Page 48 of Offside

“I know. I listened for it at the anthem.”

“She’ll bring it to the bronze.”

“Then we win the bronze,” he says. Flat. True. Like a fixture already played. “For the horn.”

“For the horn.”

“Sleep now. I’m here at breakfast.”

“That’s against.”

“I know what it’s against,” he says, and pulls the blanket over both of us, and that’s the whole hearing.

Nobody showers. Nobody folds anything. The kit stays where it fell. The towels stay wherever towels are. The room is allowed, for one night, to be a room where something happened.

He falls asleep behind me, wrapped, no washbag in the world. I lie awake in the arithmetic of his arms and do the last accounting of the day.

I held my silence for five years to protect this. That was the deal I made with nobody. Say nothing, lose nothing. And the final is gone anyway. The partnership is gone anyway, eleven boxes, a lease with a mailbox. The schedule, gone. The word semifinal, dead.

Everything I kept perfectly quiet about all summer ended anyway. On schedule. In ninety minutes plus stoppage, in front of sixty-two thousand people.

Silence protected nothing. Everything ends anyway.

The only thing still here, at one in the morning, on the worst night of my sporting life, is the man asleep against my back with his hand still resting where my heart is. The thing I never said. The thing the silence was supposed to keep safe.

It’s the last thing standing. It isn’t safe. It was never safe. Safety was never on the table.

Adrenaline, I file, at the edge of sleep, reaching for the old drawer one more time. The sentence was adrenaline. Grief talking.

The drawer doesn’t close. I leave it open and sleep.

?

BRNO'S BEST #3

Novotný

lads

I had a speech. I don’t have a speech

Polášek

nobody has a speech. sit down, brother

Horak

is there still recovery tomorrow

Hájek

bus at nine fourty. pool at ten. lunch at twelve. nothing else is asked of anyone tomorrow

Horak

ok

is anyone else awake