Super Bowl Ring
by Michael Downs
The game ended, and then came the rush outdoors into the noisy February dark, fireworks and gunfire the exclamation points at the end of every hell yeah and damn right. Joyce shimmied on her porch.
Across the street, Kenny and Tracy’s daughter, Elsa (not yet a year) slept in her grandmother’s care.
All Sefton Avenue envied her parents — Kenny who worked for the team, and Tracy, unsettled at leaving her daughter for the first time. But when would she and Kenny ever have a chance like this again? So that night, as Elsa wrinkled her nose and made fists of her hands, her parents partied in the Big Easy, blinking away the glare of celebrities and their glitter and bling.
Months later, the ring arrived. Kenny first showed Joyce and even let her slide it on her finger. Word spread, and we all gathered to marvel. Diamond after diamond after diamond. A Raven on the face, Kenny’s name on one side. Nearby, Tracy watched, bouncing Elsa in her arms and grinning. We cradled the ring in our palms, felt its heft.
“What’s that?” Sylvia yelled from her fence.
Kenny brought it over for her to see. After, he knocked on Bert’s door.
Months earlier, just home from the hospital, he had carried infant Elsa door to door, the child for whom they had waited years and years. Elsa Bear, he called her. Little Elsa Bear.
Michael Downs’ debut novel, The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist, is forthcoming from Acre Books (May 2018). His other books include The Greatest Show: Stories (Louisiana State University Press) and House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City (University of Nebraska Press), which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize.