scene

"They hunted pronghorn antelope by attaching something shiny to a post in the ground," my father said, "and then they would go hide behind a rock with their bows and wait."

He sipped from his longneck of Coors, gripping the tapered mouth between thumb and forefinger. I did not know which Native American tribe 'they' referred to, exactly. I had stopped listening just prior to the part about these peculiar stalking methods: the goading, the use of light-catching mirrors and minerals. Even the gaunt, spindly quadruped could not escape the shimmering allure of fate. Just the words, the simulation of it, ensnared me.

Before my father's historical flourish--how had the conversation even regressed to this?--I'd been unable to avert my eyes from the squeaky full-court presses and lofty three-point arcs that played themselves out on the bar's staggering flat screen. But now, pulling from my own bottle, I stared at my father. The age spots on his forehead dotted like a significantly distant constellation and his hair appeared thinner than just yesterday.

"Pronghorns," was all I could dribble back to him.

My mind flew. I tried to imagine feathers and arrowheads, plain winds and small pebbles in the bases of grass strands. Except I only saw beaded loincloths, black braids, and clear inaccuracies. This was too hard. We all just seek horizontalness, a quiet singularity. My father and I drank from our Coors bottles, nearly in unison. Nearly.

I looked back to the massive television. Kobe missed a free throw (it hit the front of the rim and bulleted right back to him) and the crowd around us rumbled loud enough, like a summer thunder clap, to mute the game announcer. I swiveled to the passing waitress and ordered another beer. By the time I'd pivoted back to the giant screen, the evolution from tactile vision to something cosmic laid its fluttering groundwork: there was a close-up of Kobe, gnawing on the top of his jersey, that Laker-yellow illuminating the faces in the darkened bar-booths like a searing quasar into the cold-bodied space.