The Correct Direction

It was time to go and Benjamin was on a serious bender. We had a date in Batesville with a gourd that blocked out the sun so bad, the local sheriff locked up six people for breaking curfew. The kind of shit you can get into in a town with a curfew makes the buttons pop off my vest just thinking about it.

“Benjamin. Let's go.”

“But I'm upset.” He was. The creases in his forehead were so tight I wanted to farm them for geothermal energy.

“What's up?”

“Why can't I just go wards?”

“Go what?”

“Wards.”

“Wards?”

“Yeah. I wanna go wards.”

I thought about it a bit, then spit out “I'm not stopping you man.” I had thought about it. And I wasn't.

“No, no, you're cool.” He paused, but his mouth was open Feed Me wide, and he had something else to say, for sure. “It's not you.”

I tried being encouraging, because when a man is flat on his back, sometimes that's what he needs. “So, go wards. It's your high.”

“What am I gonna do about grammar?”

“Grammar?” I was confused, because usually it was gravity he had trouble with. Lying there, totally prone, I had to wonder if he'd just gotten his "gr" words messed up.

“Yeah, it's bringing me down.” That I could agree with.

“Dude, I agree.” Grammar was always killing my high. Split infinitives and the pejorative tense and all that. For a writer, running into grammar is like finding a splinter when you're a termite. It sucks.

“See, I can go forwards.” He wriggled in the direction his feet had been facing, dragging the throw rug along with him as he went.

“Damn right you can.” I said, and gave him a little applause.

“I can go backwards.” He reversed the act, pushing with his heels and sliding
headfirst toward my chair.

“You can, but I don't recommend it.” Benjamin and I try to keep each other going forward whenever possible. “Remember what happened last time we did that.”

“Yes.” He then picked up his keister and shimmied out to the left. “Just as I suspected, I can go sidewards if I want to.”

“Actually, I think that one's not right.”

“I'm ignoring that.”

“Understood.”

“But there is no wards.” The world kind of blinked into the next day, and I think we both felt it. I held on to my drink tighter, because suddenly nothing made sense. I looked around, and he was right. There was no wards. “I've looked in every direction I can think of, and I'm convinced that no matter which way I go, it won't be wards.”

“You're right. Only one thing can be to blame.”

“I tried to tell you, man.”

“Fucking grammar, man.”

“Completely.”