Summer Stories 2026: 'If I Rise'

Summer Stories 2026: 'If I Rise'

He lay on his back on the concrete floor and pushed his follow-through into the dark. He pictured the ball on a quick backspin, the net ready for the sound. The ball redolent of sweat and leather. A feeling of fire in the hand and fire in the night as if a lone tree of epic height had been lit in the darkness and the conflagration was a candle seen for hundreds of miles. If he had a pure heart to try to reach something, he remembered as a boy he’d been called with his brother to the solitude of remote places. The singlewide trailer was on an open plain in northeast Washington, an hour and a half from Spokane, and could have been anywhere inland, anywhere far from the city – the fallow ground north of Stockton, California, the red fields of Oklahoma, the high plains of Kansas or the blue peaks of Colorado, places basketball had already brought him on the travel teams for blue chip high school athletes, All-Americans, of which he was one. He’d traveled to NYC, LA, Seattle, Atlanta and Detroit too, hotbeds of hoops a real estate bigwig in Billings paid for in the name of potential or perhaps oddity, the fetishizing of bodies unlike one’s own.