Western Pennsylvania
Chloe Shiffman
I am ten and cannot drive, so I ride my bike to Tamal’s house. Tamal’s house is two left turns and four right turns away from mine. His bike is always in the yard, next to a sun-bleached Fisher Price slide and his baby sister’s vacuum toy. Tamal’s bike is a neon green hand-me-down with monster claw slashes on the sides. My bike is also a hand-me-down, plain blue. Tamal does not like his bike, so when I come over, we switch. Then, we ride to the creek.
Tamal has sheepswool hair that his mom shaves into a buzzcut. I have creek-colored hair, shaved in the same way. My hair could be soft, but the cut is too close: when I run my hand over my head, the spikes graze my palm. The far suburbs of Pittsburgh are not the right place for Tamal. Tamal throws rocks at frogs in the creek, but is careful to miss. He whites out when leeches suck into his calves. I cannot smell the softness in him yet, but I’ll almost touch it twice.
—
The first time, we are twelve, playing Road Rash in my basement. The stuff my mom didn’t take to Cincinnati is stacked in boxes around the TV. Right now, I am very into motorcycles. I like the idea of going fast, leaving nothing behind me but a rubber skid. Tamal likes racing too. I drive fast and reckless, screeching into the guardrails and throwing digital sparks. Tamal drives just as fast, tailing my Diablo Vipera, tires screeching in the wake of my rampage. Upstairs, my father lies wreathed in crushed cans of Tech Light, leaking his stale sweat smell into the crushed velvet couch. The box plays Steelers games but his milky eyes can’t see them. My father lets milk go sour, lets laundry pile in dunes. He does not pack lunches, so I make myself cheese sandwiches and Dunkaroos for school, canned Spaghetti-O’s for dinner. My father refuses to sleep in his bedroom. Sometimes, at night, I hear a wheezing moan float down the hall from the living room, a cloying, humiliating sound. I squeeze my pillow around my head but my father’s whimpers wind their way into my ears, threading through my skull, humiliating both of us.
After the sixth round of screaming every slur we know at the Genny, I slide to the floor and tear the plastic off a pack of Oreos, then forget why I opened them in the first place, or what I’m doing, or where I am. This has been happening more and more often: odd gaps in my world, like the feeling of a wall missing in a previously reliable room, or the stumble of an extra stair where muscle memory recalls a smooth surface. I look up to locate myself and see the boxes. A name I never called my mother is scrawled over and over on their sides. I grip the Oreos in my lap. I stare at the wall. Then, I chuck the box right at the cardboard. It hits the wall with a satisfying smack, then thuds dully on the carpet, scattering loot of pasty cream and stale black cookie.
After a minute of poorly-stifled sniffling, already sharp and foreign in my new adolescent’s voice, Tamal slides down the leather couch and settles next to me on the floor. This subdued reaction could have been excusable in the court of seventh grade boys, but the longer Tamal’s peaceful silence stretches on, the less comfortable it feels. But we both know I won’t move away.
A better friend would nudge this softness out of Tamal, would make the long run easier for him. But I can’t. Instead, I helplessly watch him savor Bugles and imitate car horns and leave the twilight porch light on for the moths, watching him watch their tissue wings with open wonder, and kick myself for my cowardice. I let older boys do my work meaner, then sit in silence next to my bleeding, confused best friend as if I can’t hear the terrifying softness in him like the ocean roaring in a conch.
This is to say that usually, I’d follow Tamal’s inadvertent lead, our new looming, foreboding social conventions be damned. I’d tip my head back into the leather of the couch, find his eyes, and hold the quiet together. But then, across the carpeted floor in my basement of castoffs, Tamal reaches out his hand.
This is a softness I can’t stomach. Everything about his pink palm and dark fingers, extended belly-up to me on the gritty fibers, wobbles in me like the edge of a razor blade. Someone needs to pack my lunches. If I reach for this hand, I will break.
