Nate Duke

After, I'd Try Becoming a White Parapet

“People like to criticize, but what they don’t know is I was six tall mountains in a past life,” he says. This was in the front seat of the world’s fastest Camry. He said it was a gift from the president. It made sense. He was a secret agent, as he reminded me when he floored it out of the cul-de-sac on our way to school. 

He had many talents. He invented the cereal bowl, for example. Before him, people would just pour the cereal and the milk onto the countertop and lap it up. Also checkers. He bet me a hundred million dollars I couldn’t beat him, and I think he might’ve let me win, but afterward he gave me a green sticky note with a number on it and took me to the gas station for some candy. I made a pocket of my shirtfront and filled it and gave the cashier the sticky note, and the cashier laughed. Just recently, I learned avocados aren’t really ostrich eggs.

Where he lived was on this property outside of Texarkana with one neighboring family. They had very loud dogs, the neighbors. I always wanted to feed them, so one day he had me put on rubber gloves and soak some “butcher’s special” T-bones in a Pyrex pan of blue fluid whose smell stung my nose. We waited awhile in the sun while they marinated. I had to put on different gloves late that night when I threw them over the fence. It took a few days for me to realize what I had done, peering through the slats at the neighbors digging irregular holes for the animals. 

Once, I asked him: “Where are the mountains you used to be?” 

He spun a globe in my face and pointed at one of the watery parts, somewhere in the Indian Ocean. He told me they were there, under the sea, and when I asked why he changed, he said, “When I got covered in water, I stopped being six tall mountains, and that’s when I came here.” 

For a couple years, later on, he’d call and I wouldn’t pick up. He left me a few hundred short voicemails, and I listened to them all and told myself I hated him, until one day I was alone in the public library looking at the newspaper and some grandma in Connecticut had taken her three young grandchildren and executed them one by one while they were bound and gagged in their car seats before killing herself. Now he and I, we talk every day. 

It’s nice to remember him again, like when he stood in the gondola and played his accordion until it burst into flames, or when I got up in the middle of the night because I could hear the TV in the living room and he was sitting in the dark, watching a show about Mount Everest, and we sat there watching cold people drag oxygen tanks through the snow. Or like when, back when I was a kid, I asked him to prove once and for all that he had really been all those mountains, and he stood up over me and pressed both hands flat against the ceiling and pushed.

Nate Duke was born in Arkansas and is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He has won an Academy of American Poets College Prize and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Southern Humanities Review, Puerto del Sol, the Hunger, and elsewhere. You can find him on twitter, @realnateduke.