Literary Orphans

I Am 1 AM by Jonathan Duckworth

unchain_the_colors_before_my_eyes_by_invisiblemartyr-Joanna Jankowska

Mimes are people too. They have girlfriends. They have sex with those girlfriends. These are obvious things, but you don’t ever consider them until you’re with your buddies at the Waffle House at 11:30 PM, waiting on your hashbrowns, and one of your buddies ducks when a cluster of amateur mimes walks into the restaurant.

“See the tall one? I sort of fucked his girlfriend,” Teddy told us.

“How do you ‘sort of’ fuck someone?” I asked.

“Over the pants handjob?” suggested Rick.

“Nah, by sayin ‘sort’a,’ he wants to make it seem like it’s less his fault,” said Woody, ever the purveyor of lucid Florida Panhandle redneck wisdom.

Teddy wanted to get out, but Woody wanted to stay and eat. We all agreed with Woody, and not just because he was our ride. It had been a bad night, what with the bouncer at the town’s only strip club seeing through our fake IDs. We were ready to pay him all the money we’d brought for the dancers, self-defeating as that would have been, just to get through the doors, but he warned us never to try bribing a marine. We said Semper Fi, flipped him the collective bird, and then courageously booked it to Woody’s car. After that, we weren’t going to let a bunch of mimes scare us off before our food arrived.

There were five mimes. I recognized most of them under the makeup from school. They took a corner booth across the restaurant. It didn’t take them long to notice Teddy. When you’re little, mimes are creepy. But even as a seventeen year old, a gang of mimes is scary as hell if they’re all giving you the evil eye. All that makeup becomes like warpaint.

When our food arrived, the mimes were still eyeing us. I ate just a bit of my hashbrowns and got up to go to the bathroom, making a conscious effort not to glance at the mimes. Before I could even unzip I heard the chairs getting knocked over and the cooks yelling. When I stepped out, one of the mimes was stumbling around holding his head, the tall mime and Teddy were rolling on the floor, Rick had a small one pinned under his knee, and the remaining two mimes were struggling to pin Woody against the wall, what with all his redneck strength.

I don’t know if I’d have joined the fight, because before I could even think the red-and-blue lights of the sheriff’s deputies’ car flooded the restaurant. I guess no one had noticed the deputies drinking coffee in the parking lot before starting the brawl. Everyone left through the side doors, while I just stood there like an idiot. The deputies burst into the restaurant. It was just me and the small mime left. One of the cops helped the small mime up to his feet while the other cop asked me if I was with the “them-all troublemakers.” All I said was that I was their friend. But I might as well have said I was the mastermind. They took me and the mime to the sheriff’s department. They processed me first. Said they were calling my parents, that I’d be free to go in the morning and that what happened to me after that was up to my folks, and blah blah blah. They wanted names. I didn’t give up Woody or Rick, but I gave up Teddy, because fuck him.

At half past midnight the mime joined me in the cell. The deputies had scrubbed away most of the makeup to take his mugshot, but there was plenty left around his chin and forehead. I asked him his name. He didn’t answer.

“Still on the clock,” I muttered.

He nodded.

“Are you always miming?” I asked.

He shook his head and tugged at his striped shirt.

“So you don’t ever talk when in costume? That’s dedication.”

A few minutes passed filled only by the buzz of the fluorescent light tubes before I started talking to the mime. I said it was fucked up how I was the one in prison when I wasn’t even in the fight, and how my friends just left me there. I started to say that I was the only one of them with a future—well maybe not now—and how… I looked at the mime. He was playing a little violin.

“You think I’m a crybaby?” I asked.

He pouted his lips and traced the fall of tears down his cheeks.

I stood up. “What’s to being a mime anyway?” I asked. “Anyone could do it.”

I started to do some miming of my own, building a box around myself like in cartoons. The mime’s body shook with mute laughter.

“You got some constructive criticism, buddy?” I asked.

The mime stood up and began to construct the same box around himself. Only I noticed his hands weren’t like mine. His thumbs and fingers made perfect 90 degree angles, and the movements of his limbs were exact, mechanical. When I tried to make my hands like his, it actually hurt my thumbs. It took me a little while, but I started to get the hang of it. Once I finally made a decent box around myself the mime took his little beret off and saluted me. I asked him what was next, and he showed me how to drag myself along with a rope, how to walk against a stiff wind, and how to climb down an invisible staircase.

Around 1 AM, we were miming what I think were the operations of an assembly line for a Ford Model-T. Eventually I noticed the red-eyed sheriff’s deputy gawking at us through the bars. Seeing the look on his face, I knew that this was the first time the deputy had ever walked in on two prisoners building a car.

That alone made it a good night.

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Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an MFA student at Florida International University, where he serves as a reader and copy-editor for the Gulf Stream Magazine. His fiction and poetry appears in or is forthcoming in Sliver of Stone, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Penny Dreadful, Synaesthesia, and Gravel: A Literary Journal among others.

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–Art by Joanna Jankowska

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