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musings on a tiny piece of ground...
#WritcoRapidPrompt1
Write a short story from your past that involves light or darkness in some way.
When I was 17, I was a fresh faced junior in high school who had just joined a volunteer fire department. That day, I stood outside goofing around with my friends and then suddenly responsed to a horrible car wreck that happened right outside of my view across the street, resulting in 2 casualties... it's somewhat difficult to remember the entire event but I do know for certain that was the first time I had ever seen a dead body with my own two a sheet draped haphazardly over a shapeless Mass and a bloody sock poking out from one end...
The aforementioned drivers and passengers of said vehicles were a police officer in his cruiser and 2 women and 2 children in a four-door light blue car that was so mangled I couldn't tell you the make or model.
I discovered later the police officer was chasing a man (dark-skinned black man in the middle of the Bible belt in rural Missouri) who had been accused of running out on a hotel bill, the anxious girl boy cop T-Boned the other car at nearly 100 mph...instantly, not just killing, but decapitating the driver and passenger, and sending the two small children flying from the car into a ultimately pointless helicopter ride to hospitals in St. Louis...it was an utter horror show... and apparently the man being chased had actually committed no crime whatsoever...
Afterward, when I had finished shaking from adrenaline and putting the jaws of life and the spreader back on the main fire engine, I rejoined my friends. I assumed they were joking at the time when they called me a hero, because both then and now I never espoused myself to be any such thing. However, many years later their opinion of me on that day has, if anything, grown to be more heroic and I find that to be both extremely ironic but also quite endearing...
Years later, I oddly found myself living in the apartment directly beside where this accident occurred with my then doting and loving 2nd wife...the green, metal electrical box sat no more than 10 feet away from my back door and my bedroom window where I slept every night for over 2 years, and even still, memorial flowers and the like sit next to it...much closer to 20 than 15 years later...I still feel that death in the earth beneath my the place I lovingly called home.
Across the street, juxtaposed to the now expanded apartment complex I lived in long ago sits a large, white tree that is home to a substantial, and quite always vocal murder of crows or perhaps ravens. As far as I recall they have always lived in this gangly, supposedly dead birch tree... I wonder, are any of this flock old enough to have witnessed the crash? I doubt they would ever tell me as I assume they'd like to forget as well.
They cackle and fly into the field behind the site of that day to snatch up little meals from the grass and cry out constantly, as if they are to sign of that tragedy, if only to remind me that perhaps, not just the God I grew up knowing, but also even the old gods of man...Odin and the Morrigan....watch me and desire to give me validation and guidance I often posited while I stood by the back door smoking a cigarette or musing over the day's work and woes, whenever I find myself musing over that spot and the events that have occurred there over the years I hear their chorus.
It strikes me also that other, sharper, even more searing pains later struck me many times during that time I called this blood soaked, nightmare-stricken patch of ground I still find myself loving home...finding myself traveling abruptly and often between the heights of ecstatic happiness and love; and the abysmal depths of depression and suicidal ideations...I recall feeling love and intimacy on a level I never assumed I would ever have as well as having those same feelings turn to mourning of horrific betrayal and hatred...
I don't believe I'll ever pass that spot without feeling a small shiver, thinking on the totality of life and death and the many splendid and horrific shades between those two extremes...
After a little over a year...maybe more... since the slow burn of my former life and marriage and time living in that simple apartment ended... I found myself spending a single night in fellowship and fraternity with my former neighbors that still resided above my apartment. As I listened to them speak on things that young people speak of, I thought about the future that they might feel differently about if only they could see the ups and downs that were to come...
As I grilled meat for my hosts by their request, I also looked down at the bird feeder and the small garden that I constructed and found myself no longer mourning it being gone, still feeling a sense of pride knowing that the tiny little splotches of sage that still grew in that flower box were lovingly planted there by myself and my children, and they likely will be there for many more years, starkly alongside with a mild irritation that the new tenants of that little box had not gone to the trouble of filling the bird feeder I had placed there and also left. I told myself neither they nor I truly have any duty to nor sway over the feeding of the birds of the air and the field. Oddly, the words I still find myself holding as sacred and holy spring to mind that the divine casts a watchful eye over those same little beings...so I have no choice but to take stock of the fact that I too am being watched as I have watched over this little patch of storied soil in my hometown. Who could have known that day while I stood there with my friends and heard that horrific crunching and screeching of metal and the fevered dash I made across the muddy field...now secondary set of apartments that were not there before, that I would never be able to shake that absolute totality of this small little piece of ground?
