In Short – Issue 2 (Winter 2025)

January 31, 2025

Image credit: Ken Lund

Joe’s House

By Adam Cheshire

A random article about road construction in Wilmington, which all these years later the algorithm is kind enough to send me updates on, leads me down a navigational nostalgia, and I find myself on Google Maps thumbing through our old streets.

I end up at your house, of course; of all the memorable structures within that town—many bulldozed and remade into something you’d never recognize—your house is particularly evocative. It was my first real “hangout” as a jittery freshman, the lone 18-year-old among 20-somethings. The night we met, I sat on your porch swing after a few beers thinking I’d entered some kind of dreamland: a college by the beach with older friends like Shaman guides to lead me through this new consciousness, and this kind and generous guy who rode a perpetual wave of cool nonchalance.

Your house became the microcosm of all the joyous parts of my life in that transient town. Beyond the frequent parties, large and small, it was an anchor, a meetup spot before trips downtown, pickup basketball games, beach rides, and all things worth doing in between. That first year, as you drove us back from nights out in your 4Runner, winding through the labyrinthine neighborhoods, I wondered how you would ever be able to navigate us home. Yet somehow in the darkness, between sleeping trees, your house would appear, the tire swing a blacker black than the 3 a.m. sky, preparing for another halcyon day in our young lives.

Young—we were so young then, Joe! It could collapse the universe to think about that too much. At my 21st birthday, your house was inundated with friends old and new; overflowed with an excess of endorphins, hormones pulsing in the night, silky and warm even in February, this never-ending summer. We all glowed, like the little airplane bottles you placed on your tree at Christmas. 

The photo on Google Street Views, taken relatively recently, a month after your death, and long after you left Wilmington for Florida, shows the house decorated for the holidays. Understated ribbons and wreaths you never would’ve hung. A stranger’s home. But at the bottom of my phone, this tiny screen I use to search the depths of our former worlds, Google offers me two more photographs. I travel through time, lost and frozen now, with the swipe of a finger.

The oldest was taken two years after college, which at the time seemed a veritable eon from those undergrad days of life segmented into semesters, weekly Thursday night trips to The Liquid Room (the thump of music and flying sweat on a crowded dance floor slumber in the very cells of my body, awakened now by Usher’s “Yeah!” playing in the grocery store), but which I realize was part of the same era I scour for in certain nightmares, crying out to show itself, explain why it released me across decades and placed me here, befuddled, groping, bereft. 

The photograph is muted and grainy, Google’s old cameras a far cry from the improved resolution of its more recent pictures. But I can still make out the tire swing, drooping in the shadow of an invisible sun. The dark blue door is shut, the windows closed. It looks like a fall day, the leaves a scatter of orange blurs on the grass—and you are gone, the driveway empty save for that little yellow sports car I never saw you drive, with a gray tarp draped over it, its ghostly form haunting the edges of my view.

The other Google photograph is from five years later. By this time I had moved back home to Hillsborough, and you would soon be heading to Florida to begin a new life, get married, hold your daughter for a month. But in the Google photograph, it’s your house again, in full bloom, there on Day Lily Drive. The sun shines brightly against the grass, the open windows, the blue door. T-shirts dry on the banisters. There’s a hammock keeping the tire swing company, which seems higher, tauter. And your 4Runner is in the driveway. I can hear the rumble of its speakers, see its luminescent display lighting up the eternal nights. 

You are home, then. You are there. That’s what sends a chill up my spine; causes me to lose myself for a moment. “Where are you, Joe?” I whisper at the screen. The storm door holds a glare, but is that your pit bull, Yippa, lying on the floor, staring out at me from beyond time? As in so many things, I’m uncertain. I imagine you in motion, about to burst around the corner of the hallway, into that new and inimitable day. 

I stare for a long time at this photo taken from a stranger’s car on a random day over a dozen years ago. I want so badly to find you. I zoom in at each window, manipulate the angles, searching for any piece of you—a steady hand lining up a pool shot in the living room; a page from a book about distant galaxies on the kitchen counter; some sign of the porch swing moving, that place I often wish I was again, on that first night, with a Tallboy in my hand, realizing how spectacular everything is about to be. 

I know I’ll return to this picture, like I return to my thoughts of you, hoping something about our reality will have changed—that you will be crossing the threshold of your door, your handsome smile greeting us all as we prepare for the impossible euphoria of these years to come, in near disbelief that we can be this young, right here, right now.

Where are you, Joe?

I zoom in, I zoom out, never certain which will get me closer to you.  

Adam Cheshire (he/him) is a writer and bookseller living in Hillsborough, NC. His work has appeared in a variety of publications. A collection of linked prose pieces, 90s Kid Plays Games, was published in December 2022 by NifytLit. Adam received his M.A. in literature from The University of North Carolina Wilmington.