Topic: A not-so-everyday object

Author: Chris Dunn

You probably don’t know it, but the saddest object in the universe sits in a wall socket at the top of my parent’s staircase. It’s a Dyson V7 Motorhead Cord Free Vacuum, and it’s sweet – as a vacuum that is. For what it represents, though, it’s sad.

I had been living alone for several months – that’s not the sad part. My friends had all finally moved on into their adult lives with the spouses and the children, and I had inherited the hippy house by rules of last-man-standing and was finally settling into accepting that the place was truly mine, my responsibility, do with as I willed. So, it was in that mindset that the commercial found me. Crisp, clean, smiling people clearing away filth and debris with alarming ease, be it under a long, low sofa or hiding in a high, ceilinged corner. The price tag was steep, but the joy in their effortless cleaning seemed worth it. And I was starting to do well at my new job. My old vacuum sucked, and not in the good way. I deserved and upgrade!

Amazon makes it so easy to commit before you’ve fully considered, and two days later, I had my very own Dyson V6 Animal Cord-free Vacuum, and it was sweet! Maybe I didn’t have the exact same joie de vivre that the people being paid to vacuum showed, but it was still miles better than my old crusty vacuum with its bags and what not. You know those things are a horror to deal with, or so the commercial had told me. Sure, it had its issues – like a 15-minute battery life at max power and a near constant need to clean the roller brush of cat and Chris hairs - but the way the carpets felt under my bare feet - it was totally worth it.

I was so impressed I told my mom about it. Gushing like an infomercial crossbred with a carnival barker, I extolled its virtues to her bemused expression. Something about her son raving about the joys of vacuuming made her smile. It was good to see her smile. She had been sick for some time, and I had taken to visiting her a few times a week to see how she was coming along, catching her up with stories about my new job and the assorted, motley characters who populate the periphery of my existence (more on them in other stories). She always brightened at my visits.

The Dyson company owes me a commission, because the next week when I came over, there atop the stairs in its own place of prominence was the V7. I commented on it, and my mom was quick to point out that she had been moved by my pitch AND that hers was the next step up from mine. She was really looking forward to using it once she was back on her feet and feeling fit again.

That’s where the sadness comes in. She never got that chance. My father went in to have his knee replaced, and while he was rehabbing at a facility, her condition continued to worsen. She became confused and distant. We would bring her to see him and she would sit quietly in the corner looking lost. I continued to treat, what at the time we thought was back pain, by applying these little electro-pads to her bare skin, turning on a mild current and letting her sit for fifteen minutes at a time while I wandered the neighborhood. She complained of numbness and carpal tunnel, but what it turned out to be was cancer and kidney failure.

She went into the hospital before my dad got out. I brought him home to an empty house. It was his turn to look confused. In and out of the intensive care units and long term facilities, she eventually recovered enough from the kidney failure to interact with her family like her old self, but she never found the strength to use that vacuum. Instead, they had to have a chair lift installed to carry her to the second floor, when she had the strength to bother making the trip.

Did she see it? Hanging there as the slow-rising chair brought it mockingly into view? Did it taunt her with the hubris of her plans, the thought that she was going to continue? Because that’s all she wanted to do, to go on and serve others, to keep her house clean and ready to receive. She wasn’t ready.

As the doctor’s grim prognostication slowly became real, I drove her to the infusion center on a white, winter’s day. I remember noting how the wind swept the snow in waves off the wide-open field where a grocery once stood. “I wonder if they’re ever going to do anything with that space,” I pondered to myself. They would give her fluids that day to help her confusion. They didn’t help. She went back the same day for more fluids for more confusion, then to the hospital from where she would come one last time home, to end.

She wouldn’t get better. She would never get the chance to show me up with her slightly better vacuum. The scene would never play out as I’m sure she’d envisioned. I’d come for a party, and she would point out the spotless floors with a superior smirk, and we’d share a laugh about that day I tried to cheer her up with a story about my new vacuum.

