I ask my mom if she remembers the days before the high five and she looks at me as if I just walked into her hospital room with a monkey on my shoulder and he’s wearing a diaper and playing his way through Kenny G’s Greatest Hits. She asks me why I’m asking her about high fives on a day like today. But she can hardly ask this question with the tubes out of her nose and arms and legs and wherever else. I ask her if she knew that the high five wasn’t invented until the late 70s, by a baseball player. She says no one thinks about the implications of the moment they’re in when they’re in it, but no, she didn’t watch baseball. I ask her what they did before high fives then. She says they just did things; they didn’t worry about what they should do after. A doctor comes in and tells us it’s time to prep my mom for surgery. I ask the doctor if she remembers when the high five was invented. She stops pushing my mom out of the room and says that everything will be okay, my mother is in capable hands. The monkey on my shoulder plays on, despite the tiny tremors from my hands’ trembling. He’s made his way through the track list to The Moment now. My mom turns back to me as they push her down the hall and shakes her head at the little guy, as if to say that’s too on the nose. But he just keeps on jamming.
Joshua Trent Brown is a writer from Raleigh, NC, and a fiction editor at JAKE. He has been published in a dozen cool lit mags like HAD and The Dead Mule. He also has a novella that he hopes you’ll want to publish after reading this <3. Find him on Twitter @TrentBWrites.
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