I'm a winner!

My recently posted story, The Bridge, won second place at my school's short story contest! Not quite first, but I'm pleased nonetheless.

Hopefully once this semester ends and summer comes I'll be able to devote some more time to writing. I'm working on one thing right now (I posted a screenshot of it) but hope to do more over the summer months. I've noticed most of my stories deal with similar themes so I want to try changing things up a little bit.

Thanks for reading!

- Tim

After the Wind (Another Revision)

The wind came through town last night. It took everything with it. The power was out everywhere. Electrical wires hung limp from splintered poles. They did not even spark; the power had been cut off some time during the night to prevent fires.

My car was down the street, lofted in a neighbor’s tree.

No one else was outside. I could never sleep through the wind, and as soon as it ended I walked out into the aftermath. The first thing I noticed was that it was hot. That dry, breezeless midsummer heat, times two. The grass did not even move between my toes. It appeared that Mother Nature had used up all her breath in that crescendo of a tantrum. The next thing I noticed was that it was quiet. Absolutely quiet. No birds chirped, no wind shook the leaves. There was not even the sound of insects. All the animals had left; those that hadn’t were probably blown away.

Which brings us back to the silence. I never experienced silence like that before then. I rubbed my arm as a chill ran down my spine. It was like I was living in a dead world. I shuffled my feet just so that I could hear the grass crackle beneath them. I needed to remind myself that sound still existed.

That was why I jumped when a screen door creaked open. The reemergence of normalcy to this stark scene was a jolt. I turned my eyes to the source, and saw my neighbor, Mister Moore, walk outside, sipping a mug of coffee in his bathrobe, as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Behind him, the screen door floated shut. It didn’t slam.

I was perhaps more shocked by his nonchalance than I was at the silence that I had just experienced. He looked over at me and raised his mug in greeting. Mister Moore was about fifty years old, his thin hair gray, but only recently receding.

I mentioned before that I couldn’t sleep through the wind. Older folks like Mister Moore and my parents could sleep like it was any other night. They had lived through it a few times.

The last winds came when I was eleven, and I spent the whole time huddled under my doorway with a blanket over my head. To be fair, my reaction this particular time was no different.

Mister Moore surveyed the damage, the belt on his bathrobe eerily still. He raised his hand above his eyes and peered down the street. I did likewise. It was like some kind of highway nightmare. Cars piled on top of each other; none looked at all salvageable. My eyes flitted back to my car, a few houses closer, lofted in a tree. Compared to those in the pile it appeared immaculate.

Briefly, the image of my car as some kind of holy emperor, more majestic and beyond the paltry problems of its inferiors played across my mind. I laughed almost immediately. Yesterday it had been the cheapest hunk of junk on the block.

Mister Moore must have been looking at my car too. “You got lucky, we should be able to get that down today. You’ll be the envy of the neighborhood pretty soon.”  I smiled at him as a courtesy. Again, the imaginary immaculacy of the car played through my thoughts.

I wanted to drive off and leave this town behind. All of its bizarre avoidance of the eventual, annual fate had grated on me more and more every year. I thought about leaving last night. Taking that car that hung so calmly from wooden branches now and racing away. To what? It didn’t matter— just out of this town. I hated this coordinated disaster and I hated that no one did anything about it. I have known for years that I didn’t want to repeat what my parents have done—to live here and simply deal with problems as they came and constantly avoiding what would eventually come.

I began to wonder why anyone stayed here. Every ten years this wind came, and every ten years the people who lived here had to clean up this mess. How had his town even survived so long?

Needless to say, it has been my plan to move away at my first opportunity. Maybe the fact that my car survived unscathed was the universe trying to tell me something: that I’m not supposed to deal with this, that I still have a chance to escape the fate of my parents and Mister Moore and not have to rebuild my life every decade. How did they afford it? Why would you even bother?

Mister Moore was in disturbingly cheerful spirits and so was my dad when he came out, in almost an identical fashion to my neighbor. My father’s eyes squinted against the sun, which beamed down with severe intensity because there were no clouds to veil it for once.