Every time I climb those stairs…

Topic: Athleticism

Author: Chris Dunn

The coach looked down the bench to where I was sitting tracking pitches, hitters, runs and errors, all in an intricate code I had just been taught. “Dunn,” he called. “You want to go in?” I looked up at the field and suddenly it changed from a structured repository of facts and data into a swirling dust cloud of chaos and sweat. Injuries were possible. Exertion certain. But the worst part was that I wouldn’t be able to complete my statistical analysis of the game. With only an inning to go, it seemed a disservice to my efforts to that point. Screwing my face shut with indifference, I gave him the wave-off I’m sure he was hoping for, “That’s okay?” I said. Later, when my mother caught my eye from bleachers, I gave her my most convincing, helpless shrug, as if to say, “Hey, don’t ask me what’s going on?” I me, I did, from a statistical perspective. I had the pencil scratches to prove it, but as far as why I was there on the baseball field, I was beginning to wonder.

I cannot justifiably be accused of never having tried sports. I did try, or at least I tried to try, but I never quite grasped the point. Maybe it’s because I was never on a winning team. Maybe it was my poor hand to eye coordination or small stature. Who can say? I certainly was no prodigy.

My basketball career lasted all of two games. I didn’t like the coach. He was loud and overbearing. And at an age where, I was lucky to run ten steps without tripping over my own feet, he expected me to keep my head up, bounce a ball the size of that head in-and-around boys twice my size until I could either pass it off or throw it embarrassingly far from the tiny ring I was aiming for. My answer for this sport was simple, whenever someone passed me the ball, I passed it right back and ran away. I got maybe ten minutes of floor time in my pair of games, and when my mom asked, “Do you not want to do this?” For once, I found my courage and answered clearly, “I do not!”

Soccer was more my speed. Eleven players on a side, the chance you would be involved in the game was greatly diminished. Still, if you were on the field, sooner or later the ball would come to you. Dribble it a bit, pass it off, try to get in the way of the guy coming at you – fast! Man, they were fast. And again, there was that thing, running and kicking the ball at the same time. Who thought this was fun? I quickly went from forward to halfback to fullback to bench. Jumping in to sweat out my soccer association mandated quarter each game, all the while praying fervently that I would not do something to lose the game for us.

Baseball worked for me until pitchers learned how to find a strike zone, then I was done. My first two years I had no batting average and around fifteen stolen bases. “Be a hitter!” the coach would yell, his hands clapping furiously. I’d nod and stare out at the pitcher with false focus, aping the motions and stances of the boys before me, but I’d been watching. I’d done the math in my head. Seven attempts, and three out of the seven had to hit the sweet spot, from that distance. We were ten years old! Nobody could do it, not on a kid my size anyway. And even with pitchers who were good enough to come close on occasion, my swatting at the ball with a piece of wood wasn’t going to make any difference. Typically, by about the fifth or sixth pitch, I was on my way down to first. Grabbing second or third was usually easy enough, no catcher had the arm or the accuracy if you got a decent jump. Fielding was another matter entirely, and why I never got more than one or two at-bats per game despite what would now be called an amazing on-base percentage.

Fortunately, my parents never pushed me toward football.

To be honest, I don’t know why they pushed us into sports at all, neither of them had glory day yarns. Being from New England my father’s sports stories revolved largely around yachting. My mother couldn’t ride a bike and had broken her arm her one and only time on roller skates. So, it wasn’t like the family had an honored history to uphold... I think it came more from the schools. The leagues would come into class and make their pitch, and everyone would get excited. “Are you playing this year?” asked my peers. “Sure, yeah,” I agreed not knowing to what. And I went along with it, for years, waiting for something to click, to make it all make sense. It never did…

Until one day, I told the coach I wasn’t feeling well, and he let me ride the bench. As I sat there beside him watching the rest of the guys run and slide in the dirt, I looked over at the book he was always scribbling in. Though I tried to be sly, he caught my surreptitious gaze. “It’s a score book,” he explained. “Here let me show you…” In no time, he handed it off to me, and I was entranced. So many minor things to keep track of. All the focus, tracking every pitch, every out, every error.

“Are you sad you didn’t get to play today?” my mother had asked as we walked home. No mom, you don’t understand. I got to keep score!

Topic: Athleticism

I was an athletic child. 

