Immortality is yours! by Uzodinma Okehi

Crack! That was the sound of our hearts stopped, the crunch of my soles against the pavement, and I pushed off, straight up from the curb, a thousand feet into the air . . . And what can you ever really do given the situation? Even had any of us been able to act, to move, what was there to say? Time never slows, in fact those are the moments where your mind moves like the hummingbird; touching, dancing over each little thing, or floating, time as an ocean, and that break-beat is wave upon wave of perspective. Could I have known, for instance, as we watched that girl crossing the street in front of us, that one day, years later, Valdez would stand-up at his office job, tear off his tie and begin screaming at the top of his lungs? Or that Goezman would end up living as a kind of pasha, retiring before age 35 with two women to a small country estate? How many times between now and then would I say I’d stopped stock-still to watch some girl’s ass from behind? Ass from the future. Ass encompassing everything, like two snow-capped mountains crashing together. And not to dwell on it too much, but I felt ashamed to be there frozen. All I could think that night was about the plot of the shitty movie we’d just seen, about the Trojan war, with that white hero killing everybody, giving those speeches about immortality and whatnot. And who’s to say those moments don’t last forever, that somewhere behind us we’re not still making the same mistakes, taking the same wrong forks in the road, overestimating ourselves again and again?

Uzodinma’s favorite color is Aqua—no, Lapis. Or maybe Sky Blue. He still doesn’t own a cellphone . . .