FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #8

'I wouldn't do that if I were you,' she told me the first time we met.

I looked over at the four year old with the big eyes staring at me through the gaps in the wrought iron fence surrounding the yard across the street.  Sweating beneath the glare of the July sun, I leaned back from the lawn mower I was just about to start and rubbed the kerchief across my face.  Smiling, I asked good-naturedly, “Why not?”

She continued to look at me with eyes too serious for her small little face and said nothing.  Glancing over her shoulder at the empty windows behind her, she looked back at me and beckoned me to come closer.

Humoring her, I checked both ways and then loped across the street.  When I got near her, she looked around again and then motioned for me to kneel down to her level.  Staring earnestly at my face she said, “Because it’s about to go kaboom.”

Thinking this was just a game I played along, “Kaboom?  That’s a very serious thing.  What’s going to make it go kaboom?”

Her wide blues eyes peered into mine and with the intuition all children have, she knew I didn’t believe her. She knew that what she meant in all seriousness I was turning into a joke.  She thrust out her lower lip and said petulantly, “The light and sound. It’s going to come from the sky and boom! Kaboom it!”

I looked up at the sky, I couldn’t see a single cloud – neither white nor gray -- just blue like her eyes from horizon to horizon.

She stamped her foot and rubbed the back of her chubby hand across the freckles liberally sprinkled across her nose in frustration, “I knows what I knows.”

I was twelve at the time, confident that nobody could know more than I did about anything in the world.  I had setup a summer business, in true entrepreneurial spirit, mowing the lawns of the neighbors.  Looking back, I’m not sure if they were taking pity on me or if my price point was too low, but I’d had a 75% return on my advertising budget and that made me even more cocky.  I could feel the frets and the cherry wood neck beneath my fingers of the guitar I had already named Desdemona in my mind.  I didn’t know who Desdemona was, I’d never even heard of Shakespeare, but somewhere I’d heard the name and bestowed it on the Gibson I coveted.  In my free hours, between mowing lawns and taking dogs for walks and any other odd job a twelve year old boy could get from the beneficence of his neighbors, I was always at the music store trying to teach myself to play.  I’m sure I was terrible, I didn’t even know how to tune her yet – but I was certain she would be mine and it was only a matter of time before I could live every guy’s dream and be a rockstar.  I wasn’t about to let a pudgy little girl play games with my head and keep me from mowing the lawn of one of my most lucrative clients so I could buy my first guitar.

I smiled reassuringly at the little girl I’d never seen before and to prevent a tantrum said, “Look hun, there’s not a cloud in the sky.  Lightning only comes with the rain, from the clouds.  I’ll be fine.  Thanks for worrying though!”

I grinned again and dashed back across the street to return to work.  I was on the sidewalk, maybe ten feet from the lawn mower when I heard her frantic cry, “Jussin!  No!  Think of Dez-a-mona.”

My mind whirled in a million directions at once, I couldn’t understand how this little girl knew my name, let alone the name I had never told anyone I had bestowed on a guitar I coveted.  I was looking back at the child across the street, when it happened.  I never saw it, just saw the way the little girl turned her face away sobbing.  I felt it, more than anything else.  I felt it as waves of energy outside my skin, like a million tiny feet dancing just outside my skin, up and down my back.  I also felt a shock in my legs and the muscles convulsing and seizing uncontrollably.  I learned later that my life was saved by turning around – it had brought my feet right next to each other so the voltage gradient between them didn’t setup a natural circuit inside my body.

I don’t recall anything else of that moment – everything else I learned later. I just remember the feeling of the electricity dancing on my skin, the seizing contractions in my legs and the tears falling down a chubby little face turned into a wrought iron fence as if she sought comfort from the cold black metal.

Apparently, Mrs. Wroth, the neighbor whose house I was working at, happened to glance out her window just then and saw the whole accident.  She called 911 and then ran out to see what could be done for me.  They told her on the phone that if my breathing had stopped, my life depended on her trying to resuscitate me immediately.  My body was still having minor seizures, but I was later told they had stopped by the time the medical team arrived. The uncontrollable spasms could have been a side effect of the loss of consciousness as much as the sudden jolt of electricity through my system.