The look I shoot Tamal looks something like disgust, fury. I don’t mean it, and I can’t control it. My brain immediately catches up with my body and snatches thegrimace from my face before Tamal can fully register it, but I can tell from the widening of his eyes and slight recoil that he’d seen enough. The thing between us is grief, but we are both too young to know it, let alone understand the faces it dons. Tamal, startled and singed, quickly retreats his hand. He punches me on the shoulder instead, hard enough to bruise.
—
The second time, we are seventeen. Tamal and I are learning to kill deer. I am learning to like the blood. Tamal is learning that there are some things he can’t force himself to like. We bunker in the cold earth, smelling of deer pee and mud, a rifle resting carefully under our chins. When the young buck comes, it is regal and decadent as a minor god. I aim the gun. Tamal pulls the trigger. The beast falls.
We race to the kill, crowing and slapping each other’s backs, unprepared for what we’ve done. It was a sloppy beginner’s shot. The beast is drowning in its own blood, gurgling and splashing, eyes white and panicked. We stare in horror. Something in Tamal tightens, snaps. He drops to the grass and touches the writhing deer’s flank, plumming his hand with blood. His eyes water from the cold. I am petrified. Though I found new words for it, I am as helpless as I’ve ever been.
I am slowly becoming used to this feeling of being left behind by Tamal. It is not just the college applications, the diverging hobbies, the unshared minutia of our days. There is something drawing to the surface of Tamal, or perhaps resurfacing, in him: something that tilts to the sun, that lifts people to where they were always supposed to go. I feel an ugly slew of repulsion and jealousy when I recognize that the place he and the dying deer go is somewhere I cannot follow. But the young buck’s terror has knocked something loose in me. Faintly, I feel something in me, too, something that wants to reach out and touch the fading warmth of the thing we are killing. To feel the autumn chill and primal regret and let it run through me, raw and terrifying and humbling. Maybe I do not need to be left behind.
I start to kneel, but I hesitate a moment too long. The beast twitches and dies beneath Tamal’s coarse pink palm. Tamal withdraws tenderly and wipes his hand on his dungarees, already heading back for our field dressing knife. We are at the stage of our friendship where he has stopped looking at me before he leaves. I force myself to tag the antler’s base. My hand looks alien, chapped and white from the cold, an unearthly touch of death. This roiling feeling is pride, I tell myself. I am larger than a beast.
—
The final time, we will be fifty eight. Tamal will come to pack up his parents’ house. He’ll bring a son with long hair and a flower-patterned skirt, and a child wearing leggings in parade-candy colors. His children will look out of place in Western Pennsylvania, but Tamal will click into the pine and clapboard in a way that he never did growing up. It will be because he’s only here to leave. I will have tried to visit him in Washington, but the woods were unfamiliar and eerie to me, and I left before I was supposed to. It will have been years since we last saw each other. I will live in a house four lefts and one right from the house I grew up in. I will have three sons who do not speak to me, who live with their mother two towns over. I will also have a dog, a mangy bitch that gets more of my gentleness than anything else I’ve loved.
Once his children are near asleep, Tamal will invite me over for a beer. We will sit on plastic chairs on what was once his parents’ lawn and slap at mosquitoes. I will be jealous of his children; of how I could see, through the buttery kitchen window, his youngest child bow their forehead for a kiss before going up to bed. Tamal will be starting to turn velvet with age. It will look good on him. The waxing moon will bring it out: his smooth belly and his apple cheeks and his greying locs. From a distance, I will look more or less the same as Tamal, but as I draw closer, my hardness will betray me: my sharp bloated gut, my sour breath, my steel eyes.
He’ll sit next to me on the green plastic chair, already facing back toward the west. His malty breath will wash over me. His hands will rest gently on his lap. Tamal will never know that his friendship was the love of my life.
I’ll almost reach my hand into the space between us. I’ll try my hardest to move my fingers, one by one, dragging them ever so slightly through the open air. I’ll struggle and strain: just one digit, just one inch, just one twitch. I won’t be able to do it. Instead, Tamal and I will watch the fireflies blink, the sky turn black, and settle into the shared quiet of a Pennsylvania twilight.
Chloe Shiffman is a senior at Yale University.
ABOUT THE ART | Prague Morning by Alison Le, 2026. Alison Le is a student at Yale University.
