Fizzling into Fragments

Dad was a poet on the ice, carving commas with his skates and plotting long, arcing narratives from the blue line to the net. I watched him play in an over-thirty league one year and he still had it. I could tell, though, that his game had become an elegy for the past when he used to share the ice with his older brother who waited at the bottom of the page for that frozen rubber end stop to punctuate a plotline destined to fizzle into a fragment. Nothing could get by him––except opportunity. He joined the Marines the day before a letter arrived in the mail inviting him to try out for the Cleveland Barons. 

I was fourteen when I found their sweaters in the back of the closet. Dad’s was white and tied at the chest: old school. Across the back, our last name was stitched in red lettering outlined with pale blue thread––just like the pros. I wore it everywhere, even during the summer months, like some protagonist destined to make it to the show. But you really can’t judge a book by its cover. That fall I tried out for my high school’s varsity team and was put on the roster because there weren’t enough kids with grades good enough to play. Our back-up goalie skated right-wing that season. 

We lost every game by at least five goals. I never scored. We had one kid who could play, but it didn’t matter. This wasn’t basketball where a single superstar could carry the team. It must have been agonizing for my parents to watch, considering my pedigree. Then, when my arm was snapped like a pencil by a cross-check into the boards (a plot twist that I never saw coming) the team folded. We all joked that the team just couldn’t make it without me. Either way, I'm still not sure if what I heard in the stands that night was a collective gasp or a communal sigh of relief.

MATTHEW SCHULTZ is the author of two novels: On Coventry and We, The Wanted. His chapbook of cento paradelles is forthcoming from Beir Bua Press (January 2022) and his collection of prose poems is forthcoming from ELJ Editions (May 2022).