Fragrance's Hit

Safely Into the Gap

Photo by Matin Hosseini on Unsplash

This is Fragrance’s first birthday with a limp. It’s more than a limp. He can’t bend his left knee at all. There’s a rod in it.

Every year, I always get Fragrance baseball tickets for his birthday. It’s simple, and a guaranteed winner of a gift. This year he doesn’t want ‘em.

We’ve been best friends since we were 14, when neither of us could afford baseball tickets, when Fragrance was still Curtis Luckett. 

He got a job at Dasch Lumber right out of high school and would come to his Uncle Rick’s bar, The Shamrock, right after work, too young to drink (Rick served us anyway) stinking like someone put a sweat bomb in boiled cabbage leftover from a skunk making golabki.