The Games We Played by Erica Plouffe Lazure
In Dizzy Circle, we’d spend as long as our centers of balance would let us on our bicycles, one clockwise bike trailing the other, until we’d stop. The trick was to not let your speed shift, too fast or slow, to keep pace with the person ahead of you, and ahead of Justin, then behind Phillip, then Danny. Sometimes Kristi would come by, or Shelly, but I don’t remember them with bikes. David, whose hearing aids always squeaked when he talked, never rode a bike. Sometimes he’d stand in the center of the Dizzy Circle, trying to count us or grab us by our shirts with his long arms. No one ever wanted to get grabbed by David. But he was so slow, he could rarely reach us.
In the winter the older boys across the street hosed down their hard-packed dirt backyard for a hockey rink, and they’d spend the cold months behind their tall wooden fence, out of view. My brother and I had a three-wheeler, an ATC, and we’d ride up and down our driveway from the mountainous snowplow pile by our barn to the street some 50 feet up. I stopped after the ATC flipped and pinned me going up the snowplow mountain, the very reason they banned them nationally five years later. My brother rode on. In the summer, the same older boys’ nets and sticks would take over Chapin Street, and they’d play street hockey until late into the night. No windows that I know of were broke by a wayward puck.
My brother once: misfired his BB gun, aiming for a cat but got the windowsill instead; inhaled so much gasoline they took him to the hospital; got mugged on his paper route, resulting in a fat lip.
I once: leapt off an ancient skateboard from a very steep hill; drank nail polish remover because of its lemony scent; sipped warm beer with a friend overnight in my grandfather’s camper.
We poured out the rest of the beer.
Some days we played Dukes of Hazzard (I was Daisy), Star Wars (Princess Leia), or Annie (orphans, all!). Other days we trailed one after the other on our bikes, ending up in our Dizzy Circle, whizzing past David again and again, his look one of constant puzzlement, like he was just getting the hang of what this world had to offer.
Erica Plouffe Lazure is the author of a forthcoming short story collection, Proof of Me + Other Stories (New American Press, March 2022) and two flash fiction chapbooks, Sugar Mountain (2020) and Heard Around Town (2015). Her fiction is published in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Carve, Greensboro Review, Meridian, American Short Fiction, The MacGuffin, The Southeast Review, Phoebe, Fiction Southeast, Flash: the International Short-Short Story Magazine (UK), Hippocampus Magazine, The Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in Exeter, NH and can be found online at www.ericaplouffelazure.com