I’m not bragging, it was just a fact of life; like my height or my skin color.

The only girl, I enjoyed playing “boy” games with my cousin and brothers. As a result, I loved football and baseball, track and field, martial arts… anything that required strength, speed, and agility.

It wasn’t just sports. I was good at anything physical: climbing, running, swimming. I was a natural.

When I was in 2^nd grade I joined the school softball team. I was really excited to play, but my dreams of victory on the baseball diamond were short-lived.

See, I was the only girl on the team. I was also the only black kid and both of those things made my mother nervous. This was the 1970s when girls were still expected to be girls and play with dolls.

But Tatum O’Neil’s character in the Bad News Bears was my hero and I wanted to play softball.

My mother, being the one with the car, won that argument.

When I was even younger, I asked Santa for football gear for Christmas.

I got a doll house.

That was pretty much the story of my life back then. Any athletic dreams I had were crushed under the wheels of what girls should be.

After a while I kind of gave up.

I lost my interest in sports and became one of those artsy-fartsy kids, who spent a lot of time indoors coloring and plotting world domination.

By the time I was in high-school I could barely tell the difference between a touchdown and a home run. Sports, I had decided, were for losers. Thick-necked, lummoxes with IQs barely higher than a baseball bat.

But I couldn’t completely shed my athleticism, and it came out in little ways.

Dance, for instance.

Put me on a dance floor and I became positively acrobatic and uninhibited with the sheer joy of movement.

I remember being in college and putting on a pair of ice skates for the first time. Rather than struggling and falling down, I took to it as if I were standing on flat ground – moving easily and effortlessly around the rink.

And I finally got my chance to play softball, in college, with a bunch of nerds who were more interested in tapping the keg than tapping someone out. Still, despite our less-than-serious participation, I managed to become something of a pitcher with quite a few strike outs under my belt.

But that didn’t last. I put softball behind me as soon as I graduated and settled into a sedentary adulthood.

That is, until I started going to the gym.

It was slow going at first. After years of not being athletic, I had to rebuild my strength and stamina. But it didn’t take long for me to get into the swing of things.

I started taking yoga every morning before work, and I got really good at it. Then I moved on to cardio and weights in the evenings. When I wasn’t at the gym, I was walking for miles at a time.

There were a couple of years there where I was so active that I would have put the childhood me to shame. And I loved every minute of it.

In fact, I loved it so much that I decided to go back to school to become a trainer and share that love with other people.

Things were going really well too, until I caught that flu.

With a name like “the flu” it sounds like a minor inconvenience. It actually even sounds a little cute. Like “Aww! Look at that! It’s a little flu! Hi Flu!”

But the flu is no joke. That shit can fuck you up.

It fucked me up.

I spent a week in bed, and when the initial flu passed, I lost the hearing in my left ear for two months. Worse yet, I was hit with this bone-crushing fatigue that I couldn’t shake.

I’d think I was fine and go to the gym only to emerge sweaty, shaky, and weak 15 minutes later. The fatigue stayed with me for months and would hit in earnest at the oddest times.

It took the better part of a year for me to get over it.

But the flu wasn’t done with me yet.

Over the years, I started to notice that my body no longer responded to exercise the way it used to. Instead of getting progressively stronger, I felt like I was damaging and weakening my muscles.

I started to gain weight, no matter how active I was or what I ate.

I had strange pains in my muscles and joints.

I was cold all the time and the fatigue that I thought I’d gotten over would rear it’s ugly head at the most inopportune times.

Having taken anatomy and physiology and pathology, I thought my thyroid was the problem.

Turns out it was, but that it would take six years for a doctor to finally take me seriously. By then, it was too late.

What years of sedentary living couldn’t erase, an autoimmune disease destroyed.

Well, maybe “destroyed” is too strong a word.

The easy athleticism of my youth is gone. At 48, I’m lucky if I can navigate a flight of stairs without pain. And the fatigue is a constant companion, loitering in the periphery, just waiting to pounce whenever I get sick or my resistance gets too low. 

I have to say that I miss it.

