Yesteryear Fiction

Ah, to remember
(ah, to relive it all over again)
By Tony Rauch


. . . It’s dark and dank all around, but I know I’m outside. I feel a hint of cool, fresh wind stirring about. There is a comfortable familiarity in the air, a sense of scale and proportion that fits me like a glove. In the darkness I step to a faint rushing noise, then a dark gray light. Soon I’m walking toward a louder rushing - why I’m in the culvert under the highway. I start jogging, and after a few steps I appear from the opening that empties into a slight ditch at the far end of the shopping mall’s parking lot.

I stand in a little ravine surrounded by thin, scraggly trees. Cars and trucks flang past in the distance behind me. Their lights zip by in strips of flashes to reveal a few old tires in the little ditch. There is an old refrigerator lying on its side with its door removed, and an old couch lying upside down in a puddle of mud.

I turn around and around, looking all over. I recognize this place as a frequent after school hide-out of ours from several years ago. I step up the slight embankment and walk onto the mall’s parking lot. Through the darkness things come into view - dark gray outlines, vague objects. It must be the middle of the night. . . . some figures appear out of the darkness ahead. They turn and call to me. They recognize me. I wonder who they are. . . . I wonder what year it is this time. . . .


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Tony Rauch has three books of funky/jazzy/arty short stories out, "I'm right here," from Spout Press, and "Laredo," and “Eyeballs growing all over me . . again” from Eraserhead Press (some dark and gothic, some kinda sci-fi, some absurdist, some experimental, some fairytale, some fantasy-ish, some dream-like and surreal, some whimsical, some social satire).