something a little different

Tomorrow is the big move day...oyoyoy
Nothing to say about it yet of course, it hasn't happened, so here's a little story I wrote instead.

The grass and the sky were white from July, faded from the intense heat of our summers. Our small town, with an overwhelmingly vast and simple landscape with only the flatness like endless space, and the occasional, unreachable cloud. People could only come out comfortably in the cooler night, when there was nothing to do but gather in backyards with neighbours for drinks, and more drinks.
And for us kids, times got shifted too. Cereal clanged in bowls across the town at five in the evening, playgrounds were crowded by dusk. We ran through ravines with our dogs guiding the way in the darkness. Our minds raced and our realities crumbled.
We became invincible.
So we rode our bikes down steep hills forgotten in the sliding winters. We conquered lakes, we neglected meals.
We were untouchable, and filled with ideas and astronomical plans.

I remember one summer, the one between sixth and seventh grade, my brother and I challenged ourselves to raise enough money to go to Disneyland the following autumn. We began passing through every swinging wooden gate to every backyard, asking the middle aged loungers for their empty beer cans. We attached a wagon to our dog Beatrice, and she trotted alongside us, wheeling the bags of bottles and cans.
When it got really late, more and more would be close to passed out on their dirty lawn chairs, eyes half shut, and fingers only loosely around their final cans.
It was easy. And at the end of each week our mother would take my brother and me to the recycling depot to put the cans and bottles in organized rows. We always sang, “Trash into cash! Trash into cash!”


The sign at the travel agent office that sparked this undertaking read “$299 per person for 3 days in Disneyland, kids fly free.” All we needed was $299 for mom and a few bucks extra for us, for cotton candy and a souvenir. But by the end of July we’d already found ourselves with close to $600 in our pockets.

When the second month of summer hit, the heat broke through, penetrated us, and filled our veins with lethargy whenever we were far from the lake. And since we already had more than enough money for our trip, we stopped riding our bikes from house to house collecting beer cans, and took to refreshing our thirst, and rotting ourselves out, with too many big gulps instead.
We had two hundred extra dollars to blow, and I’d never known that kind of cash before. It seemed unimaginable, since I could easily make my five dollar allowance last a week and a half.

But soon, somehow, it evaporated like everything else that summer, and we found ourselves spending the remaining $400 dollars too, on nothing, small somethings, instead of Disneyland.
Our mother made a big fuss about our wasted opportunity, but we didn’t mind too much at the time because I was 11 and my brother was 13 and he told me that we were probably too old for that Disney stuff anyway. We ignored when Mom said we’d regret it later.

But soon we all became distracted by the excitement and the dread of the approaching Autumn. The daytime heat and sunlight were beginning to lose their daunt. We became busied with different kinds of things, sharpening our pencils and writing our names on our notebooks, while the days became windier and the clouds snowballed across the low sky.

On one of these cooler afternoons, I was watching the clouds move grandiosely, when I noticed Beatrice, our dog, howling and whimpering nearby.

“Cut the racket, Bea, there’s nothing there. It’s just the wind rustling and the leaves crackling.”

But she came to my side slowly, and fell beside me in a heavy clump.

My God.

I’d never been so horrified. I screamed and ran to my brother for help. I was nowhere near capable of leading the solution to such a situation! But my brother became equally as terrified when he came, and so we called Mom to get off work early and drive us to the vet.

We were told that Bea had liver problems and needed treatment right away. The treatment was $400 and my mother said, “can’t you give a discount to a single mom?” and this made me embarrassed, especially when the vet said no he could not.
I remembered the money we had raised and wasted. I cried right there in the waiting room, and felt guilty for spending that money on nothing when it could have been used to save Bea. The roles reversed and it was now me embarassing my mother as I cried out, for all the waiting room to hear, that I hated money, and I hated myself, and my brother too.
But Mom told me to be please be goddamn quiet, with clenched teeth, and then just put the bill on her visa and we brought Beatrice home the following day.

That was the day before school started, and the weather was still warm but not too warm, and everything was going to be fine. How could I forget that we were invincible? And I fell asleep just fine.

But when I woke, my mom was on my bed and she touched my cheek and she told me, “Sweetheart, Bea died last night”. I was still half asleep, but I cried until I was completely awake.

That was the first time I realized the sadness of feeling powerless over a situation, compared to the agonizing realization that in some situations, everyone is powerless.

the end