The soil that once was soaked in the blood of the innocent also was made into a playground for my children, and long after I am gone, others will laugh, play, cry, hurt, bleed, and love on the same tiny square of soil.
If only we could know what small and awesome power something so simple as being able to glimpse a tiny piece of the fourth dimension is as we watch it weave its way from past to present to Future...I wonder how much differently we would all feel about every moment that we live... I wonder too if even then... knowing all of this... I somehow still have missed some great and profound truth or perhaps I, like a fool, have over thought significance of something quite simple once again... By making something profound out of something quite insubstantial.
No...
Somehow, I feel a certain sense of absoluteness and certainty that this moment, as well as all the other moments that I have shared with all the others that share this space with me in life and death, in joy, sorrow, even absolute mediocrity... There is something much more profound to be seen than a green metal box with sun bleached flowers of plastic and crumbling ceramic angels...
Perhaps, it is only a secret that I will know... And that to me creates a secret knowledge that I'm not certain can ever be truly shared with anyone...
... Thinking that, I am both saddened but also incredibly thankful...
... I pray that if the world were to fall into itself long after I am dead and gone and any memory of these thoughts are known by no one any longer... that somewhere the same eye that looks down on me and the birds and those ill-fated passengers... maybthat divine eye I hold the hope that it would look down on this spot once more and realize that something happened here... Something that never could have happened any other time or way, and affected just this one simple person in a way that nothing else truly ever has or will...in no way was anything, even at its worst, not one moment, was ever cursed... A blessing and a monument... A place in which time and space became something much more than an idea... if only for myself and only in the back of my mind or spoken of in a way that cannot ever truly convey the immense importance of a small unassuming square of ground in a town in the middle of America...
May that little plot be the last to fall into the mantle...
© David Hafley
Write a short story from your past that involves light or darkness in some way.
When I was 17, I was a fresh faced junior in high school who had just joined a volunteer fire department. That day, I stood outside goofing around with my friends and then suddenly responsed to a horrible car wreck that happened right outside of my view across the street, resulting in 2 casualties... it's somewhat difficult to remember the entire event but I do know for certain that was the first time I had ever seen a dead body with my own two a sheet draped haphazardly over a shapeless Mass and a bloody sock poking out from one end...
The aforementioned drivers and passengers of said vehicles were a police officer in his cruiser and 2 women and 2 children in a four-door light blue car that was so mangled I couldn't tell you the make or model.
I discovered later the police officer was chasing a man (dark-skinned black man in the middle of the Bible belt in rural Missouri) who had been accused of running out on a hotel bill, the anxious girl boy cop T-Boned the other car at nearly 100 mph...instantly, not just killing, but decapitating the driver and passenger, and sending the two small children flying from the car into a ultimately pointless helicopter ride to hospitals in St. Louis...it was an utter horror show... and apparently the man being chased had actually committed no crime whatsoever...
Afterward, when I had finished shaking from adrenaline and putting the jaws of life and the spreader back on the main fire engine, I rejoined my friends. I assumed they were joking at the time when they called me a hero, because both then and now I never espoused myself to be any such thing. However, many years later their opinion of me on that day has, if anything, grown to be more heroic and I find that to be both extremely ironic but also quite endearing...
Years later, I oddly found myself living in the apartment directly beside where this accident occurred with my then doting and loving 2nd wife...the green, metal electrical box sat no more than 10 feet away from my back door and my bedroom window where I slept every night for over 2 years, and even still, memorial flowers and the like sit next to it...much closer to 20 than 15 years later...I still feel that death in the earth beneath my the place I lovingly called home.
Across the street, juxtaposed to the now expanded apartment complex I lived in long ago sits a large, white tree that is home to a substantial, and quite always vocal murder of crows or perhaps ravens. As far as I recall they have always lived in this gangly, supposedly dead birch tree... I wonder, are any of this flock old enough to have witnessed the crash? I doubt they would ever tell me as I assume they'd like to forget as well.