Apparently I was lucky.  Well, as lucky as you can be when you get struck by lightning out of a blue sky. (I later learned that 30% of lightning strikes occur 6-10 miles before the front, often out of skies as clear as the ones that day.)  The type of strike that hit my back was a splash from the main strike on the lawnmower.  And the reason I was so lucky was that I had a flashover from it, where the metals and moisture in my sweat kept the lightning from going through me.  Instead, the electricity was conducted by the ions in the sweat as the water evaporated.  I was literally surrounded by the electricity like a glowing cloud of light just outside of my skin instead of having it flow through my body as the path of least resistance.  If not for the flashover effect, I’d have died.

I do remember when I came to, in the hospital, and everything sounded like it was being spoken underwater.  I was terrified at the thought of having lost my hearing, I was sure it would end my future as a rockstar.  The burn marks on my back from the dancing feet of the electricity made a Lichtenberg figure, a ferning burn which disappeared in a couple days, but the deafness stayed.  I would have wished it the other way around.  The burn was beautiful, like a fractal.  There was nothing cool or beautiful about losing my hearing.

The accident left me depressed.  Perhaps I should have felt thankful I had my life, but I was depressed over the loss of hearing.  I had made enough money that summer to buy Desdemona, but it was a hollow victory.  What sort of rockstar could I be now?  I learned sign language and I learned to read lips – nobody knew at that point if it was a temporary or a permanent loss.  My mother gently cleaned out the blood and swabbed on antibiotics in the ear where the tympanum had split, she was the one who tried everything she could those first six months to no avail.  She believed in my dream to be a rockstar, some days even more than I did.  How could I be a rockstar if I couldn’t even hear what I played?  I knew the story of Pete Townshend, but he had learned his craft before he lost his hearing.  That was different.  I didn’t even know how to tune my guitar, let alone play any chords.

There were days, before the months when my hearing started to come back, when I wished the girl who knew my name had never said anything.  I wish she had let me be hit by the lightning directly – at least if I were dead I wouldn’t have lost my dream.  The little girl who apparently never existed. 

Mrs. Wroth insisted there had been nobody outside, anywhere up and down the street when she came running outside.  Not even a four year old she could send to find her mother.  I always doubted her though, perhaps she just hadn’t looked that low, between the bars of the wrought iron, in her agitation.  By the time I left the hospital and my parents let me go outside again, I learned that the house with the wrought iron gate had been sold months before.

I never did learn the name of the little girl who saved my life, the one Mrs. Wroth and everyone else believed had never existed.  When I asked the neighbors her name, they told me it was an older couple in their sixties who kept to themselves who had lived there.  The house was sold after the old man died and the widow moved out east somewhere to be nearer her daughter.  Nobody had ever met or heard of a little girl about four or five years old.

As my hearing came back, so did a sense of awe that is normally only found in young children, which we kill in our years of teenage angst.  In me, the fact I could hear again was such a blessing that my wonder for the world was reborn.  It kindled in me the belief that anything could be achieved if you just tried long and hard enough.  My dreams were given back to me and with it a sense of gratitude and frustration that I could never say thank you to the girl who had saved my life.  I grew to feel that it was only because of the accident that I realized making music really was my passion, and not just some school boy fantasy. 

As my career took off, I tried looking for her, the girl who might have only been in my head, but I had nowhere to start.  I had no information besides she’d had bright blue eyes as a child and she told me the lightning would make the lawnmower go kaboom.  Eventually, I accepted that she must have been in my head, a product of the strange effects lightning has on the brain, and I gave up searching for her.  I never stopped writing songs about her and my feelings about finding her, I just gave up believing she ever had existed. I fell into the ego and the lifestyle of the rich and famous touring musician.  I could have passed her on the street a thousand times and never even seen her even though she was always on my mind.

 ******

It was fifteen years after the accident and I was sitting in a café, dark sunglasses on so no one would recognize my face.  It was midway through tour and I wasn’t even sure what city I was in, let alone anyone who might live there.  All I wanted was to drink my iced coffee, eat my muffin, catch up on the news and relax for a little while somewhere I could stretch my legs better than on the bus.

I bent over to plug in the AC adapter for my laptop when I suddenly heard a clear voice from above the table, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Suddenly I was twelve again, and felt that same shock and thrill of all the dancing electricity over my skin.  I dropped the cable hurriedly and bumped my head under the table as I sat up asking, “Why? Will my laptop go kaboom?”

She was leaning over, holding my iced coffee steady on the rocking table so it wouldn’t spill onto the keyboard.  She was looking at me with the same vividly blue eyes I remembered set in a face I’d never have picked out of a crowd, but this time she was smiling instead of serious, “No, but you’d have missed the pretty girl walking by and continued to wonder the rest of your life if she had ever really existed.”

 

back to Contest #8