These Promises are Teeth

These promises are teeth. Hungry, he thought, but still hard. He'd never collected promises in a drawstring bag before, and they rattled.

Promises.

These promises - rattling on the bus, in the bag - loud enough to draw attention. His long fingers, nails bitten to the quick, played constantly at the drawstring.

Where are we going, promises?

He knew where they were going. He had bought the ticket, it curled in his pocket, warm with his warmth.

It was an arduous journey. Sweaty people, all that flesh compacted in a vehicle that stopped and started, stopped and started, so frequently that it never seemed to get up a good head of speed, all those smells, food and fart, and their conversational equivalents. By the end of it, 19 hours in, entering the city at night, he had become one of those sweaty people, and just a little manic. He found himself laughing at the strangest things, the ragged hairdo of the bookish boy in seat 18B, the white bit of thigh of the lady in 16A. He found himself rattling the bag, and all those rattling promises, and laughing.

He got off in the rain.

You ever been in the rain with a bag of promises? You ever marched through the city, your face broad with a 19-hour smile? You, ever done that shit?

He found the hill in the dark, stumbling in the rain and the dark. He sat on a bench, looking up at the hill. And he opened the bag. Stared inside.

These promises rattled.

Out. Out.

One after the other, they rattled and tumbled and wondered how they had ever managed to fit inside the bag. They felt significant, these promises. They grew slick in the rain. They caught the streetlight.

He touched them, each one, with his chewed on fingertips. He measured them. He observed them. They were hard and they were meaningful, and they were slick. He hesitated.
Children. Children. He whispered. You're things that should be forgotten. You're things that daren't be. You're the soft caress of lips. You're the hard hope, and the long pause between glimmering and dream.

Of course they were.

These promises.

He left them on the bench.

He scrunched the bag tight in his pocket, and ran, the drawstring, both ends, flapping and flopping, reaching out from his pocket, reaching back like the stringy arms of a stringy mother bear to a lost cub, reaching back to toothy promises gleaming in the rain.