“American Night II” by Bradley Warshauer

The park is closed to the public, but the riverfront belongs to us all, so nobody cares. The kids go through an opening in the concrete wall, following train tracks to the high fence and no trespassing signs that separate them from the Mississippi.

Some people don’t climb over the fence. They stay behind on the train tracks and sing America the Beautiful, and they are laughing. Someone lights a joint. Someone opens a beer can. Someone sings Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Over the fence, girls in white t-shirts and ripped shorts let their legs dangle above the water, and the water ripples under the light of the bridge and downtown skyline. Across the Mississippi over its west bank small red and green and blue explosions pop in the sky.

Downriver lightning flashes in the clouds over the Ninth Ward. There is no thunder.

In the center of the river, between the point of Algiers and the bend of the water against the armored Quarter levee, are two barges. Guys wearing glasses fire Roman candles, which die, hissing, in the current.

Headlights on a small white van ignite the air and the small white van rolls hesitantly through the crowd of American kids. The name on the side of the small van is written in ad agency logotype. An armed man in a private security guard’s uniform keeps his hand on the wheel and says, only once, through his open window: This is a private construction site. You all have to leave.

Someone boos. Someone says: After the fireworks. Someone says: Have a beer. The small white van hesitantly rolls away, stops, turns, perches beyond the end of the crowd and waits.

Someone says: I bet that poor guy doesn’t even want to be out here.

Above us all fireworks burst and light up the water and change the color of everything from unsure dark to red to green to blue to green to red. Girls standing at the river’s edge become ephemeral silhouettes against the light. The only way to capture their outlines is to look constantly into the screen of your phone, taking many pictures so that one might turn out to be beautiful.

When the fireworks show climaxes the kids sing America the Beautiful again. This time nobody is laughing. The private security guard, protecting an unfinished park in a city that is three centuries old along a river that is one hundred centuries old, watches, the lights of his small white van having gone dark, while the kids help one another over the fence and disperse, smiling, into the Fourth of July night.

Bradley Warshauer is a writer of fiction and essays and blog post things on a lot of subjects. His work has appeared previously here in Specter Magazine, at Connotation Press, at NolaVie, and elsewhere. His novel 11th Hour was published when he was 18, which was a long time ago, and which, he hopes, was not the pinnacle of his career.