--ONE DAY MORE

Day of the Dead

What you don’t hear is the screams or cracking of bones, because the sound isn’t working.  You feel it though, as if it is your body on screen, bats and crowbars thwacking your spine and ribs, the assault sudden and merciless, a brand of violence so ripe that it must be staged.  Only this is not fiction.  This is real.

You don’t know the kid on the screen.  He’s from a different neighborhood.  He’s wearing the wrong colors, colors that are soon splashed with terrific amounts of body and slimy gore.  It takes longer than you expect for him to crumple.  When he does, the bats go to work on the kid’s head until his skull is a caved-in watermelon.

Your seat mates in this room are conspicuously silent as they watch, like juveniles spying a naked woman for the first time.  No one seems to breathe.

When the bats finally stop swinging there is no celebration, just a knowing jerk of the head from one signaling that the job is done, it’s time to move on.

You try not to throw up in your mouth, try to still your bones that feel as if they’re stabbing through your skin.  You are eleven but could be any age.

“So?” Goose says, standing by the ancient television, tapping the wood.

You’re afraid you are crying, worried your crotch could be leaking piss. 

But you need this, to belong, to feel safe, to have friends who surround you for the right reasons.

You nod.  You hear your mouth say, “I’m ready.”  You stand and wait for instructions, a time and place, an enemy.