Pretty soon the front lawns of the block were specked with a gaggle of robed, coffee-drinking, middle aged men. I tried to retreat back inside, but my mom intercepted me and began to explain to me how the clean up process worked.

First was the gathering of all the debris. Most people who lived here now had figured out ways to minimize this damage but some people never bothered. My dad never bothered—he seemed to enjoy the cleaning process.

As I watched him survey the scene nonchalantly sipping coffee, I was furious. Why was my mom still talking to me?  I felt that my supreme bitterness had to be emanating in waves from my pores. I’d be gone in a month for school, and I’d be away from all this mess. I hated it here. It wasn’t just this wind or the cleanup—it was this whole place. It was stagnant. No one in this town ever did anything new. The same thing every day, every month, every year. I wanted no part in stopping progress. Whatever my mother was telling me fell on deaf ears. Why should I help?

Before I realized it, I had asked that “Why?” out loud. My frustration with the whole situation had boiled to a point where it began to overflow. Keeping my mouth shut wasn’t an option. “Why bother? It’ll cost more to repair all this damage than to move!”

“This is home, dear,” my mom explained, and the voice she used attempted to be so calming that it just made me angrier. “Your father has lived here his whole life, why would we leave just because of a minor setback?”

Minor setback. We owned three cars. One was sandwiched in between a telephone pole and a Volkswagen Beetle, another had fused into a T-shape with a decrepit truck, and the third was stuck in a tree. Not for the last time, I imagined myself driving my lofty chariot down that silent road away from here, the only sound echoing in the air my defiant laughter.

My dad came over and put a hand on my shoulder to calm me down. “It’s alright, we’ve got plenty saved away to fix all of this up. Besides, I’ve been needing an excuse to fix our landscaping.” His smile felt more condescending than reassuring. Was this why I was driving a car that was older than me? Because my parents were saving all their money to repair and replace things they knew would be ruined? Was that why they had never taken me anywhere farther than the lake for our family vacation?

I tried to pass off my gritted teeth as a smile. I don’t know that it worked, but either way my parents continued onto their business and in a horrifically synchronized manner, the cups of coffee had been finished off, and all the older men of the neighborhood retreated inside.  My mother was circling the house and surveying the damage. I wandered over to the tree that held up my car. The branches looked slumped beneath the weight. On a normal autumn day the tree looked barren enough, but especially so today.  Some of the bark had been stripped, and the branches looked weak around the trunk. In the unearthly silence I could hear the faint sound of the wood creaking.

Mr. Moore from across the street was already dressed and trying to sort out the mess of cars. His house had been wind-proofed, so he wasn’t concerned. I always thought it was funny he had spent so much on renovations over the last few years but still drove a powder blue Nissan Stanza. I felt like an idiot for never realizing all of this before. Suddenly, my always-lingering desire to leave this place became more immediate.

No one else my age lived in this town. It was like an entire generation realized the futility of having to rebuild every decade. I had every intention of joining them. My closest friend lived in the next town—this one didn’t even have its own school district, I went to regional schools. I was never bitter about it before the wind, but suddenly every slight injustice felt like a history of oppression in the face of futility. It took me 21 years to get to this point, and all I had to show for it was a car flipped upside down in a tree. 

My mother told me stay nearby for school; I knew before I was out of high school that was not going to happen. My family couldn’t afford to send me too far, though, and I settled for a small private school about an hour away. Far enough to pretend for at least a little while that I was not tethered to a place of such unavailing monotony.

My father and most of the rest of the block had come back outside, and began to pick up their lawns. “Little help here, son?” My dad requested. I pretended not to hear him, and walked over to the pile of cars.

I wished mine were down from its height. I looked up at it again.  Logistically, I couldn’t see how to get it down. A branch looked like it had lodged in the axle of one of the wheels somehow. But more than that, it just seemed like there was no way to keep it from falling. Maybe the car wasn’t special or lofty; maybe it was just the last to crash.

I turned my eyes to the rest of the block again. Most people were working hard on gathering up the debris. A few had begun to try to sort out the mess of cars. There was still not even a slight breeze; the air was just as motionless as it had been when I came out. Other than the sounds of the clean up, I could hear no animals. There was still a chance this was all a dream, because it certainly felt unreal.

