Into Me He Falls
I am participating in the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge. It’s a writing contest where you get an assignment with a genre, a setting, and an object that has to appear, and you have 48 hours to write a 1,000-word story. Everybody participates in the first 2 rounds, and scoring in those rounds determines who goes to round 3. With over 3,500 writers separated into 125 groups, I got first place in my group! Yay! 15 of 15 points to carry me into round 2.
This was fun! I’m looking forward to round 2 assignments, which come out Friday night. I guess I’ll have some work to do this weekend.
I like writing to prompts. I enjoy the structure provided by a framework. I think that’s why I like storytelling events, too: there’s a theme and a time limit. Here’s my entry for the “ghost story/playground/clothesline” group.
Into Me He Falls
Waymon hung himself from the monkey bars of his old elementary school. The playground was across the street from his house. He wanted his mother to see him when she went out for her paper in the morning.
Or his father. Some stories said he wanted his father to find him, to make him sorry for all the beatings. Or for the car they wouldn’t buy him. Sometimes it was a car. It was always to make them sorry for something. In that version, he was 16. Sometimes he was just a 4th or 5th grader, like the kids who most kept him alive, whispering about him in the dark at sleepovers, giddy at the thought of parents made sorry, parents who had learned their lesson. Most of the time, his name was Waymon.
It’s been told longer than I’ve been alive, maybe, that cautionary tale spiced just so with a dash of comeuppance. When I was one of those 4th graders, our story said it was just a few years ago, long enough back that none of us would’ve known him but recent enough that we could say a friend of a friend of a friend had. My friend Greggo had a short length of clothesline in his bottom drawer, dirty and frayed, that he swore was the very rope. He showed it, in the dark, at a sleepover. It had come, he said, from the little brother of the cousin of the son of the cop that cut him down. That’s blood, he said. That’s blood, pointing at a stain that maybe was red once. Maybe. Blood where it cut into the skin of his neck.
I look across the street now. I haven’t been here since it was my school, my playground. It’s dark, cloudy and moonless. This late, the suburbs all are sleeping. The trees block my view of the front doors over there, some black, inscrutable, and some lit up in a protective spell against the night and its mysteries. I don’t know which door it was, but she wouldn’t have seen him in the cheerful light of morning. She wouldn’t have seen him, unless she knew to look. It’s just one of those stories that kids tell.
I tip the plastic Coke bottle up to drain it. Coke doesn’t burn like that, and it’s not a dark enough brown. It wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, but there’s no one here to scrutinize. The only eyes on me, I think, are his, and he doesn’t judge. In the dark, beneath the monkey bars, it’s easy to forget that it’s just a story. Such a strange name. Who makes up a name like his?
It’s hard to get booze in this town. It’s a dry county. The next one over is plenty wet, but that’s not much help when you’re 15. I’m a resourceful 15, though, deft in my calculations on how much to water down Mom’s bottles so she won’t notice. Her liquor isn’t in a cabinet. Hers is not for display. Hers is hidden from view. Under the sink. At the bottom of the hamper. Behind the mirror in the bathroom, like it’s medicine.
I ride my bike here sometimes. It’s quiet, and no one cares. When I ride at night, the cool air is alive with an electric quality that only exists at 3 a.m. The whirring of the gears of my bike as I coast downhill blends with the chorus of crickets, a sussurating soundtrack to my ride. It comes from a pawl, that whirring sound. It’s a private word, pawl, that no one knows, like a code or a secret name, just for me. Pawl. It’s a gear that engages in only one direction and spins free in the other, like a mouthful of teeth that can only chew and swallow, chew and swallow, endlessly taking it all in and never, ever able to throw it all up again. A pawl in the night, and the night like a pall.
It’s quiet now, the pawl and the crickets both silent. I am not drunk, but the silence is disorienting. Even the breeze does not shush through the leaves of the trees that hide me from the front doors across the street or moan like a ghost over the neck of the bottle I let drop into the gravel. It is quiet now, and only Waymon is watching. I’m not drunk. Only Waymon knows where I am at this hour when all good children are home in bed. It doesn’t seem like a story now. Stories are for bedtime, and stories about kids like me and like Waymon are not stories to bring sweet dreams.
Three times I’ve thought his name, standing beneath his monkey bars. Three times, and the breeze stirs. It lifts my hair. It rattles the leaves, and the wheel of my bike where I dropped it turns, clicking slowly, deliberately. The crickets are silent. Nothing else moves. I look up. The moon is still hiding. I can see him there, above me, crouched on top of the monkey bars, the length of clothesline secured with a knot I cannot name. He is crouched there. And then, as if he were the drunk one, he topples forward, overbalancing, tipping in slow motion until gravity takes him completely and he falls. Suddenly, he falls. The rope catches and snaps tight. The wheel is turning, and he falls. Into me he falls, and we stare, twitching and kicking, through the leaves into the doorway that does not open.
