A few of the guys kick a ball around at Butzel Park on Wednesday afternoons. Soccer is one of those recession games, it’s cheap, you only need a ball. Even in the cold, so long as it isn’t raining, they head out. A couple of hours before dusk, but sometimes they play into the dark, too. Most of us don’t have anything else to do. I haven’t played soccer since my mom was a soccer mom and used to drive Brad and me every Saturday morning to the Southside YMCA. But maybe once a month I go over to see if there’s a game. All kinds of memories come back to me, nothing is lost. Orange wedges and Capri Suns in the ice chest. Grass in your cleats. God knows what the parents are talking about. Their kids. You keep starting over. Somebody kicks the ball away from your feet. And for a few seconds you watch them passing it up the field. While your breath comes back, you just stand there, hands on hips. Fuck this, you think, but then you put your head down anyway, and when it’s probably too late to catch them, start running.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BENJAMIN MARKOVITS grew up in Texas, London, Oxford and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics — an experience he wrote about in Playing Days, a fictional memoir forthcoming from Harper Perennial. He has written essays, stories, and reviews for, among other publications, The New York Times, Granta, The Guardian, London Review of Books and The Paris Review. The author of six novels, including a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron, he was a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and won a Pushcart Prize in 2009. Granta selected him as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 2013. Markovits lives in London and is married, with a daughter and a son.
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