I looked back at my house and my mother came back around to the front with a long list of damages. Curiosity took the better of me and I retraced her steps into the backyard.  A tree from next door had destroyed our fence and pieces of roof from well down the street littered the grass. Leaves from all over had mingled together, while the cherry tree in our backyard stood naked but somehow still standing. As I looked at the piles of leaves they didn’t so much as wave.  One of our windows had been shattered by something, but luckily we had boarded them to keep any glass from getting inside.  

 I turned my attention from the house itself to the rest of the yard and then my breath left me like a punch in the gut. Ripped right out of the ground was our old swing set. It was older than my memory, and here it was splintered and sprawled across the yard. One of the seats hung limply from the cherry tree branch, but the rest of it was almost beyond recognition. Something deep and visceral went through me at the moment my eyes surveyed the remains of that once-wondrous source of joy.

I can’t say why I felt this way; it had been years since I had touched the thing. The chains were rusted and the noise it made when someone tried to use it was like the dying sounds of some large animal. Every part of it swayed with the movement of the swing. Even in normal wind it shifted.

But I could still remember spending whole afternoons on those swings, pretending I was in flight high above the rest of the world. Above the feeble troubles of schoolwork and chores. For years that swing set had been my sanctuary.  I slept a number of nights in the lookout above the slide. Escape. Freedom. But that had been a long time ago.

It seemed like there was no escape anymore. Dad needed me to help out with the clean up. Next time the winds came he’d need me even more. I began to realize that even if I moved out there was no getting away. Was that it? Was everyone just resigned to this absurd fate by obligation? My car came back to me again. It had done the same as the swingset used to. It meant freedom. It meant escape.

My feet took me to the limp swing hanging from the tree branch before I could even process that I was moving. Apparently it was very precariously balanced.  As soon as my finger brushed against the plastic seat, the metal chain slid off the branch with a metallic hiss followed by a thump with the weight of a fifty-pound sack hitting a padded floor. Maybe I was projecting.

“We’ve been meaning to get rid of that for years—it’s been such an eyesore. But we figured we’d save ourselves the trouble.” I jumped at the sound of my dad’s voice; every sound this morning was still so loud as it hung in the unnaturally still air.  I said nothing.  “Here, can you help me with this?” he asked, as he lifted what had once been the lookout’s roof. I stared at him for a moment, then at the piece of wood. I wanted to refuse, but also knew it needed to get done. Silently, I picked up the plank of wood with him and we carried it over to a corner of the yard. My dad proceeded to collect wooden debris and carried it over to start a pile. “We could get a lot of use out of this for a while,” he explained, all smiles.

I was still speechless, and I began to notice something about my dad’s behavior this morning, and Mister Moore’s, for that matter. They weren’t just going through the motions. Something about this for my dad was enjoyable. I couldn’t figure out what, or why, but I wanted to find out.

“You want to come with me to look at cars tomorrow? We can finally go ahead and replace that old Taurus. I never liked that car, it was such an ugly color.” I shrugged. I wasn’t feeling particularly committal. But I paid attention to what he was saying. The words seemed so much clearer than they would have on another day; maybe it was because there was nothing in between him and myself except the dead summer air.

Something about that simple proposition struck me. I had always thought that for my dad the Taurus was like my swing set, some old object he had some kind of sentimental attachment to. In that way, I guess I was wrong. But much like that old swing set, he had utilized the wind to take care of the work for him.

As I gathered the leftover plastic of what had once been my sanctuary, I felt the weight of the years that had passed in each piece. I let out a deep breath while I piled the various pieces of plastic on the side of the lawn.  My childhood was laying at my feet in a very real way.  And as that deep breath left me I felt a tension I hadn’t even noticed before leave me. I turned my eyes to my dad who was already moving onto another project.

I knew that this day was coming for years, but I had always just assumed my parents were being stubborn about it or ignoring it. I assumed that cleaning up would just be futilely mending fences and waiting for things to break again. But despite the leaves on the ground and the various and sundry broken parts all over the place, I realized what my father saw: a renewal.

