the sharks to stick around for a little while longer, and she told me she was going to run out to the parking lot for a license plate. She returned in a very short time, panting and out of breath, and with someone’s metal plate in her hands. She then frisbee-ed the plate out toward the sea below. It sank right away upon impact, of course, and that was that.

But, now, beyond Jasmine and my days in the Bahamas — and what with all the stuff that happened there — why, Cleveland, do you still insist on wanting to go to clown school? How many times have I begged you to take a chance and see what you might do with slipping transmissions and busted shocks? I have to think auto mechanic training would be a far better bet for your ass than almost anything else you could touch. And it’s not as if you have to abandon forever plans for going to clown school: just put them on hold for a bit.

Look, what say we try to be objective about this. What say we at least run things by Jasmine first thing when she comes home this evening?

© 2014 William C Blome

William C. Blome is a writer of short fiction and poetry. He lives in-between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and he is a master’s degree graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. His work has previously seen the light of day in such fine little mags as Amarillo Bay, Prism International, Laurel Review, The Oyez Review, Orion headless, Salted Feathers, and The California Quarterly.

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