We hope you’ve been enjoying our very merry, end-of-year series, Crackers!
We asked eight of our favourite writers to tell us about the best gift that 2015 gave them/the world, and today we post our final response, from Evan Fleischer. Happy New Year, love The Lifted Brow.
I know where to stand when the fireworks go off: I know there’s a backyard where neighbours can gleefully flee from roaring currents of flash powder that rigorously bulldoze nearby begonias. I know there’s a perch of brick that balconies itself out over a city. I know there’s an old street already roofed with lights of their own. I know I can stand in a room where the wooden shutters close and listen to the wind chimes attached to said wood panelling quietly ding.
And this is my piece of pro-offered gratitude—an alley-oop written on December 8th aimed at a specific place on December 31st.
It’s aimed at the dance—the atomised individual parts (the shoulders wiggling their way into a full-fledged shimmy, the shoes sliding across the floor, the popping locking itself before unlocking and popping again) and the greater unified, sweating whole. Go bananas, I want to say, but not like that. Go crazy, I want to say, but not like that.
Happy New Year, I’ll say, and even if I don’t use those words—or, indeed, any of these words—it will still say something very much like, “Yes. Like that.”
Evan Fleischeris a writer-at-large. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, and numerous other publications.