Rafters

by Pat Guiney

Dad took me to the big city to see a basketball game. I don't remember anything like the score, or even who the other team was anymore. I don't even remember seeing anyone score any baskets, even though there were probably a lot of points. It was a basketball game. All I remember is tall black men loping up and down the court, up and down, sometimes dribbling the ball, sometimes passing. In my memory there were no hoops, no backboard.

Only the tall, slender men, running and passing in a complicated pattern of endlessly overlapping figure eights. Dad got me a hot dog in a little foil bag. It said on it, in red letters with a red border: Hot Dog. The bun was steaming hot and the meat was kind of lukewarm. Without ketchup or mustard it tasted naked and gamey. It was not like the hot dogs at home. I spent a large part of the second half staring at the rafters. I was in awe of them.

There were giant metal pipes up there, air ducts and catwalks and I-beams.

Championship banners hung on invisible strings. It got me wondering whose job it was to go up there and hang those things. Then I became terrified that somehow it would become my job, that I would be expected to teeter out on the narrow beams with an armful of championship hockey and basketball banners. And then in my mind I wandered elsewhere around the rafters. I saw myself perched in corners, hanging from tiny ledges, occupying areas no human was intended to be. And in the end I saw my own fall, from a dizzying height, hard onto the gleaming parquet floor.