The soccer game had been spectacular, with Springfield trouncing Cape Barnard 3 to 0. The rain started late in the game, but was not called and finished just as the lightning and thunder began. The sky darkened, bolts of lightning lit the field and surrounding forests as players and spectators raced for their cars, the brilliant flashes followed immediately by thunder so loud, many covered their ears.
Jack Beech and Andy Jameson were estatic, having cooperated to score the final goal. They raced through the woods and into the greenway beyond, shirts held aloft, snapping in the wind, their yells of triumph snatched away by the storm and the roar of thunder.
Suddenly, Jack felt his hair rise on his head, the thin hair of his arms go rigid. The air crackled and Andy, running 10 yards ahead dissolved in light so brilliant, that Jack shut his eyes and saw the field, the forest and Andy clearly, through his closed eyelids. His eyes burned with sparks and flashes, and for a moment he could not see. The rain poured down in a darkness so complete Jack was blind.
Slowly, the blackness lightened around the edges, although a black smudge blanked out the center. And he saw Andy laying in the grass, his white shirt luminous beside him. The air, the field, the forest, seemed numb, featureless without temperature or movement, even though the rain poured down and the trees swung wildly. He approached Andy in a bubble of stillness, and gazed down at a crater in Andy’s head. He idly remembered a watermelon he’d tried to carve into a jack-o-lantern as a child. He dug a hole in the center with a knife.
Jack didn’t remember walking home or the days that followed. He texted Andy but got no response. He emailed and called and posted to Facebook and Twitter, but still no response. He ignored the messages that poured in from friends. They thought Andy was dead.
He rode in his parent’s silent car to a celebration of life. A vase: Andy’s earthly remains. Many tears, flowers, stories and hymns. God took Andy home. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. No answer.
Jack didn’t care, his lips were numb, he could not speak or walk or run, and unfinished jack-o-lanterns burned brightly in the night, light streaming from ragged holes, shadows clutched at themselves, resisting the counselor who tried to tug them off. He saw two things. Andy’s watermelon and Andy’s parents, clutching one another and wailing, the others rushing outside to give them privacy or just to escape the grief too deep to countenance. He could help them, Jack thought dimly, he could help lessen their grief. Andy kicked the final goal and so he deserved to live.
He went to their house and they hugged him and cried over his return or so it seemed.
Pills sent him to an empty place, a white place with no pain, no happiness. He lived there for many weeks, while his parents called to him from far away. But he could not answer, because he spoke a different language now, a language of thick sounds and many vowels, a language of groans and squeaks, like ungreased wooden axles, and the sounds did not issue forth as one intended, but only as the pills allowed.
And so at last, they strapped him to a bed, injected him with muscle relaxant, smeared conducting jelly on his temples and sent lightning through his brain, again and again. Electro convulsive therapy seemed promising for killing hogs. It made them passive, easier to slaughter, rock to water.
And as he convulsed, Jack became Andy, he became the dead with a hole in the head. He would go to Andy’s house, quiet as a mouse, and his parents found their boy, shouted their joy. No hole in the head, no empty bed, his place at the breakfast table taken, a boy to hold and love, a child restored to his family, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, bacon to bacon.
