Fort Myers, FL

Shirtless and in rubber thong sandals and holding three
tallboys against his bare wet chest, he pedaled diagonally through the empty intersection and into the purple Florida
night, the air liquid as the canal water the rusted loading
cranes waded through, and thought, Why can’t everything
be more chill, so we can wear our woven straw pork pie
hats to the beach, and puke a little on the stone floor of the public bathroom, then emerge a while later, stained and wizened, maybe even triumphant, ready to step back into
the party, and wouldn’t it be neat to retreat, to retrace, to
seek the scald of cheap coffee, the unfolding of a map, the zipper crack of a cap twisting free of a plastic bottle of
cheap wine, to sleep in a random bed far from the road, to
drink and to eat among strangers, to find a curl of hair on a pillow not your own, and he smiled, and in the doing,
showed the world the glint of a gold tooth, as if to let us
know that we all have the chance to touch wealth, and, if
we are lucky, to carry it with us.

Edmund Sandoval is a writer living in Chicago, IL. His work has appeared online and in print in the minnesota review, The Common, American Literary Review, Superstition Review, Hobart, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere.