Once There Was This Kid

Once There Was This Kid

By Jules Vasquez

Your baseball strikes the side of shed on the far side of the field. Bask in afternoon swelter curtains of shadow. Dust rises off the timber, fallout summer red. It tilts away from your glove, rolling down the raw earth past your feet. Panic swells, an unknown sea, in your throat when it rolls downslope through the brush barrier onto the outfield. Thin halos of cicadas rise. You don’t dare retrieve it now. A jeer swallowed in swells of murmurs. They think they’re smart. Nobody forgot your tryout. The wild swing sent it arching high, catching a sliver of sun, then tumbling like a dead satellite, then the scramble, uncoordinated, like a frenzied wounded deer, the desperate slide dragged your face in the sand, staining you head to crotch, you crow victoriously. Everyone laughed when you were tagged out. You got a nosebleed and didn’t wait for an icepack or even a rag, only ran through the tall grass. You thought a hare ran beside but didn’t look. Someday you’ll show them all. Someday. Trekking across backyards, sunburnt kneed, alone. Your shadow stretched across burnt pavement, long as the hour, tall, fearsome like the man you’ll be. The heat, like blazing coals, leaks through your thin-soled high tops. You’re a firewalker. Someday you’ll be. You should stop going spying on practice, swathed in thin pelts of proximity. There are other battered sheds in this new town, ones closer to the porch. Still, you find yourself walking three miles like pilgrimage. Today it’s too much effort and proves nothing. Then you hear it. Solid snap of timber, scuffle of feet. Here, it’s wild, not an overgrown lot, but something more, something gone deep and feral. An argument whether it’s a ball or a strike. You can’t see them. There’s no fence in sight, nor the decaying line of one, not the posts, not an outline wavering in the hallucination heat. Once you saw a bridge unfurl vague in the distance, you couldn’t get nearer. They call it heat exhaustion, something you’re prone to when you woke face up on the beach, mouth full of vomit and sea water. This isn’t that. Not one voice, many, the slap of hide on leather, skid of cleats. You’re following the rhythm. Thick sticky thorns grab at your calves and shoulders, but you don’t stop. They’re running, laughing. Just like the others. Now they’re closer, taunting, hurry up buttercup. You hate the layered implications under and through, you’re no girl. It’s them, it fucking has to be them. They followed you all this way to do this. But there’s invitation, an urge to follow. Everywhere is alive with movement and skittish feet. A secret game to begin, something invited to, beckoned at. You don’t know what’s starting, but there is that hollow wound, you’re being left out again. So you follow. It’s denser here. The wet smell of green, the burnt smell of dead. Pollen coats your tongue, your throat, your lungs. One sweeps past, his shadow close enough to touch. Turn and race after. Move unthinking. You’ll get that fucker now. Your aching soles miles away. You’re gaining on him, three paces behind, heavy stalks whip out against you. Don’t think of the pain. Think of settling this once and for all. Now he’s in reach. Your fingers grasp. You want this all to be over.

But it’s not over. It’s beginning.

About an hour after dinner, with yet plentiful daylight, they call the parents in the neighborhood. You’re surely inside watching tv somewhere. Only you are not. Then they begin their search start behind the baseball diamond, the playgrounds below, the rotting creaking jungle bars, the boys’ bathrooms, then the shed. Then, in treehouses, then trees, where boys climb. Then backyards along the alley route, then backyards along the trail route. Once along the paved route again just in case, they pause near a condemned lot, but don’t say why. It’s is the one place they do not search. Then around the neighborhood to tap on neighbors’ doors, sometimes boys go over to play then stay for dinner and then sit down for a movie, the other parents wouldn’t know about your curfew, it’s a very safe trusting neighborhood. But you’re not a sociable boy. Then one neighborhood over, then another. They begin to worry, of course. That worry which starts small, like a coat hanging on the wall, then grows, oh, grows. At midnight it’s time to call. Police don’t start until the next day. They do all the same, with more swagger, austerity and dogs. Kids collect along the road to watch. They’ll search first the backyards, the trails, the treehouses, the campsites, the shacks, then the canals stuffed with sewage and runoff, shacks piled with molding timber, lake beaches with otherworldly broken bottles covering them like electric snow, property lines fenced by loops of rusting razor wire, under the aching bridges below the looming railroad tracks, they search an abandoned filling station near the onramp covered in graffiti. The sigh of the highway makes their hearts run chill. Listen to the sound of a seventeen-wheeler roar down it, the shivering it leaves. If it happened this way, somehow, though no one can think why it would have, you are long gone, forever. Kids come home, cops say. Boys blow off steam then come home, you’d be amazed how often it happens. By the weekend, the posters go up. All the kids, even boys on the baseball team, help staple them up. The parents go with them this time, though, especially when they go door to door. Eventually, the posters, both stapled on community corkboards and telephone posts and those taped in storefront windows, fade and yellow. After months, after seasons, the parents let the kids walk home alone again. That year, the baseball team plays a decent season. Nobody walks home past the shed anymore. The next year, a boy starts telling a story to another in a conspiratorial voice, you know, once there was this kid.

Jules Vasquez is nonbinary, queer, an abuse survivor, and proud. Their major publications include Plague City, which won the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel from the Journal of Experimental Fiction. They enjoy cheap takeout, void screaming, drone/noise/industrial music, B-rated gangster and horror flicks, long walks off short piers.

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