I peeked the brim of my helmet just over the edge of the concrete lip, trying to get eyes on my enemy while only presenting a small target in the shortest amount of time possible.
Being the idiot I was, I knocked my forehead against the wall in my haste to duck my head back down.
Ouch, my inner voice hissed, be more careful next time.
At the same time the little voice in my head was admonishing me for knocking his house around against a concrete wall, he'd also quickly calculated the distance to my target, and was busy telling my muscles exactly how much to tense up, how much energy to get ready to use, where my feet needed to move to get the best leverage for the throw.
Ready, he whispered.
I tucked the little ball in close to my chest, holding it in my right hand, and stuck my middle finger of my opposite hand through the metallic hoop hanging from the top of the ball. In one swift motion I twisted and pulled my left hand back from my right, as the little voice in my head barked It's show time!, sounding way too much like Michael Keaton's Betelgeuse.
The muscles in my legs fired automatically and propelled me into a sort of half-crouch, my arms coming up to my ears with my left hand extended up and out at an angle; if I hadn't had a live grenade in my hand it might have looked like I was throwing a Nazi salute toward the silhouettes in front of me. I pushed my right arm forward, hard, starting at my shoulder and just as I fully extended my forearm, I rolled my right wrist, just like they'd told me not to, in order to let the grenade come out of my hand more like a baseball than the shot-put technique they'd told us all to use.
It came out of my hand smoothly and with just enough spin that I could tell by heart it was going where I wanted.
To nail that fucking guy right in the teeth.
I didn't have time to admire my strike, though, and in a split second I was flat on my ass, having thrown myself downward as hard as I could in order to...
there was a big WHOOSH sound over my head
...in order to miss that.
The Senior Drill Sergeant standing over me was livid, and I could almost see the steam starting to leak from his ears; not only because I'd failed to let him clothesline me like he'd been trying to all afternoon with the rest of the Privates, but also because I'd flat out ignored the throwing technique he'd specifically taught us earlier that day.
He squatted down in front of me as I rolled over to get up out of the sand in the bottom of the little fake 6 foot square bunker, his face inches from mine. "Get the fuck out of my face and off my firing line, you", he snarled. Smoke puffed out of his eye sockets, or so it seemed, as I answered, "Yes, Senior Drill Sergeant! Moving, Senior Drill Sergeant!"
I started to hustle off the range when I heard him call out after me, "Next iteration! Y'all better fucking find something else to throw at since Nash just killed our fucking dummy!"
I smiled to myself and went to go find someone else to piss off.
Nice, the little voice in my head whispered.
******************************************************
I'll never forget, though, the sound of the Senior Drill's arm crashing through the air inches above my head as I threw myself clear of his clothesline attempt.
WHOOSH
I'll never forget because it was the same sound as one of my worst nightmares when I was a kid.
******************************************************
As a child, I used to run past doorways to darkened rooms as fast as I could.
I was convinced something bad would happen to me.
When I was eleven, my parents let me move my room from the second bedroom on the long hallway in our house, up to the first bedroom on the hall. My brother had moved out, and I'd never slept well in my smaller bedroom, so my parents agreed to let me take his old room since it was bigger and had a ceiling fan; I always slept better with a big fan on the high setting, for some reason.
I was delighted.
Until my brain sabotaged me.
One night I woke up around 1:30AM and went to the kitchen for a drink of water...and a piece of cake Mom thought she'd sneakily hidden in the back of the fridge. I'd learned to walk on the balls of my feet on the hard wood floor of the hallway, so as not to make the boards creak and give me away, and I'd learned how to open the refrigerator door by first putting my fingers in between the rubber stripping around the edge and then pulling the door open so it didn't make that big suck-clunk-hiss noise when opened. I had this shit down to an art. I was also the fattest kid in my 5th grade class. Actions beget consequences, I guess.
I had just finished my late night snack when I looked up from the kitchen counter and out through the dining room and into the main hallway where the bedrooms were. The door to my old room was perfectly centered opposite the dining room door on the other side of the hallway. As I looked into the darkened hall, I swore I saw the door to my old room open a bit further. There was nothing in there, and I knew it. All my furniture had been moved into my new room and nobody had gone in the now-abandoned bedroom in a week. Our only cats were sitting in the kitchen window to my right, casting big shadows on the tile floor in the moonlight, and there was no fan or circulation in that bedroom to make the door move on its own.
But my brain filled in the blanks with an image of a giant, disembodied, black hand curling around the edge of the white door.
After that, I always ran past open doors to dark rooms. I wasn't willing to take the risk, even though I knew I'd made that monster hand up.
When I was 16, I spent a lot of time away from home. My Dad had moved out of the country for work, my Mom was in the process of becoming an alcoholic, and my brother had just moved back home after being let out of minimum-security lockup for burglary and domestic abuse. I made it a point to find other places to stay other than my own house.
But one night I just couldn't manage to invite myself to any of my friends' houses for the night, and my Mom was just sober enough to catch me in a lie about "going to study" at girl's house down the street. She sent me to my room. With no dessert. Boo-fucking-Hoo.
Luckily, later that night I finally got a text on my absolute brick of a Nokia phone from a friend telling me if I could get out of my house, they'd pick me up at the park just down the street. It was a Thursday and we'd probably just fall asleep in the high school band parking lot like usual, and we needed to be there at 5 AM anyway to start setting up for rehearsal (rebellious band-geek here), so I figured what the hell? If my brother was home, he sure as hell wouldn't rat me out if he saw me sneaking away, and my Mom wouldn't wake up until 10 or so the next morning, and as long as my car was gone from the driveway, she wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
It was around 2AM when I got the text.
Quickly, I grabbed my backpack and phone charger and silently opened the door to my room.
Padding down the hallway on the front part of my feet, stepping where I knew the boards wouldn't creak, I was just past my old bedroom in the middle of the hall when I heard it.
WHOOSH
I ducked, froze, and looked behind me in time to see something big and black retreat into the darkened doorway to the room.
I instantly turned and made the last 20 feet of the hallway in about two strides before I was at the back door, ghosting out and catching the screen door before it characteristically slammed hard enough to be heard down the fucking block.
The park was about a quarter mile down the street from my house and I think I made it there in about 90 seconds. For a fat kid, that's pretty fucking fast.
I didn't bother going back to the house the next morning to move my car. Whatever was in there in my room could fucking have the place, for all I cared.
The next morning my Dad called me from London. He said he was getting on a plane to come home and that he'd been on three flights already that morning. Something had happened, and I needed to get back to the house. Now.
I remember asking him, muzzily, my head not fully keeping up with the conversation yet, "wait, what? What's wrong? What happened?"
"Shawn...", the connection picked that moment to crackle and fuzz and get all shitty, "...'s dead."
"What? Mom's dead? Is that what you just fucking said?" I blurted.
"No. Stop. Listen. Rob's dead. Your brother. Your Mom found him this morning. Go back to the house, now. I'll see you soon", and my Dad hung up the phone. It was the longest conversation we'd had in six months.
My Mom woke up around 4AM to the sound of thrashing in the house.
She'd opened the bedroom door to see my older brother in a full grand mal seizure. He'd gone unresponsive in her arms and was dead before the neighbors heard the screaming and could dial 911.
He'd died in the same room I'd been scared by only two hours before. The room I'd been scared by for years.
WHOOSH
Submitted November 26, 2018 at 04:42AM by 5119medmusic https://ift.tt/2DXe0XB
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