NORTHEAST OHIO SPOTLIGHT

SPARKS

Nonfiction by Joe Kapitan

In sixth grade I kissed Terry Melznyk for the first time, pressed up against the guardrail of a highway overpass, right above the northbound lanes of Interstate 77. The overpass was nothing more than a short street and a bridge without a name. I can’t remember if I picked that place or if she did, but I remember we didn’t want to hide, to hell with secrecy—we wanted everyone to see us! We wanted drivers to honk their horns at us kissing or maybe even swerve and lose control and flip their cars into the grassy berm where they would climb out of the steaming wrecks all dizzy and covered with sparkling shards, kind of the way we both felt out there in the open on that no-name bridge. Years later, the city named that overpass Lacey Lane, in memory of a local girl who died due to a malfunction during a fireworks show in a neighboring town. The newspaper said that the launch platform fell over and shot rockets horizontally, into the crowd. I used to wonder if some ill-advised wish like ours had brought that tragedy about—two kids wanting the shower of gold and silver sparks that became the last thing Lacey ever saw.

Joe Kapitan

Joe Kapitan writes from a glacial ridgeline located a day’s march south of Cleveland. His short fiction and creative nonfiction have been published online and in print at such venues as Notre Dame Magazine, Cincinnati Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Midwestern Gothic, PANK, Annalemma and A cappella Zoo. His flash fiction chapbook won Eastern Point Press' inaugural prose chapbook contest and his book-length collection of Ohio-based short stories will be published in 2018. He’s disguised as an architect to pay the bills.