drop: a story

[TheDandyMan]

I'd like any opnions/critisicms. I'd actually be tickled pink of you read and reply.



There were good days.
When Josh and I chased ice cream trucks down the streets and lay in the fields as the clouds careened and exploded in the liquid sky as sugary ice slid down our warm throats oh so slow but all too fast. When we wore holes in our mitts and tore the frayed ends of slender red laces from under the white shell. When we flew down the hill standing on our pedals as lush little gardens blurred out the sides of our eyes watering from Wind combing our hair and then, any minute now, we would spread our wings and fly into the oozing sun crashing and shattering into hills and buildings so far away as the drops of the sun caught in the clouds that always stayed so nice and pure and fluffy.

But Josh is dead now.

Josh died and then, up in the Heavens, he screamed and unleashed a black torrent of cold unto the earth—into the clouds, into the hearts of millions of souls. Billions. He was fifteen, and there were fifteen days of solid snow before The War started. It has been 182 days since The War started. One hundred eighty-two days of being forced to stay indoors by an unseen government. One hundred eighty-two days of looking at sobered reporters, of playing cards, of petting Angelo, of wearing grooves in CDs, of dog earring magazines, of boredom, of completing the 9th grade on the Internet in 10 weeks, of drawing, of staring at walls, of teaching myself to break dance, of sleeping the precious hours of my day—my childhood! my life!—away, of making castles made of whipped cream and graham crackers and topped with gum drops and crushing it with cookie dough bombs, of writing poems, of talking to neighbors I’d never seen before through opened windows, of torture.

Dozens of goons were on these chat rooms and I was a bystander calmly watching conversation go on, not once stepping in to shout to the world that I am 15 years old and my opinion is worth your precious time to hear! Hundreds of people were jostling for the corners shrouded in shadow with me. The goons were celebrities. They fought and said words to each other I didn’t hear in Sunday School. There was still entertainment yet for us Shadow Dwellers.

A tank came down our street yesterday. It was an incredible beast, a huge lumbering animal, a frightful monster the Orcs and captured and tied up with treads and they rode on it for pleasure. The end of my street is a cul-de-sac and they turned around in the park at the end of the street and the Monster crushed the wooden fence posts like toothpicks and flattened the grass like it was hair. I finally realized that The War was here, and The War was real. It has always been real, and, for 182 days, it has been goring holes in the Earth and breathing lethal frost into souls and pulling the plugs on hundreds of thousands of hearts.

Living was pointless now. There was nothing to live for. There was no place to go, and no people to see. How badly I wanted to walk out on the streets of The City—The City I’ve always detested—and approach somebody who looked my age, and then talk to them. And buy them a big soda that would fizzle in their mouths and tickle their throats and would please them and I would tell them all the lame jokes I know and then he would have to go wherever he was going and then I would go back on the streets again and find somebody else—a grandpa, maybe—and I would buy him a fresh, steaming coffee—black—and he would tell me about the good old days and he would tell me stories about the people who he played baseball with in The Lots in the endless days where the world was good.

‘But I only had a wall to stare at and a world that was too big and too menacing and too lethal to comprehend and the office chair squeaked as I left it.

Angelo is a small dog, so he sits in my lap as I sit on the towel I put on the roof after I clamor out the window and while I stare at the clouds that I could grab and twist and mold to my liking and the parks that I would walk through with Angelo on a long, free, lax leash on Saturday mornings with the sun gently crashing through the drab, gray curtain of cloud.

I was content to sit and to stare. To sit and to stare for endless minutes—hours—slowly flowing by in a syrupy sludge.

And then I watched The Drop.

I knew the reporters all over the world would talk about it with eyes wild and frenzied like a lost four-year-old in a store and Goons would pour their hearts—their crazed, cold souls—into the keys and then they would shove them into the corneas of frenzied eyes through the monitors, the same frenzied eyes that relatives far away would use to watch my name drift up on the TV screen, lost in a forest that spanned the world—a forest of names.

But my eyes were not frenzied and my mind was not pinging with alarms with headquarters flooding and I was not asking why I was created to live to come to such a swift, horrible end—I was fascinated.

I watched the bird that numbed souls had bred in years of cold, dark hours when every light had been turned out and I watched it soar and enjoy Wind comb its feathers and finally open its eyes after enjoying Wind and maybe thinking about twisting around in it for a while abut its eyes had returned from its dreams and now it had picked out its prey with eyes that had no soul—with no eyes at all.

I watched it drop. Down, down, down. Too fast, too fast, all too fast. All the way down, down, down.

And then the bird had disappeared and it had broken into the safe under the buildings where they keep the clouds and gray clouds flew out of the ground and they rippled—the clear sky rippled—with the boom that turned the faucet on and the world was covered with a shower of hail—of ice and of metal—and the clouds were growing angrier and the hail was stinging my neck and covering my shirt with white streaks and the hail was also breaking into the safes of clouds who were heading up to join their friends who were pure and white and fluffy because they hadn’t been held captive for decades—centuries, millenniums, eons!—and am I crying I think I’m happy now and I’m hugging you, Angelo, closer to me and I can smell your stale breath and soon I will break through these clouds and on the other side Josh—oh, dear, dear Josh—will feel the quiet tickling of the sugary ice plopping into his stomach and I will be flung down on the endless field next to him and our bikes—Josh would have taken care of my bike, of course—will be there and we will fly down The Hill and through the clouds drenched with Sun and we will crash through that wonderful glowing globe and I’ll let Josh beat me out the other side and I’m sorry for crying so much on you, Angelo, the hail is ripping my house apart, I just need to pull you tighter, tighter, tighter.

There would be good days.