In the first draft of your wildest fantasy, the stick flies past your ear and makes a bumpy emergency landing on the grass behind you. The worst that happens is your mother pops her head out the kitchen door to yell, “Jimmy, watch your language,” after you call the errant thrower something crude and Anglo-Saxon in origin.
That would make for a happy ending. But you don’t want your most heroic action in this narrative to be tilting your head almost imperceptibly to the side.
In the second draft, you track the stick as it leaves the hand of your neighbor, a boy a year or two older, a familiar presence in that teeming ecosystem of grass, brick, concrete, and asphalt that is your childhood habitat. You follow that two-foot-long javelin as it draws a bead on your left eye, snatching it inches before it makes contact, your mouth open wider than your still-intact eyes, which dart from the stick in your hand to the would-be perpetrator of your demise, whose own intact eyes goggle with relief.
This ending, while satisfying, fails to deliver anything approaching the catharsis you demand.
In the next revision, you snatch that missile out of the air, and, buoyed by the whoops from the other kids, launch it back where it came from. The drawback is that, once the stick leaves your hand, all you can do is watch the story play out.
The stick flies with more velocity than your skinny, nine-year-old arm ever mustered while pitching pee-wee league, spinning the tight spiral mastered in backyard football games. You yell, the exact words unknowable, drowned out at first by the percussive blood rushing to your ears and then by the yowls of the older boy, still off-balance after his mighty heave, who looks up a second before impact.
He feels a sharp sensation as the jagged point pierces his eyeball, followed by a radiating numbness. Then he turns and runs into his apartment as if propelled by his own banshee wail.
You wonder if his mother rushes into the kitchen, at first confused then alarmed when she sees him; if he apologizes for crying as she cracks ice cubes to make a dish towel compress; if he shields his face on the silent drive to the emergency room, convinced everyone they pass along the way is staring at him.
At the hospital, they’ll shuttle him from room to room for X-rays, tests, and all manner of poking and prodding, then wheel him to pediatrics. Not understanding that a movie would be the last thing on his mother’s mind, he will feign sleep so she will leave and not cancel plans to see The Godfather Part II, but will blow his cover by opening his unbandaged eye when she is in the room.
You hope he’s not a bleeder; that his hospital stay won’t be extended because blood seeps out the back of his punctured eyeball to pool in his chest and abdomen, rendering his torso several shades of purple; that he won’t almost faint from weariness at the restaurant where his family takes him ten days later to celebrate his discharge.
You also hope he doesn’t hear his mother sniffling in the living room every night as he lies awake in his bedroom; that he remains unaware of his condition as he shuffles from doctor’s appointment to doctor’s appointment, wearing out every copy of Highlights magazine in the waiting room of his chatty, always-running-behind ophthalmologist; that his skin is tough enough not to abrade every time his mother pulls off the medical tape; that his first question when his doctor tells him he’ll lose the eye will be, “Can I still play baseball?”
You wonder whether he’ll be confident enough not to care when someone stares at the prosthetic residing in his voided socket, if he won’t shy away from telling people about his condition, if he’ll disarm their questions with matter-of-fact honesty, if he’ll view the deformity as a feature not a bug, if he’ll emerge from this damaged but not broken.
In the next draft, you don’t want to be the perpetrator of that damage, to see the other kid trudging to his car for yet another doctor’s appointment, to watch him strike out three times in a Little League game and wonder if you, not genetics, were the instrument of his ineptitude, to witness the result of your handiwork for the rest of your childhood, to harbor so much guilt that you ignore all the evidence that the accident didn’t deter him from playing sports or going to college or having a family, from living a life.
No matter how normal he turns out, you’ll only be able to live with yourself if you’re the one who gets maimed.
So in the final draft of your wildest fantasy, that is what happens.
Jim Parisi writes fiction and creative nonfiction. His writing has appeared in FlashFlood Journal, The Bluebird Word, Five Minutes, Club Plum, and The Good Life Review, among others. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. Jim spends most of his free time coaching Little League softball. He lives in Occupied Washington, D.C., with his wife, Beth, and their dog, Dolce.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Rob Olivera
