New Year’s Eve, 1991

My parents are at opposite ends
of the bar. She’s teased her strawberry blond
hair like a carved beehive.
He fluffs dark curls; sleeves plaid, rolled up,
showing pale skin like mine.
She sucks on a Marlboro at the bar,
the cherry tip illuminating her freckles.
He taps his foot to Madonna’s “Justify my Love”,
tries to watch Dick Clark countdown
on the TV behind the bar,
but he keeps looking at my mother.

He doesn’t know my brother’s sleeping
at my grandmother’s three blocks away
or if her divorce papers are stamped FINAL yet.
He sees the cherry between her lips
and thinks of the one below her hips.
He moves a seat closer.

I want to stop him,
say

she’ll use you to fill herself
like a broken dam.
Just buy yourself another Bud Light,
go back to your pool table,
and later, your single-wide trailer
in Saint Cloud, Florida,
and forget the push beneath your zipper
when she smiles over her shoulder.

I could stop it now.
But I watch and wait—

he extends a pale hand

—it too looks like mine—

places it on the small of her back
where her faded cherry halter floats
over the band of high-waisted jeans;
the freckles along her spine a connect-the-dot
he must play.

And when Dick Clark says
it is now 1992!
he’ll kiss away
the itch Mama went out
looking for that night.

I want to tell him it’s a mistake.
I won’t love her the way she wanted
and I’ll ghost her
the way she ghosts him.

But I don’t.

T.L. Browning is an undergraduate at the UCF. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her husband and four fur children. By day she manages a UPS Store, by night she manages the stories in her head. When she travels, she collects small cliché tattoos of places that steal a piece of her soul. Her fiction and nonfiction can be found in TCC's "Eyrie" under her maiden name Tamara Jeffers.