"San Dimas High School Football Rules" • The Ataris (by Amy E. Casey)

The blanket doesn’t matter anymore, the way you spread it out in the grass across the street from the junior high that no longer exists. Community musicians were performing in the bandshell while the sunset crept to lavender. You poured grape juice, but that doesn’t matter, not how you set it out in wine glasses while we sat, cross-legged, in ripped jeans, or how we traded designs in Sharpie on our arms. 

We were sixteen then, but that doesn’t matter. The frogs don’t matter, the ones we re-homed, slimy-handed, onto the algae carpet of your backyard pool. It doesn’t matter that the Ataris song was playing on your CD player. I accidentally left my hoodie in your room, but your mom doesn’t live in that house anymore, and that room is not your room, so it doesn’t matter. 

The hood of the black truck doesn’t matter, where you sat at midnight on Thursdays, waiting for me to come off shift at the movie theater. It doesn’t matter that the cab smelled like hot popcorn and sweat while you touched me, a boy gliding across the knife-edge of becoming a man. I threw my head back as the summer night bled through the passenger side window and you said what if we got married and I thought I saw the future. But it wasn’t, so it doesn’t matter. It was a trick of the strange light, though you looked angelic in it. 

It’s just a song. It doesn’t matter that you held my childhood in your mouth for a time while you kissed me. It doesn’t matter that you gently pushed it back to me across your tongue, asking nothing. What matters is that I can still feel it, twenty years later, true as a sore throat.

Amy E. Casey is the author of the novel The Sturgeon's Heart (2022). Her short fiction and poetry have been published by Horns & Rattles Press, Lit Angels, Marrow Magazine, Club Plum, NonBinary Review, and Split Rock Review, among others. She lives and works on the cold freshwater shores of Lake Michigan. Follow her process on Instagram at @amy_e_casey or Bluesky @amy-e-casey, and the web at amyecasey.com