Day 2 of 100 Days of Creativity

Prompt from The Writer's Block: According to the Florida Department of Corrections, more than one hundred people have registered on a waiting list to see an execution. Write about one of them.

Look. I know. I know you're judging me. I am on the waiting list to see an execution. Look. I know. I would judge me too but you have to understand how I got there. How I got here. I'm from Ormond-by-the-sea. You probably haven't heard of it. Have you heard of it?

If you blink you'd miss it. I joke about those fly-over states - which are most states when you're from Florida. I mean it's basically New York City, Florida, Texas, and California. We're the most populous states. Outside of us, everyone is a flyover. Outside California, everyone else is just a state. California is its own GD country. But I'm from Florida. I'm from Ormond-by-the-Sea. Have you heard about us?

And that's the point. We're near Dayton. Everyone knows Dayton. Dayton is America's romance with cars and sun and sex and speed. We're an exit on your way to Dayton from South Florida. There's the rub - South Florida. We're the stop where people would stay who didn't have money. I'm not talking about the people from New York or New Jersey or even Virginia. We might be where you stay when you can't afford to stay in Dayton. Or the suburbs. We're a flyover. During the Daytona races, my mom would send us camping. Sometimes we'd stay with our grandmother but mostly she gave us a cooler full of lunch meat, Cheetos, and Sunkiss cola. We'd take blankets and sometimes our tent or a tarp and set up our space just out of sight. She'd rent out our home to poor South Florida folks going to the races. 

We didn't mind though. We didn't go to school. My brothers and I would pool our money and buy trinkets to sell to tourists. Sometimes Mr. Arnold, who owned the gas station would pay us to wash car windows and give the cars some attention when they rolled up to get gas. This was the 80s. No one cared if we were in school or not. It was only a few days that we were gone. Sleeping on the beach. Working for Mr. Arnold. Sometimes we would lay on the beach at night and look up into the sky.

My oldest brother loved poetry. He was a little strange. He died. When he finished high school he moved to New York City. It broke our mother's heart. Twice. The first time when he moved to New York and the second time when he died. He died of AIDS. Our mom doesn't care. She'll tell everyone that he went to New York to become someone and then died of AIDS. She didn't really think about the stigma or how Howie could have gotten it. He was her oldest boy. She loved him. She loved him so much. And when our dad left, our mom relied on Howie even more.

When we were on the beach, sometimes he'd pull out his Walt Witman book, which he loved more than the Walk Man that I was always stealing from him. The four of us boys would lay on the blanket on the sand while our mom hosted people in her home and he'd read to us: 

On the beach at night,

Stands a child with her father,

Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness,

While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,

Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,

Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,

Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,

And nigh at hand, only a very little above,

Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,

Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,

Watching, silently weeps...

And I never remembered the part that came next because I would be lost in the stars. 

Howie's voice carried you away. Carried you away from Ormond. From Florida. From anything that made you sad.

I have never left Ormond. I finished high school. I still live in my mom's house though she's been gone a long time. 

And that's why I'm on the list to watch an execution. Howie told me to make something of myself.

And I'm trying. 

Don't judge. I really am. Now there's Airbnb. I still camp in the sand but I make way more money than my mom made. So much more. Things have changed.

But Howie said to make something of yourself. I figured if I saw an execution that would make me special. It would increase the value of my property. 

That's why I'm on the list.