Real Life(82)
They arrived at their designated fire pit. The fire was going, and the others were already roasting food. Yngve had brought plates and utensils. Wallace sat next to Cole on a stump and discovered that he loved tennis too. They talked excitedly about that, the fire splashing orange and gold all over their faces.
Someone wanted to make a toast. They popped a bottle of mid-priced champagne. They looked at each other. They smiled. Lukas cleared his throat. “You know, guys, this is it. This is it. Our life. It starts now.”
“Hell yeah it does,” Yngve said, putting his hand on Lukas’s back. “Hell yeah.”
“To life,” Emma said, raising her plastic cup. The firelight danced through it. Wallace watched it undulate, writhe in the liquid. Golden bubbles rippled up to the champagne’s surface. He lifted his cup too.
“To life,” they all said, quietly and in their own ways, and then louder, until they were chanting it again and again. To life, they said, imbuing those words with all their hope and all their desires for the future. Their laughter rang through the night and through the trees, and on the shore they had left behind, people were eating dinner and laughing and crying and going about things as they always had and always would.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, in no particular order, to Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Cal Morgan, Antonio Byrd, Derrick Austin, Natalie Eilbert, Sarah Fuchs, Emily Shelter, Pam Zhang, Philip Wallén, Noah Ballard, Hux Michaels, Justin Torres, Jeanne Thornton, Monet Thomas, Esmé Weijun Wang, Judith Kimble, Sarah Crittenden, Peggy Kroll-Conner, Kim Haupt, Heaji Shin, Erika Sorrensen-Kamakian, Hannah Seidel, Sarah Robinson, Aaron Kershner, Elena Sorokin, Scott Aoki, Abbey Thompson, and my whole IPiB cohort.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Lit Hub. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.