Would You Look at That by Tyler Gobble
Would You Look at That
Karl started it. At the Silver Dollar Tavern. Last November. I think a Thursday, but maybe it was Sunday. He said, “It’s strange there are tons of gaseous planets out there no one has discovered.”
The bar people gazed out the single window, a beer sign flickering. The bar people clutched at the same beer. The bar people took a sip at once.
The cue ball flew off the table, rolled between Karl’s feet. “A weird place for the moon,” Karl said.
Karl and his three sips. “It’s kind of like how I could have a tumor on my kidney and soon it’ll kill me but I have no idea. If only I’d have looked.”
He sunk the 4-ball and said, “I’m solids.” The bar had emptied, the beer on the sign now a lighter shade of gold. The TV showed a football field with nothing but the white stripes.
*
Thirty-seven people pass by, that kind of stride like the earth is sucking in its tummy with each step. Each one has a telescope, even the babies in strollers with little periscopes with unicorns or felt footballs stuck on the sides. One guy pulls his on a cart like a cannon.
Karl says, “Do you think we should tell them that Halley’s Comet doesn’t give a shit about any of us?”
*
“What If God Was One Of Us” played on the speaker in front of the diner. A man without a telescope, his hands in his pockets (shaking or maybe completely still), zig-zagged through the people lined up on Anderson Street. He breathed but I couldn’t see it. Karl chuckled, breaking a seventeen-minute silent streak.
*
“Would you look at that,” Karl says. He points to a headline in the newspaper, the only thing written on an entire page. It says, THE INTERNET HAS DIED.
The town below us starts to vibrate. Like an alarm someone taught to say, WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT. All the town’s fingers pointing up.
*
Karl and I spent Thanksgiving evening peering into windows. Houses with the family eating lunch leftovers. Houses with dads sleeping, the late football game shining on their faces. Houses with a single kid playing with his new action figure the aunt who never makes Christmas brought.
“It feels nice to look at something else,” I said this, but Karl was staring into space.
* * *
Tyler Gobble is lead editor of Stoked Press and a contributor with Vouched Books. He is the author of the chapbooks, Tell Me You've Got Good News (H_NGM_N Books) and Stale Champagne (Artistically Declined Press), both forthcoming online this month.
Find more here: Tyler Gobble.
And visit Stoked here: STOKED.