Corsicana, TX 9/27
Inside a microcosm.
Friday Night Lights burn bright as stars inside the high school stadium, funded so generously by local businessmen that not a play goes by without announcements brought to you courtesy of local car dealerships, funeral homes or roofing companies.
Rows of fathers in the bleachers scream support and strategic direction as though they were on the front lines of a battlefield, while, a few rows back from that ruckus, a more sedate set of spectators scoop chips thickly coated in cheese sauce towards their waiting maws.
Down upon the field of play there’s a boy whose only thoughts are of the girl he wants to go with. She’s one of the group that cheers for the team in sequinned cowboy hats and dirty white roper boots that’ve been handed down from girl to girl through the ages. She hovers in his mind with her auburn hair and freckles and pale eyes. With her there he can’t get his head in the game. Snap after snap’s fumbled as he wrestles with her smile.
The fathers are losing the energy they’d bristled with moments before until another boy, a wide receiver, leaps with balletic grace and intercepts an errant throw down field towards the end zone. He stretches all fibres of his frame in that crucial moment that could make or break the game.
“All day! All day!” the paternal chants call with the fire back in their hearts. It burns for youth.
The band strikes up again, blasting the theme from a famous film franchise. The team shares their name with it. Despite the regularity of this rousing rendition, it’s taken far too long to form a connection between the two and you feel disconnected from the crowd cheering so ecstatically each time the brass and drums kick in.
Everything about the game operates at a professional level—the slow motion replays, the coaching team in logo’d polo shirts and khakis, the teens chugging Gatorade and reading play cards, raging at the bad throws, the interceptions, the sacks, with pure vitriol.
Over on the horizon past the goal posts, far beyond the clamour of the crowd, the sun drops below the landscape and amber light ignites the stretch of sky spread between the home and visiting fans. It’s as though a great, unchecked wildfire is burning up the baked summer brush that connects the rural towns. It’s an armageddon glow that makes your eyes burn as though they were staring at the sun itself.
In the stadium’s microcosm, the teens are atoms of this time and place. Simple lives orbiting within a small town game played in an interzone between big cities.
The cheerleaders. The band kids. The players. The drill team. The band crew. The flag core. The boy. The girl.
The world hasn’t opened up to them yet.