They cackle and fly into the field behind the site of that day to snatch up little meals from the grass and cry out constantly, as if they are to sign of that tragedy, if only to remind me that perhaps, not just the God I grew up knowing, but also even the old gods of man...Odin and the Morrigan....watch me and desire to give me validation and guidance I often posited while I stood by the back door smoking a cigarette or musing over the day's work and woes, whenever I find myself musing over that spot and the events that have occurred there over the years I hear their chorus.
It strikes me also that other, sharper, even more searing pains later struck me many times during that time I called this blood soaked, nightmare-stricken patch of ground I still find myself loving home...finding myself traveling abruptly and often between the heights of ecstatic happiness and love; and the abysmal depths of depression and suicidal ideations...I recall feeling love and intimacy on a level I never assumed I would ever have as well as having those same feelings turn to mourning of horrific betrayal and hatred...
I don't believe I'll ever pass that spot without feeling a small shiver, thinking on the totality of life and death and the many splendid and horrific shades between those two extremes...
After a little over a year...maybe more... since the slow burn of my former life and marriage and time living in that simple apartment ended... I found myself spending a single night in fellowship and fraternity with my former neighbors that still resided above my apartment. As I listened to them speak on things that young people speak of, I thought about the future that they might feel differently about if only they could see the ups and downs that were to come...
As I grilled meat for my hosts by their request, I also looked down at the bird feeder and the small garden that I constructed and found myself no longer mourning it being gone, still feeling a sense of pride knowing that the tiny little splotches of sage that still grew in that flower box were lovingly planted there by myself and my children, and they likely will be there for many more years, starkly alongside with a mild irritation that the new tenants of that little box had not gone to the trouble of filling the bird feeder I had placed there and also left. I told myself neither they nor I truly have any duty to nor sway over the feeding of the birds of the air and the field. Oddly, the words I still find myself holding as sacred and holy spring to mind that the divine casts a watchful eye over those same little beings...so I have no choice but to take stock of the fact that I too am being watched as I have watched over this little patch of storied soil in my hometown. Who could have known that day while I stood there with my friends and heard that horrific crunching and screeching of metal and the fevered dash I made across the muddy field...now secondary set of apartments that were not there before, that I would never be able to shake that absolute totality of this small little piece of ground?
The soil that once was soaked in the blood of the innocent also was made into a playground for my children, and long after I am gone, others will laugh, play, cry, hurt, bleed, and love on the same tiny square of soil.
If only we could know what small and awesome power something so simple as being able to glimpse a tiny piece of the fourth dimension is as we watch it weave its way from past to present to Future...I wonder how much differently we would all feel about every moment that we live... I wonder too if even then... knowing all of this... I somehow still have missed some great and profound truth or perhaps I, like a fool, have over thought significance of something quite simple once again... By making something profound out of something quite insubstantial.
No...
Somehow, I feel a certain sense of absoluteness and certainty that this moment, as well as all the other moments that I have shared with all the others that share this space with me in life and death, in joy, sorrow, even absolute mediocrity... There is something much more profound to be seen than a green metal box with sun bleached flowers of plastic and crumbling ceramic angels...
Perhaps, it is only a secret that I will know... And that to me creates a secret knowledge that I'm not certain can ever be truly shared with anyone...
... Thinking that, I am both saddened but also incredibly thankful...
... I pray that if the world were to fall into itself long after I am dead and gone and any memory of these thoughts are known by no one any longer... that somewhere the same eye that looks down on me and the birds and those ill-fated passengers... maybthat divine eye I hold the hope that it would look down on this spot once more and realize that something happened here... Something that never could have happened any other time or way, and affected just this one simple person in a way that nothing else truly ever has or will...in no way was anything, even at its worst, not one moment, was ever cursed... A blessing and a monument... A place in which time and space became something much more than an idea... if only for myself and only in the back of my mind or spoken of in a way that cannot ever truly convey the immense importance of a small unassuming square of ground in a town in the middle of America...
May that little plot be the last to fall into the mantle...
© David Hafley
