I meant to go home early last night, but then the D.J. played my favorite song and this girl whom I’d seen before cut her way into my little pod of dancers. Coming in closer, she spread the pod girls out with her hands while her eyes were closed and her chin was up and it was like she was hearing some other music, because she was moving just a little bit slower then the rest of us. Yet, she kept the beat, and when she opened her eyes to me again I saw some fire emerge from that serene moment. We went on and on on that lighted floor for almost an hour before I asked her if she wanted a drink, and she said “Let’s just get out of here…” – because she had to work in the morning, some weekend job downtown or something. I drove her home in my jalopy, and on her porch, where her dishwater bob looked iridescent under the strange light, she turned and kissed me for a long, soft moment. “I gotta go in,” she said, giggling as I tried to reach around her waist, “see you back there some time.”

I was not gonna keep this from my friends – I’d like to have found out if any of them knew her, but when I got to the diner they were already in the middle of a muddle, something about Morris Day going off on his own, or maybe it was Jesse Johnson, I wasn’t sure, they were all talking at once and filling the air with cigarette smoke, so I had some coffee and laughed at the histrionics. More friends showed up, one booth became two, and another table beside. When they started quoting movie lines and arguing about them, I summoned another cup and settled into the booth for the rest of the show.

The birds were already chirping when I left the diner, and my short drive home brought me to my stoop just as the sun was rising, and it was beautiful, like her, I thought, so I sat out there and watched the sky redden and then fade into a baby blue silk. Unfortunately, none of this fatigued me; there was the coffee, and my ears were buzzing from the club, and the diner, and, well, everything else, so that when I went in I didn’t go to sleep, I just laid there for a while replaying the short film that was the night, staging in my head that slow, walk up moment, with her center stage, from different angles so I could relive it new, again and again.

A lot of nights are like short films now, they even fade to black…

I woke up with a start a couple of hours later, saw the time and hustled into the shower. Early game today. I kind of jumped into my softball pants and socks. I’d carry my jersey, and my spikes were in the car, so I ran out, and seemingly a minute later I am here, ensconced in another serene moment, under the blue summer sky, leading off, watching the world quiet and slow down once again, as I wait for that fat, new 16″ clincher to come down off its long arc.

–Danny Grosso