The swing set had been torn down because it was time for it to come down. It had ceased to be an escape a long time go and had been for years tying me to a past that no longer existed. I hadn’t used it in years, and the only reason it had held on so long was because I wasn’t ready to let it go. Any time the subject of taking it down came up I protested, but I never really had a valid argument for it staying.

Dad wasn’t avoiding reality by staying here; he was making the best of it. In that way, he even had me beat, because all I wanted to do was run away. That’s all I ever did.

A crash came from down the street and the sound swept down the row of houses like a shockwave. I knew what it was before I went and looked. The branches of the tree had given way, my car’s precarious loft had given out and it had landed hood-first on the blacktop.

The dream of pulling out of this desolation in a victorious laughter shattered in front of my eyes.  So much for an emperor’s chariot, now it was once again just a piece of junk.

Mister Moore, still in his bathrobe, was probing his Nissan Stanza for things that may have been left behind, but it seemed like he wasn’t turning up much. I looked down at my own car and peered into the window, but the only thing that had been in there had been my hopes of getting away from this place.  I wondered what Mister Moore was hoping to find in that wreck, but didn’t ask. Much like myself with the swing set, he was probably just looking for hope that he didn’t have to let go. Mister Moore complained about that car a lot, but he took meticulous care of it.

Meanwhile, my dad was gathering up the broken pieces of our house’s exterior. There wasn’t anything he was looking for. . There wasn’t anything he was holding onto—he accepted that this was his chance to get ready for whatever the future held. Dad struggled to roll a pillar that had broken off of our porch out of the bushes. “Here, let me help,” I called across the yard, and I felt my words taken away in a summer breeze.

In progress

This is what an in progress jawn looks like.

The Bridge

"They tore it down a year ago."

The sentence washed over me and rested around my ankles like a pair of cement shoes. When you're young the places you see every day are a simple fact. Never given a second thought. Life isn't a changing and growing organism; it's a static and structured thing. It is a building. A place. A definitive monument untempered by time.

I walked over the torn up soil where there was once an old wooden bridge over a small creek. “I don’t think tore it down is quite the phrase you wanted to use,” I joked, pretending that the loss of the bridge was not a big deal. “There was a creek here. They fill that up?”

“Yeah, before the bridge went, even. Honestly I’m surprised it took them so long to tear it down.”

Amy had been one of my closest friends through grade school into high school. She was one of those rare friends that didn’t abandon you in the awkward pubescent years. We waited until after high school graduation to drift apart. She got attractive in eighth grade, which put me in a weird position because I always looked young for my age. It wasn’t until late in high school that I sprouted up. She could have left me for any boy she wanted or because a sudden interest from a cooler group, but she never did. We watched Star Wars on Friday nights and saw Attack of the Clones opening day. In retrospect, perhaps a waste of money. I never thought of her as a girl, which is why I never understood why guys hated me after they asked her out and they saw us at McDonalds. She was just Amy.

My family moved just before I started college. I guess they figured I’d be going away to school anyway, so what was the harm? At first I visited Amy and home during breaks. After a while it got harder. I didn’t have the time and I only ever spoke to Amy occasionally online and said, “Man, I haven’t seen you in so long!” That led to “We have to see each other this Christmas break,” but never to actually seeing each other.

Amy came up to my school last semester because I guess we finally got tired of the circular conversations. It was fun, we spent the night watching Star Wars and drinking every time they said “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” or Darth Vader choked someone. But it was different, like the time we spent apart was separating us the whole night. It manifested in a gap in conversation, in an awkward reference to embarrassing things we had done together that we had forgotten about. It was as if we were eulogizing the friendship instead of reinvigorating it. I decided then that I needed to visit home again.

And that’s why we came here. When we needed to get away from parents or high school drama we’d come to the bridge and sit on the edge and throw rocks into the creek.

“I remember more trees,” I said. If my memory served me I was standing at the center of the bridge. If I closed my eyes I could see the old view. Lush and green trees older than the world we knew. They blocked out the late afternoon sun. Today I had to shield my eyes. When we were here, time stopped for just a little while. It didn’t matter if it was day or night; there was always the same hazy glow from between the leaves. The trees were our sanctuary.