Looking back, I wish that I had fought more for my right to be an active, athletic girl. That I had claimed and owned my athleticism more. Maybe I would have turned into one of those thick-necked jocks, but maybe not.

There’s no way to known now.

I just wish I’d made the most of it when I had it.

Topic: The Object of Her Affection

She didn’t know when, or how it had happened. She only knew that it was slow and insidious, like a creeping rot or a cancer. All she knew is that one day she was no longer in love; that the object of her affection was now just… an object. A nameless, soulless thing that held no more meaning than a discarded cigarette butt on the sidewalk. As she stood on the street, wrapped in a blanket, watching the fire consume the last of the house she used to love, all she could feel was relief that it was all over.

The Beginning

It began with a spark; a tiny mote of blue light emanating from the tips of her fingers as she flipped the light switch in the living room. The spark that sent chills up her spine and alerted her to the vibrant & beautiful soul housed within the plaster and lathe walls.

 It wasn’t the biggest house, or even the best looking on the block. In fact, it was actually a little run down, with a slight lean to the right. It also had a leak in the basement, the roof was in desperate need of replacement, and all of the windows were warped and drafty.

 Despite its flaws, the house had a strange and captivating effect on her. When she first walked in, with the realtor, she immediately felt loved and protected. It was as if the house were embracing her, enveloping her in its many rooms.

Throughout the tour, the house spoke to her. “Choose me,” it said, as she inspected the large kitchen “I will feed and nurture you.”

“I’ll keep you comfortable and warm.” It crooned, as she wandered the large master bedroom.

 As she was leaving, the sunlight sparkled off the windows giving them a mischievous twinkle, as if the house were showing its wicked, playful side.

 The house captured her imagination and she found herself thinking about it at odd points during the day. She was overcome with images of massaging tung oil into the wooden banisters, caressing the downspouts as she removed leaves from the gutters, and lovingly polishing the brass sconces – a holdover from when the house lights ran on gas.

 The house, Andrew, was priced way outside of her budget, yet she knew he had to be hers. He had been on the market for almost a year so, with some deft negotiating, she was able to get him for less than the asking price. With some creative accounting she was able to afford the mortgage payments without resorting to an all ramen diet.

It was done. He was hers.

The Middle

In those first few years he did, indeed, feed and nurture her. He also kept her safe, comfortable and warm. For her part, she did, indeed, massage tung oil into his bannisters, caress the downspouts, and lovingly polish his sconces.

She also replaced his drafty windows and leaking roof. She covered his peeling exterior with siding, and brightened his interior with paint and wallpaper. With each repair and upgrade she discovered something new about him and loved him even more.

She would fantasize about him while she was at work; counting the hours until she could return to him. Each night, she rushed through the front door and embraced his first floor banister, showering it with kisses.

Her favorite space, in his vast interior, was the large, front, master bedroom. Painted, carpeted, arranged, and decorated to her exact specifications, that room became her haven within a haven. It was the space where she and Andrew could be intimate, both physically and spiritually. It was where she shared her body and her dreams with him.

For years it was her and Andrew against the world. When friends and family lamented her living alone, she would always smile, secure in the knowledge that she had someone special waiting at home for her.

That someone special was home to her.

For years she was blissfully happy within the haven of Andrew’s walls…

Until, one day, she wasn’t.

The End

At first it was little things. Things that, in and of themselves, were innocent enough. But, taken as a whole, became a big, red flag signaling trouble in paradise.

There was the racoon that found its way into the attic crawl space. It had wreaked havoc for days as it scraped across her bedroom ceiling and chewed on electrical wires. Even after removal, extermination, and repairs, it had taken weeks for her to reclaim her space.

There was the thermostat that stopped working on the coldest day of the year. As she sat shivering in her normally-warm living room, all she could think about was warmer climates where furnaces and thermostats were distant dreams.

Although she had been through rough times with Andrew before, these times somehow seemed different. She found herself watching home and garden shows, wishing that Andrew could be more like the houses on the programs. If only that window weren’t there, if only he were brick instead of wood, if only…

She found her eyes wandering to for sale signs and realtors’ descriptions of newer houses, larger houses… better houses.

