Bradley Borsari

A Drive-in Called the Royal

The night before we left for college, Bertram and I lingered after the last movie ended, lay back on the hood of his dad’s blue Buick LeSabre and stared at the Milky Way, somehow sensing places you love are never the same when you return. We never returned, and the Royal closed for good six years later. Tonight, I learned Bertram fell asleep driving home, his car slamming head-on into a dumpster. I walk out into the night, pulled to that familiar corner of Imperial and Idaho. I slide between a gap in chain-link into the still deserted lot. The white screen hangs in darkness, a tattered sail beneath a new moon. In-car speakers droop like scarecrows in a forgotten field, their crackling replaced by wind whistling over broken glass. Inside the snack shack, delicate cobwebs cling like memories to dusty corners. I see Bertram leaning against the back fence beneath the orange glow of a street lamp. He catches and gently clasps a moth—open too wide and it flies away, he says, too tight and you crush it. Hold it just so and it tickles your palms. Takes me back to being out late with friends who knew me before I knew myself, back to projected images so real we thought we could climb inside. Images bright and solid as our bodies. We didn’t notice the flickers, hadn’t heard of celluloid frames. We never paused to think that at some point, you have to open your hands and release the moth back into the night.

Brad Borsari practices Internal Medicine in Fullerton, CA. He graduated from Haverford College in 1995 with a BA in English and a minor in Creative Writing. He is married and has three children. His work has appeared in JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, and Scapegoat Review.