Every year on the summer solstice our group of friends sat around the firepit in Jake’s backyard and offered sacrifices. It started as a joke a few years back. Everyone was high on something. Everyone was still in their twenties. We spiked our Baja Blasts with the cheapest vodka we could find. That was back before any of us got hangovers, when I could single-handedly take down a dozen soft tacos without puking my guts out.
That was the year I tossed the only thing I had on me into the fire—pocket change and a receipt for cigarettes and movie rentals—and called it a worthy sacrifice. But the year—and myself—went on unchanged. Minimum wage job. A constant buzz. Student loans. Sinking feelings with no way out.
Jake’s house was a 1930s bungalow, inherited from his grandpa. The backyard was small and unkempt, with an abandoned washing machine near the garage. That was our firepit: we’d sit on the roof of the garage, the grit from weathered shingles sticking to our sweat-slicked legs, and throw shit into it. Our dirty laundry, we’d call it. Jake would try to recreate scenes from BASEketball. That was his sacrifice one year. A ratty VHS of BASEketball, meant to signify sobriety or something. We didn’t have to qualify our sacrifices, but Jake always did. That was the first year it felt real—significant—because Jake, of all people, finally wanted to change.
Black pungent smoke rose from the melted plastic and mylar magnetic tape, the cardboard sleeve wilted away in the fire. I tossed my shoes in, adding to the toxic haze. It didn’t last. Neither did Jake’s sobriety.
The next few years were a daze as our friend group thinned like Jake’s hair. New jobs with 401ks. Pregnant girlfriends who turned into wives. Grad school opportunities to make up for lost time and unused humanities degrees. That was the year Jake folded his Bachelor’s of Science into a paper airplane and flew it, dead center, into the fire.
“To sixty-thousand-dollar pieces of paper,” he said.
I watched it shrivel and disappear while Jake took a pull from his drink. I didn’t say what I should have: Quit being so passive and grow up. His computer science degree wasn’t worthless like my history degree, but I still made the most of it. He was just lazy and couldn’t adjust to post-college life. Couldn’t handle a nine-to-five. The world was always against him in some way.
Instead, I let it go. My sacrifice was a box of journals, a stack of Moleskins heaping so high, some slid out of the pit. Hundreds of pages. Thousands. The chicken-scratched musings of an amateur philosopher. Confessions. Depressed ramblings. All of them were parts of me I no longer needed. I was well-adjusted, went to therapy. These thoughts needed to be released in the world, not trapped between the pages of an overpriced notebook.
If I let them go, then he’d have been fine. That’s what I’d believed. Holding my unspoken resentment hostage was what kept Jake stagnant because I only held him accountable on paper. I grew up because he didn’t.
We all expected Jake to die young, just not the way he’d gone. Peacefully, in his sleep, with a clean toxicology report to follow. After the funeral, his mom came up to me and said, “He always loved you,” and handed me a box of his belongings. I stood in my soot-colored suit and cried, the box straining my arms, because if I loved him too, why did I feel this way? Like I only hung around Jake out of pity. A mirror to look into from time to time and think at least I’m not him.
I didn’t bother to look in the box until a couple of months later, on the summer solstice when we’d gathered around the firepit one last time, before they sold the house.
I opened the box of Jake’s stuff and among the retro video games and CDs was an ash-covered Moleskin. I knew the one. A Taco Bell receipt bookmarked an entry from over a decade ago. Resentment and bitterness on full, scribbled display.
We sat around the firepit, sharing a dozen soft tacos between us, passed around one last joint and a bottle of Tums. I pulled the pages from the journal and tossed them into the fire, one at a time. It was like plucking petals from a daisy: he loved me, he loved me not. I watched flecks of ink and paper turn to ash. They floated as embers dressed the sky. He loved me, always, was what his mom said.
***
Michael Bettendorf (he/him) is a writer from the Midwestern US. His recent fiction has appeared/ is forthcoming at The Drabblecast, The Martian Magazine, and elsewhere. He’s been nominated for the ’21 Best of the Net, ’21 Best Short Fictions, and ’22 Brave New Weird Award. He works in a high school library in Lincoln where he tries to convince the world Nebraska is too strange to be a flyover state. Find him on Twitter/Bluesky @BeardedBetts and http://www.michaelbettendorfwrites.com.
***
image: Ashley Beresch. Check out more of her work on Instagram @ashleyberesch
Rejection Letters 