a mi y mis amigos nos gusta jugar futbol

Mike fishes a stone from the garden, shaped unsymmetrical, jagged along the side; he does not think of the consequence of removing such a part from its whole, the complications rendered when the yaw of the garden is modified to compensate for the pitch. As referee, he is objectively determined to record each trace of the tool afore the signifier by striking once with the rock against the post. At the turn of four marks, Mike will facilitate a downward check against the grain of the wood and declare a winner. He is obsessed with replication, replication, replication, replication, and renewal. Renewal in triumph. Travis is bent in the quarter-yard of the grass, stumbling as though his pretense for clumsiness would allot a handicap in his favor — this is a ruse. And yet, Mike refuses to release even one squirm of discontent with the fairness of the game: he considers Travis’ contrived performance a facet of Travis’ game playing, and not so much a disallowed punch for mistrial. The game is soccer, and replicated soccer. It is the summer. Mike records the replicated animation of soccer for children’s soccer, as referee donned his most black-and-white t-shirt and sunscreen and bolstered himself atop a plastic replicated car. Mike also recognizes the obsession with replication that engages his peers, but reminds himself to submit to this affectation for the sake of conformity. The black egg follows the black egg where all others are white, says Mike. Travis would agree. And so young Travis collects himself with a surprise confidence and shoots his foot into the ball, much as he would anything set before his foot, which sends the ball aloft: Ryan communes at the right side of the replicated goal (conceived in plastic tubing and adorned with nylon/polyester-blend net) and misses the whole thing, having startled himself at the neck of the sun and the way mosquitoes cling to shoulders. Mike tics where there were no tics on the post, spits a replicated fatherly spit of incandescent, innocent phlegm, and returns with his hard eye on the field. The in-ground pool is spectator to the event, as he or she may always be as recluse to this once-in-a-summer’s-growl sport. He or she is lengthened by grass and borrowed into the deck, which serves as replicated bleachers for Mike, for Travis, but not for Ryan. Ryan is a born loser. His mother has recently indebted herself to Ryan’s misfortune, and compensates him in video games and junk food when he claims his psyche is ready enough to attend solid duties. Mike and Travis do not know this, but the two children suspect there is more to this game of replicated soccer than Ryan allows, sensing in his request a notion of “getting away from my parents thank god.” There is nothing to do in town. Years later, Ryan will work on a silent hull surrounded by fish. Travis recuses himself from the game and suspends further trials until he has drained himself in the bathroom. Mike takes this opportunity to reminisce on the goals that were scored and the fields that were changed before his eyes, taking comfort in the fact that he was the mover who was moved by the movers. Those light brown shreds, enacted by the specifically apportioned stone, will never be removed from the playground’s end-pole. When Mike’s father removes the ornament from beneath the skin of the lawn, and repurposes all the limbs of the thing into firewood, there will burn one lone finger of wood concerned with presenting Travis’ only goal scored upon Ryan on that summer day. Therefore, the game did not continue. In their junior year of high school, Travis will have removed one security sticker from beyond the pocket of a velvet sport coat from Macy’s and have placed it, discreetly, in the folds of Ryan’s wallet, declaring that each time Ryan enter a department store or any establishment with some similar security system, his wallet (unbeknownst to Ryan) will set off all alarms. This will be a point of travesty, and when the truth is found out, will tear the victim-imminent relationship to thin corpuscles. Endearing fresh grass and the lump of the summer, where festooned on one Thursday lay a nice game of replicated soccer. There was a garden of rock, and Mike picked his blossom of indisputable majesty. There can be no recourse for youth in pursuit of soccer, and none like Ryan exist to this day; his bowl of frantic misrepresentation curls under the weight of a mosquito bite. Asking two mere acquaintances to the buffet of jovial youthfulness results in Ryan’s befit of adulthood, on the happening of a shoulder injury, inflicted by a dumb mosquito. There is nothing more explaining will do — the stone (Mike’s utensil) must be returned to the garden, the gruel, the human, gull-plucked stark of thirteen years old.