It ended the way it began – with a spark. A tiny mote of blue light running along the antiquated knob and tube wiring that lurked within the plaster and lathe walls.

In may ways she was lucky. It happed in the middle of the day, while she was awake and downstairs, rather than the middle of the night. And, most importantly, her insurance was all paid up.

She had also learned a valuable lesson about running the vacuum cleaner and microwave at the same time.

As breakups went, it could have gone smoother. But she felt an immense sense of bittersweet freedom now that it was all over.

Topic: Touching on a medical procedure

Author: Chris Dunn

I never liked school really. Didn’t understand what it was for. Apart from math, none of the classes was trying to teach me anything. I knew how to write complete sentences, I could look up the spelling of words in a dictionary as long as I had a starting point, and everything else just seemed to be about memorizing shit I didn’t care about. Who conquered what on what date? What form does third declension take when used as an object? What countries make up the internal structure of the continent of Africa? Yeah, that stuff would matter, if I wanted to impress other people who had wasted their lives learning the same stuff, but those people sounded boring.

Do enough to get by. Read the bold print and the first and last paragraph. Ask your buddies what the big points were. These were my tools, and they got me through high school without much difficulty. Apart from scraping by with a 70.2 % average in US History junior year (which was .2 above passing at good ol’ Roger Bacon), I faced little challenge and little worry. Sure, I went in to high school ranked #2 on a scholarship, but I used my innate abilities to determine how little work I needed to graduate safely in the middle of the pack. Then on to college….

Wait a minute? I don’t have to go to class? No one’s going to check? There’s no one around to make sure I put on pants and face the sun at some point during the day? Well, this is bliss! This is what I’ve been working so hard for - the good life. Up all night, sleeping in till noon, writing papers at the last minute, seeing teachers two or three times a semester, as long as I kept my average above a C, I was fine with getting by.

But not everyone was so understanding about my new-found freedom. Every so often you’d find a teacher who had seen my kind before, “Miss three classes in a semester, and you’ll get an incomplete. Four, and I will drop you!” Please! Why did these in loco parents have to challenge me? Couldn’t we just keep coasting? You get your money – well not from me since I was riding my father-professor’s free coat tails - but still, in principle…. You get your money, I get to avoid facing the real world for another few years, it’s win-win! It made sense to me. I made to sophomore year before I met my a real challenge.

We were well into the second semester, I slipped into Latin 202 assuming no one would notice I had been gone the entire previous week, or even if they did, that – as before – the threats would prove as hollow now as they had then. The professor let me sit through the entire class before calling me out, and asking me to stay for a few minutes.

“Well, I’ve been sick, you see…”

He raised me. The dreaded doctor’s note was now a must, or I was gone.

“Not a problem,” I said, and must have sounded convincing because he let it – and me - go at that.

This was how it began. I could’ve just bailed, taken my medicine, faced my parents and started over, but no, not me. I wasn’t going to be beaten like that. That afternoon, I was down at the campus infirmary flipping through a list of symptoms in my head. In the end I decided, with Spring was coming on, I would just play up my seasonal allergies into something worthy. Taking my sniffle and red eyes and adding a low grade fever and headaches and I was golden.  I had my excuse note and nothing to worry about except the Latin exam I was woefully unprepared for. Nothing, except a referral, that is.

The doctor was concerned about my response to the treatment for the sinus infection I didn’t have, and recommended a cat scan of my sinuses. Well, I was in too deep at this point to back out, so I got to spend my spring break lying on my stomach with my head propped up on a post set beneath my chin trying not to notice how close the loudly vibrating walls were to the sides of my head. A vacuum sinus condition, this is what I had somehow managed to convince the university doctor I had. And whatever the cost to the university insurance program, they weren’t going to let it go unchecked. It took two scans not to find it. One with contrast IV. I remember the intern administering the first scan looked a lot like Scott Baio from Happy Days and thinking, “Surely, there must be someone more qualified…” But despite the giant machines involved, CAT scanning is little more complicated than old-school photo development.