“Oh, those have been gone for years, James,” Amy responded as if this wasn’t a travesty.

“Shit. It’s been a really long time.”

“They’re supposed to turn this whole place into a new development for the over-50 community,” Amy explained, and laughed. “Can you believe that? We came here to get away from grown ups.”

I laughed and tried to forget for a moment I was 23 now and was part of that world I wanted to escape when we used to come here. “This was our place.”

“I guess things change,” she offered with a half smile, placing her elbow on my shoulder, despite having to reach up to do so. She used to do it all the time when she was taller than me for most of our lives. It was a habit she hadn’t broken despite the shift in size. “Besides, it hasn’t been our place in four years. Not since you moved.” I shrugged using one shoulder.

“What do you think would have happened if I stayed? Would we be here right now?” Amy moved her arm and I heard her feet brushing some fallen leaves around beneath her feet.

“The bridge would still be gone,” she answered. I turned around to face her and she was doing that familiar ballet twirl she always did when she was thinking about something. She hadn’t even taken a dance class since she was ten. “We grew up, you know? It just happens.”

“Yeah, I know, but…I missed you. I missed this place and this town. Maybe we would’ve gotten to say goodbye to the bridge before they took it down.”

“Don’t be such a girl,” Amy teased and pressed her finger into my chest. That was familiar, too. “When was the last time we even came here? Before the day you moved, anyway. We never came here after graduation. One day something is there and the next it’s just not. We can’t live in the past forever.”

I looked again at the patch of soil that used to be our bridge and took in a deep breath. “How about us? Think we would still be friends if I hadn’t moved?”

Amy laughed at that. “What, we’re not friends anymore? We’re here now, aren’t we? That’s enough for me.”

And I guess with those four words it was enough for me, too.

On struggles

Maybe it’s the beautiful weather. Maybe it’s because I’ve been kind of miserable myself, lately. But I find myself considering the universal temptation we all have to be negative, to be self-involved and hate our daily grind in the face of all of our blessings. It’s easy to get lost in the struggle, to lose ourselves in the moment and forget the things that make life worth living. But so often—so overwhelmingly often—I see people who have had so much come easily to them be the most miserable. Maybe I’m generalizing, but Facebook and social media in general has made it abundantly clear that too many people do not take the chance to look at their lives and realize how lucky they are. I wish more people would, the world would be better for it.

Perhaps it’s because of the things I’ve seen, the trips I’ve taken, and the life I’ve lived that has allowed me to have this perspective. But I can’t help but feel bad for those who have everything come so easily to them and are still miserable. I’ve seen poverty firsthand, I’ve talked to people who have almost nothing and still cling to the small things that make life worth living. But it doesn’t even need to be so extreme as that.

We all have our issues, I’m not denying that. Whether that’s loneliness, illness, schoolwork, sitting next to the person you’re crazy about and not being able to say anything.  There’s death and moving away and break-ups and fights with friends. Part-time jobs and full-time careers. They all have their pains, but you know what they have in common? They make you stronger in the end.

In my own life, I’ve had to fight to be healthy, to make friends, to find some place in this world that is a place to belong. It makes me all the more grateful for the victories. I’m not sick right now, I’m in college, I grew up in a neighborhood that could afford to educate me, I have an amazing family.  For all of the years of anger and stress and bitterness that went along with those fights…I wouldn’t trade any of it in for an “easier” life. I wouldn’t be as strong as I am now, I wouldn’t be able to be thankful for this, perhaps brief, period of health and time spent with friends, even if that too is still an ongoing struggle.  I wouldn’t be able to see and appreciate all of the great things I have if I didn’t have to work so hard to gain them. The struggle is a part of life…it’s a beautiful part of life.  I am lucky and I am blessed enough to be in college to be able to be stressed about it. I have people in my life I care about enough to stress over.

And if you took the time to stand back and survey your own life, what would you see at the end of those struggles? I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the end, the profoundly wonderful memories didn’t outweigh the unpleasant ones.  So step outside into the sun today and think about those things that make today a day worth being thankful for. I know I will.