cancer show

I live on a street not unlike the one I lived on when I lived with my parents as a kid. Probably not unlike so many other streets in other small towns. Like the street that you may have grown up on. Growing up surrounded by much the same things that I’m surrounded by now. Homes with children running through them destroying most of what was in their path. Homes cut off from the rest of the neighbourhood by fences and gates that seem to never open and let anyone in. homes that had dogs that barked well into the night, dogs that would be maced at one time or another, dogs that would bite. Like the dog that bit me the night we moved into the our new house. A house directly next door to my, then, best friend art.
Art and I had become friends through baseball but perhaps more by default due to the sheer size of our town and the general lack of kids my own age. Our friendship was based mainly on this and I think we both knew that then but it wasn’t something we ever talked about. We were kids and maybe didn’t even really understand what it meant to be friends let alone best friends.
Art and I would steal cigarettes and head to the wooded area near his house and share them like bottles of coke, passing them back and forth each trying not to cough or choke with each pull on the increasingly soggy end. “Don’t nigger lip it” art would sometimes say as if that was going to help me become a better smoker. Like it was better I become a great smoker than anything else. In the woods we were alone, in our own world but sometimes hardly spoke to each other. Sometimes I would find myself just following art through the woods trusting that he was leading us, me, somewhere. More often than not we would just circle around often coming across clearings where teenagers had had parties on the weekends, bottle and cans littering the area. Sometimes we would collect up the empties and take them to the bottle depot spending the money on jawbreakers and coke and when we could manage it, steal playboy magazines, shoving them down the fronts of our pants. Magazines that would eventually end up in milk crates hidden in the woods behind trees so we could look at them whenever we went there to smoke the stolen cigarettes.
Art’s sister, susan, was a growing concern to me. Three or four years older than art and myself it still only made her eleven or twelve but it was enough that I considered her. I ,of course, really had no idea what it was I was actually considering but I did know that seeing her naked was at the top of my list. I often think this is why art and I remained friends for as long as we did, or at least why I stayed friends with him. At night, after we had moved in next door, I would find myself sneaking out of the house and setting up shop close to the fence that separated our houses. Through the slates in the fence I could see into susan’s bedroom hoping each time that I would catch a glimpse of something. Something like what art and I had been looking at as we sat in the woods smoking and looking at stolen magazines. Every night I went back to bed after completeing yet another fruitless task. Some nights she would come into her bedroom and look out the window and I would get scared that she knew I was there, imaging what she would do if she ever found me there. I would sit and be as still as possible, sometimes holding my breath when she would look my way, my heart beating as if it was going to explode, sometimes sweating through my shirt. Often she would stand at the window brushing her hair looking at her reflection in the window almost like she was waiting for something to happen. Sometimes she sat at her dresser, looking at herself in the mirror, touching her face, rubbing her skin as if she was looking for imperfections. More often than not she would read on her bed, talk on the phone, close the curtains, turn off the lights and go to bed. And with that, so did i.