Category: 300

He waited for the explosion of familiar pain to shoot from his elbow down to his fingertips causing them to tingle. The ball arched through the shadows back through the sun and into his glove with the satisfying thwack of leather on leather. He made the familiar transfer from glove to throwing hand, brought his arm back and sent the ball on a tight line back to the target and waited for the pain. Still, it did not come.

            It had been four years, maybe five, since he had picked up a ball or put on his glove. He’d dreamed of throwing, dreamed of playing, but hadn’t ever found a partner, or the courage to find a league of some sort. 

            He loved the game, would have played it any form; softball, wiffle ball, stick ball, it wouldn’t have mattered, he took so much joy from playing. 

            He’d never been good, but that didn’t matter now. The motion felt natural. It felt right. It felt like a piece of him that had been missing. It wasn’t a behavior or an action he needed to relearn. Every time the ball hit his glove, it was in his hand in an instant, his fingers, crossing the red laces, arm back, body moving forward, fingertips giving the leather a last push as the ball spun towards its recipient.

            They moved back, testing their older bodies, pushing arms that had lain dormant for years. They smiled at one another, at the easy camaraderie, at the familiar ebb and flow as the ball made its way through the air. Everything disappeared around them and it was just the sound of leather on leather.

            When they came together they spoke of the pain.

            “It doesn’t feel bad at all,” he’d said.

            “Wait until tomorrow,” he answered.

It started in the inky darkness of the morning under a thin stream of light. I fed a piece of white opportunity into the spool of the typewriter and sat staring at it. 

I don’t know if it was the lack of thoughts in my head or the lack of life at 3am, but the silence screamed in my ears. It was oppressive.

After 15 minutes of nothing, I walked to the kitchen and made coffee. Anything to break up the monotony. 

I wanted to jump on the Internet to look for inspiration, but I knew if I did that I would find distraction. It’s why I was using the typewriter. 

The coffee beeped its completion and I jumped a foot in the air. I took down a bottle of brandy and covered the bottom of my cup. It didn’t matter that I had to work later, this was too important. I needed to start. I needed courage. 

Fear is a horrible thing. It paralyzes. 

I don’t like blood either. It’s a piece of you coming out exposed to the world. If I hit a key on the typewriter I would be offering up myself in faded black ink. In my case, the only blood that hurts to give up.

So I was afraid to start. Even though I controlled whether or not anyone ever saw the page, I was paralyzed.

The coffee steamed in the pale light and I continued to stare at nothing and everything. I thought about how I ached to tell this story. And I wondered how I would screw it up. Then I felt horrible at the thought of never doing anything I wanted.

I took a sip of the coffee. The brandy burned. It began:

Tears streamed from her eyes as she pounded the keys.

            Crows screamed murder as I walked through the dark winter morning. Fresh white splotches of excrement lined the sidewalk and I didn’t dare look up for fear of getting an eyeful. 

            It was 20 minutes to the office, and they would be with me the entire way. They never moved from tree to tree, their ranks were swollen enough they could afford to have eyes everywhere.

            It didn’t matter the path I took. They lined all the roads and walkways their calls beating away at my ears.

            I would look around at my fellow commuters and they seemed oblivious, hooked into their cell phones and the dreary monotony of the morning. No one ever looked up as the din echoed off the concrete walls of the office buildings they trudged towards. Perhaps they had grown accustomed to the watching?

            They never flew down to pick at carrion or scavenge the sidewalks, but instead stayed away up in their naked branches with clear sightlines of those below. It was as though they were waiting for something.

            The walk through the park was inevitable. It was impossible to avoid and the worst part of the journey. Its walkways were covered in shadow, so one had a sense of foreboding even without the crows screaming. It didn’t stop them.

            I refused to run, but my heart begged me to. This day would be no different, I was not going to give fear any purchase within my mind, so I put my head down and walked, looking neither up nor back despite the deafening cries.

            The crows screamed after me as I entered my building, one final piercing cry that struck at my soul and lodged there causing a shiver to run the length of my spine. 

            As the door shut behind me I knew: they knew.