It was when they scheduled the second scan that I started to get nervous. Why would they need a second scan? I was making all this up. There was nothing for them to find, right? But I had no one to ask these questions. I was all alone marching silently to my doom, trusting that at some point someone would realize the mistake, yank me out of line, and explain this was all just a misunderstanding. They had to, right?

CAT scan machines are loud and the exams take a long time – a long time with nothing but your thoughts to wonder, “Maybe I should just go to class… Wouldn’t it be easier than all this?” But no, now I had to know.

The letter that came contained lots of confusing bits, not all of them technical: Arnold-Chiari malformation, food-filled sac between the hemispheres (we assumed this was a typo), “usually, mostly benign.” I had a follow up with a neurologist. He had me walk on the side of my feet, asked countless questions, and then flick my fingers against my thumbs like I was doing a pair of hand puppets having an intense argument. Only, then did he bottom line it all for me. Slight desensitization on my right side due to cephalic pressure… Probably always been there since birth… Nothing much to worry about… Shouldn’t cause you much difficulty… Come back in six months and we’ll see if it’s growing…

This was over 25 years ago, and I’ve never been back. Occasionally, the diagnosis will seem relevant – like with my recent discovery of arthritis in my neck – and I’ll tell the doctors about it. The reaction is always the same, confused indifference mixed with disbelief, as if I thought my run in with a unicorn on the way to the exam might be relevant. As that ancient neurologist predicted, “nothing much to worry about.”

And I didn’t get dropped from Latin. Aced the final.

Topic: People who are in love with objects

Author: Chris Dunn

I was on the fence about whether to cry or not. Part of me really wanted to. It would increase the impact of the injury and maybe force an empathic reaction to let Chris now how deeply his betrayal had stung me, but then again, this was school grounds. I was surrounded by my peers; the energy of a potential fight having drawn them into a close cluster. But they were beginning to suspect that there would be no fight, just a simple over-reaction and a brief assault. They tittered and whispered their hushed disappointment all around us. Tears, at this point, would’ve done more harm than good. My reputation among the eighth graders had never been on the manly side, being small for my age and what most would call a “later bloomer” physically. Tears – had they fallen – would’ve been all that were remembered of that day, and that was not the impression I was going for. I wanted Chris to hurt for what he’d done – feel a deep pang of guilt for the betrayal I was suffering, so I continued to clutch the side of my head which had struck the dirt wearing my best pained expression while Chris worked with some others to recover his lost treasure. He wasn’t even looking at me!

I can’t say how it came to be that Chris Marx and I were friends. A large part of it had to be that we shared the same first name. Ironically, my parents had chosen to name me Chris for the name’s uniqueness. To their knowledge, no one was named Chris. This must have been a common misconception among many hippies, as I was one of six Chris’s in my first-grade class. Chris Thompson, Chris Werk, Chris Marx - and two others who have now faded completely from memory - had to share the name and sign all our assignments with our last initial for clarification. This was hardest on Chris Thompson, as he often got in trouble for signing his work ChrisT. Which didn’t go over in the holy confines of Saint Margaret Mary Grade School. Of course, there were other factors than our shared moniker. Chris was lanky and awkward and socially – how best to say it – uneven. Though he was tall and fast, he never had displayed interest in organized sports. I assume today, it was probably due to a lack of money, though to be honest, we never became close enough friends that I learned the exact level of his family’s finances. What made any of us friends back in grade school? Proximity and coincidence. Was it really ever more than that?

Whatever the reason, Chris was my friend. I wish there was a font that could portray the emphasis placed on that word by a sixth grader. More than lover, more than brother, friends were what the world was about. I like these people. These are my people. Together we don’t like those people. Cliques were still a few years away waiting in high school, but their seeds were well planted. So, when my friend Chris wanted to show me his new creation, I was excited both for him and for me.

