"Boys"

*Warning: There is some adult language in this entry.

"Boys"

Summer Night 1987

Midnight hung heavy in the diminished dimensions of this room which contained his life and confined his form.  

The grit of sand beneath a silenced footstep screeched.  

"Is someone there!?", he asked, startled from a half sleep.  

The sound of someone else's breathing was the only reply. Reflections of moonlight bounced sharply from the angled wall mirror and jarred his nerves, taut like bowstrings kept too long in attic heat.  

This room so familiar to him was transformed in the darkness and the silence to a distorted vacuum, a tomb sealed and black.   This room without air slowly filled with the stilled breath of his own fear.  The ceiling fan turning slowly overhead was irritating, confusing him with it's droning.   Did he really hear someone in the room or was it merely a fragment of his dream? Apprehension mingled with anxiety.   "Damn the fan." he silently cursed. "Damn the wind. Damn my imagination."                                

From the west window a sliver of mercury blue porch light sliced across the foot of the bed. His chair stood alone by the door, its back turned away, unaware. Upstairs the many rooms and their weathered boarders heaved and sighed in the summer heat - separated - so removed from the isolation of he room stifling below - the room which had SO many ways in. Comfortable in the light of day, or even in the flashing blue grey cast of nighttime television, this room and the sounds in the darkness were torturous.  

The windows west and northeast were too large, easily accessed from the shadows of the driveway and the back porch.   So many ways in… but no way out for the young man trapped there in his bed counting his heartbeats in between the muffled sounds coming up from the sand worn linoleum. He was trapped inside… inside his own room… inside his own body…  inside his own fear.  

The flimsy slats of the folding entry door stuttered in the breeze buffeting the hallway to his room.  

Summer Day 1977

Boys full of fire and freedom. Boys with appetites as big as caves when the school day ended, when that eleventh school year closed.  

Theirs was a race against each other. A race to manhood, a race of biceps and of speed and grace. A race to consume all of life in every hour of these days, which flew through their grasp and twirled them in circles of conflict and delight.  

Two boys of the beach and the sun, wrangling with life and one another.  

One sucked up the ocean's energy through his eyes - dark sapphires in an angular frame. From birth, his left eyelid drooped and captured passersby. A muscled boy, straining to gather all of the world into his eager arms, he watched intently as the pattern of the waves beckoned, promising perfection.  

His broad feet displaced the sand and sprayed the length of his burnished calves white as he loped toward the hard wetpack. The board was heaviest here, mounted on his head like a massive warrior headdress, dulled with paraffin and notched with the accomplishments and dings of his attempts at capturing it all - all there was to seek and race and ride in the world of the ocean.  

Best friends they were, Bone, the dark haired boy with the sleepy eye and the shoulders of a man, and Cal, the thin blond boy with the monkey's stride. The thin one's trunk and legs had grown in such a way that he appeared disjointed, disconnected from himself. Sixteen fit poorly and hung loose around his ankles and bunched up about his spindly neck.  Mischief (or meanness?) skittered across his gap-toothed grin. His brown eyes left you quickly and hid beneath an unkempt fall of bangs.

From left to right he swung his head, and stole a glimpse from behind his blind of hair.  

Cal struggled to keep up with Bone as they ran, both boys innately powerless to resist the challenge of the ocean and their endless adolescent contest with one another. The weight of the longboard hung heavy against Cal’s meager frame. The sand trapped his feet, slowing and stunting his stride.   

He bellowed,"BONE!! Wait up!!"

As sixteen-year-olds are wont to do, they volleyed a mix of taunting and trusting, boasting and testing in their moves and in their cries.  Each invitation veiled a challenge and every challenge bared a plea. My friend, my enemy, my nemesis, my peer. You who knows me so well, shares my conquests, my fears, my weaknesses and my imagination. 

"Hey, Bone! Beat this one!"

Cal's voice was lifted briefly on the salt spray before being swallowed by the next swell.  

Bone smirked. Sunlight glinted like steel flint on the becalmed surface of the water surrounding them.  

"Cal, you've gotta be jokin'!  Give it up!"

For a long moment the waves and the boys were still against the afternoon glare. Gathering strength for the next set, they all absorbed the sun and fell into motion again.  

Alternately they rode and dove, emerging triumphant, as a glistening pair of breaching sea mammals torpedoing the sky with their exuberance.  

Bone stood on his board, scoping, as they called it. In the distance, Cal's scrawny shoulder blades winged out, salt-stiffened brittle little sails at harsh angles to his flat browned back.  

Bone laughed, thinking,  I don't know how he can even lift that ancient mother of a board.  That sucker probably outweighs him, though that's not saying much.  He eats like a horse EVERY fucking afternoon at my house after surfing... but he never gets any thicker!!"

Cal baffled him.  

The thought of food triggered a rush in Bone’s empty gut. He hoped Ma would read his mind and put the water on to boil their ritual vat of spaghetti. "Hey, Cal!!  Ready to chow down?"

As Cal turned in response, Bone somersaulted from his board and disappeared beneath the flattened seascape.  

He watched as the world turned upside down. But he couldn't get his bearings, couldn't right himself.   He was trapped in the down side of his flip, trapped face down against the sandbar he'd forgotten.  His neck was arched at a sickening angle and only his head responded to his desperate struggling.  \

"I don't know how long it takes to die.", Bone thought as the reality of drowning settled in the swirling sand and water which held him now in a deadly grasp... 

Thrashing his head, he knew he would die on the ocean floor. His chest searing with the absence of air and the tonnage of the waves and the crush of fear, he watched the blue turn to black...  and his bubbles drift to the surface.  

Summer Night 1987

Recalling the sensations from that instant a decade ago he suffered now beneath a heavy cloak of terror in the bleakness of his room where someone hid, taunting him.  

He felt his world careening into a somersault once more. The weight of death pressed hard against his shallow chest and strangled the breath from him as he listened to the shuffling of the stranger concealed in the darkness.  

Pleading, he cried, "I don't know who you are or what the hell you want! Look around the room. You'll easily see I'm paralyzed. There's my wheelchair in the corner. Besides that chair, there is nothing of any value here. PLEASE, just GO!  Take whatever you want and just GET OUT!!!  I won't try to stop you. I CAN'T stop you! I can't do a FUCKING thing to stop you!!!  PLEASE!!!"

He couldn't tell if his words were audible for the wretched roar of fear in his heart.  

The loathsome surety of being beaten to death hammered Bone mercilessly in his bed.   It was such an odd thought - this fear of being beaten when you have no feeling in your body.  Senseless.  

For a jagged fragment of a moment he was freed by the twisted irony of that picture in his mind.  

Still the intruder stayed low... making only enough sound to continue the torment.  

Suffocating in the stillness, Bone strained to see anything in the bleakness of that endless hour.  

Suddenly, staggering through the silence, a figure lurched up from the floor into his view.

Bone registered a sickening sense of recognition, entangled in disbelief.   

His heart leapt with anger as the thin boy who'd never become a man hurtled toward him.  

"Scared ya pretty good, huh, Bone!!!, Cal roared boozily in Bone's face.  

Bone's heart faltered as he felt their friendship shatter and disintegrate in the darkness.  

My friend, my enemy.

Tony Horne, a Peer Mentor for the Greater Boston Chapter, has C-5 complete quadriplegia. In June of 1977, at age 16, he was injured in a surfing accident in Hull, MA where he and his family grew up. The character Bone in this short story is Tony, and is based on actual events in his life. The story was written by Franki Grau, one of Tony’s sisters. She currently lives in rural Monterey County, CA with her husband and their four-legged family.

If you would like to connect with Tony you can email him here.