Ausgang! Three!

Originally published in Ausgang under the grouping Rooftops.

The abandoned oil tanks on the lakefront fit our purposes perfectly, to smoke a bunch of weed and waste a bunch of time. Our voices echoed metallically off the inside walls of the rusty hull as we played tag in the dark. Only the moonlight spilling in from the porthole door reminded us that we hadn’t been swallowed up like Jonah. On warmer nights, a spiral staircase carried us three-stories up to its domed roof. Looking down, we surveyed all the cottonwoods lined up on the shore, intermittently projecting a dock or two. And, as we arched our backs to hug the metal sheets, we felt the stars push down towards us. If the stars were magnets, the whole tank would serve as a ship cutting through the waves of space. With our heads full of these celestial bodies and pot, no one cared if they plummeted to their deaths. Many kids in my hometown had dropped over the edges of discarded structures over the years. Mostly, those were the heshers climbing the grain elevators. But, we were goths and punks; and no matter how bad we wanted to die... we couldn’t. By the time I graduated, developers razed the tanks, fell the trees, and crumpled up the docks to build condos.

- Melissa Sullivan