It wasn’t much, just a glow-in-the-dark rubber skeleton he had suspended on strings. It stood about eight inches in height, and Chris could make it dance comically by jiggling his hand like a poor puppeteer. If you ever see Robert Palmer’s video for the song Clues, you’ll get a very accurate idea of the level of artistry as well as the duration of the novelty. Chris was very proud of, and highly amused by his creation, as were we all - Daryl, Mark and the others of our outcast band. We each took turns working the crude marionette, but recess was long – twenty whole minutes – so it wasn’t long before this ceased to hold everyone’s interest. Even before I had my turn, someone – I believe it Mark – began throwing the rubber skeleton into the air. This was funny, in that watching its limbs flail as it flew looked silly and was, therefore, in keeping with the theme of puppetry while surrendering control to gravity and wind resistance.

The game changed. It was no longer, take your turn and show what you can do with this amusing, if crude, puppet. Now it was, catch the falling, flailing skeleton and see how high you could throw it. Oh great, another activity where being in constant competition for front-row-center of every group photo, was not an asset. And I hadn’t even gotten to play puppet master yet! But I was game to try. You had to try or be left out, right? Leaping and jostling as the taller boys continued to catch and release, laughing now as much at my feeble attempts to participate as to the skeletons wild bones. But fate has a way. Eventually things have to fall. Mark and Chris collided. Or maybe a ricochet, carom or fumble. Whatever the cause, the lovely bones fell to me, and I made the most of it. Not content to merely toss them up with what would likely be my only contribution to the game, I heaved. Heaved with all my puny strength, tossing the makeshift amusement as high as I could manage. Too late I saw the fence. Too late I remembered where we were. Too late I realized my own strength.

You see recess was held on the field adjoining school, which at that time, was a large open field of grass predominated by flanking baseball diamonds. We had congregated for our activity that day on one of said diamonds – the open grass being reserved for a never-ending game of what was known as kill-the-man-with-the-ball. Beyond the title, you can assume the rules and play of this game anyway you like, we always did. If you had asked me when I came to class that morning, walking along the path which ran beside the field, “Hey Chris, do you think you could throw a rubber, skeletal marionette as high as that backstop?” I doubt I would have said, “Sure, no problem.” Turns out, it wasn’t that hard. The thrashing arms reached out desperately to arrest the puppet’s return to earth and grasped the highest point imaginable before rapping tight and clinging for dear lifelessness.

Everyone froze. I watched the anger rush into Chris like a crimson river, flooding his face from the neck up. I should’ve run. Run it out. I would only need to avoid him for a few minutes and his stamina would’ve likely abated. But, no. I stood my ground, trying to fix the situation with a counter flood of apologies and pleas for sanity. No good. Chris grabbed me. So shocked, was I, by this the first, and I think only time, my friend had ever laid hands on me, that I barely resisted. Physically, that is. Verbally I continued to pelt him with “sorrys” and “waitaminutes” and scarcely noticed I had been upended, flipped nearly 160 degrees. I saw the dry earth of the infield and thought briefly, “Oh, shit! Am I in a fight?” The he dropped me, on my head! Well, my forearm and the side of my face, really, but that doesn’t really convey the impact. I hit and it hurt, that’s what mattered, I decided as I lay there stunned.

In my injury, hand clutched to my battered – and likely bruised – skull, I crawled to the backstop and stared with rage and betrayal as Chris and Mark and some other kids worked to retrieve the toy the only way the animals could think of. They threw rocks at it. The crowd had dissipated as quickly and magically as it had formed. No fight was occurring and now there were falling rocks to contend with. All that remained were a couple of faceless, unrembered true friends, sitting by my side and voicing actual concern. But I couldn’t hear them. I don’t even see their faces in my memory. All I saw was how it only took a couple dozen well aimed stones and toy returned to earth. Chris held it up by the strings, none the worse for wear for its temporary ensnarement. Beaming with delight at the rescue, Chris didn’t notice me approaching with my hand still glued to the red scrape on my cheek, lest one forget where I was hit.

“Hey,” he said to me. “I got it back!” Suddenly, as if only then realizing, he asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

“You dropped me on my head!” I screamed. “And for what? For this stupid-” I was going to cuss. I wanted to cuss, but catholic school, you know… Instead, I lashed out, my hands quick, and for once, my blow struck true, ripping the tiny dancer free from its strings. The look on Chris’ face was perfect. Shocked betrayal! I had won. But what good is a victory, when guilt didn’t even give you a minute or two to enjoy it?