All That We Lost, by Joshua Jones Lofflin

It started with nothing. A whiff of ozone, a burnt electric smell. But there were no fires; the sky stayed cloudless; the reports of planes plummeting to earth didn’t happen, though we all looked upward like we did years before when there was an eclipse. Then, each of us snuck glances toward the darkening sky. Now, we tilted our heads back, scanned the emptiness, and laughed.

Then came the losses. First the days, how they were separated and named, how there were once weekends, how once there were television programs that said it was Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. All a whorl of static now, my parents searching the screens for patterns. I’d come home from school, and they’d be transfixed in the living room, my father working the antenna this way and that, my mother staring deep into the screen with her sketchbook and charcoals, a star-strewn landscape emerging on the page.

I didn’t tell them my molars were gone. The wisdom teeth that would have to get yanked anyway. It didn’t hurt, their disappearance. None of it ever hurt.

The dog lost its hair and fleas. My mother lost her hearing in her left ear, her phone ear. When her sister shouted at her over the receiver, she smiled and carried on with her artwork, sketching my father who’d lost his shirt and his beer gut. My friend Ryan said the only thing he’d lost was his virginity, but we all pelted him with oranges until he cried out Enough and fessed up he hadn’t lost a thing, though of course he was lying.

There were lost cars and lost houses and lost wives and some wives who just pretended to be lost but were really across town. We thought the moon was lost but my dad said just wait, and sure enough it came back. But the rain was lost. The clouds were lost. Soon enough, the static that my parents watched was lost too. Then my father carried out the television to the curb, and it was lost too.

My poor, hairless dog lost the sweater my mom knit for him, but he seemed happier now that the days grew hotter and hotter. My dad lost the rest of his clothes, my mom too, and I took my dog to Ryan’s house. Ryan had lost his bruises, had lost his slouch, and his house had lost its shouting, its slamming doors.

I told my teachers I lost my homework, but so did everyone else. Everyone except Ryan who kept trying to write a linear equation for everything that disappeared, as if by graphing it, he might discover where all the lost things go. 

Time, he said. We have to stop losing time.

We all laughed and said it was a lost cause. The clocks were gone. The teachers too. Be happy, we said and meant it, and then we all lost our virginities for real, except for Ryan who stayed late in the darkened classroom trying to decipher the digits on his slide rule, trying to measure the ensuing darkness, where along the ridge of mountains the sun disappeared each evening. Then we lost the mountains. Then we lost the school.

My dad lost his beard, his male-pattern baldness. My mom lost her grudge, and her sister lost her ability to yell. Together, they lost their way in the neighborhood, scrabbling over mounds of dirt like Ryan and I used to do, before we started losing things. 

You haven’t lost anything, Ryan said as we watched my mom and aunt picnic beneath a spreading oak, and I opened up my mouth to show him the gaps where my teeth used to be. Then he socked me hard, and I lost another tooth, but as I said, nothing ever hurt.

Dusk fell, and I followed Ryan back to his yawning house, followed him into his living room, his kitchen, the bedrooms that echoed. Then I lay beside him and held him until he said he couldn’t even remember what he’d lost.

Are you happy? I asked, and Ryan shrugged into the earth. Our town was gone, or else we’d forgotten where we’d left it. A gentle breeze blew the scent of ozone, the lingering smell of something half-remembered gone. We lay on our backs as the blue of the sky faded away.

I’m not unhappy, he said, and I propped myself up on my elbow and studied him, tried to see if it was truly gone, his unhappiness, tried to find my own unhappiness as the sun massaged its heat into me, but instead I sighed as the sky went black. I sighed and watched as, one by one, the stars we lost reappeared.

Joshua Jones Lofflin’s writing has appeared in The Best Microfiction 2020, The Best Small Fictions 2019, The Cincinnati Review, CRAFT, Fractured Lit, Moon City Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Maryland. Find him on Twitter @JJLofflin or visit his website jjlofflin.com