bcwoods

I author the weblog DunceUponATime, more recent stories may be found there.

When my sister was six she went to her first swimming lesson and, as with everything else, it took her less than a second to pass judgment on the subject of swimming pools. My sister looked at the beautiful swim instructor. Her mouth crumpled. She emitted a noise like poison.

Like a fireman hearing a siren my father took action. My sister didn’t even have to float in her water wings for fifteen seconds before he kicked down the wooden door, ran into the pool, and pulled her out. He then cussed at the swimming instructor for ten minutes, tucked my sister under one arm, and took her out for ice cream. To this day, it is all my sister can do to stay afloat. I would like you to contrast this to what happened the first time my family went to a Waterslide Park.

Upon arrival my father handed me a towel and a bottle of suntan lotion before wishing me “the best of luck.” Two water wings hugged each of my arms like the firm, reassuring grip of the parents I have never had. I had absolutely no swimming experience whatsoever, and I was seven years old.

I decided with the wisdom and fortitude of a seven year old that the day was going to “totally kick ass.” In an effort to optimize the amount of “kick ass” I could extract from the day I made the best decision I could: I headed over to the wave-pool.

I’m not going to give you sizes or dimensions of that beast. I would probably be disappointed in my recollection if I looked it up. With time, my mind has probably blown all that happened out of proportion. Still, I’m going to try to relate to you the sheer terror of being seven years old in the belly of a monster.

It was like standing on the shore of an alien planet, with giant waves, enormous gravity, and fat sweaty tourists wearing disgusting bathing suits in place of extra-terrestrials. It was a friendless place that could have snuffed out my life in a moment.

I was thrilled.

The first thing I did was rip off my water-wings and stash them inside of my folded towel. The second thing I did was dive right into that pool like a geriatric into the Fountain of Youth. I had barely made it out ten feet before a wave knocked me over, and I had to get my feet under me again.

I spent all of five minutes in the shallow end, learning to tread water, avoiding the eyes of lifeguards who were wondering just where my supervision had gone, before deciding I had bigger fish to fry. I saw, what seemed to be a mile down the pool, a safety rope past which no one could swim. In fact, to even get to that safety rope, I would have to go through another safety rope past which you were supposed to have an inner tube.

Dog paddling at half a mile an hour, making splashes as high as my own body, and spitting water out of my nose when I became submerged under a new tidal wave, I bravely and stupidly made my way toward the source of the waves. I was like a Muslim seeking Mecca. Nothing would stop me.

No one stopped me, not the lifeguards, not the adults. I just kept paddling. I made my way through a forest of fat old women on inner tubes. I was jarred in the head by buoyant fat bodies every time they sloshed from side to side. I avoided the asshole teenager who was splashing every which way in order to impress his girlfriend. I avoided everyone, until at long last… I had passed the final safety rope.

There I was, a tiny little boy, alone in an ocean that was about to be overcome by a very large longitudinal wave. It didn’t matter. I had the pride of having made it into that magical land only adults are supposed to go. I had made it to “The Deep End.”

For a minute that lasted eternity I treaded water in the deep, alone, in a sea so desolate I missed even the presence of “sarpents.” And then at long last, I felt the wave start to build.

Let me tell you how these things work. Before a series of canals spew out the water that will combine together to make the next wave, they first intake a great deal of water from the pool. This also causes a sudden movement of water backwards. The safety rope that I had crossed had been there to save me from just this action.

When the canals began to consume the water in front of them, I was immediately sucked down as though some hellish sea serpent had wrapped its tail around my flailing feet and pulled me in to devour me.

My lungs burned. The air inside of them compressed down to nothing. I had almost no warning to take a breath. It was the first time in my life that I realized I could die. I could be crushed out in this pool and no one would know until the waves washed my body up in the shallow end.

When I looked up through the mountains of water that lay on top of me, and saw the faded light of a not-too distant sun I honestly made my peace with whatever power controls the universe and accepted that I was going to end. I closed my eyes, and it seemed the waters around me had gone still.

They had. The pumps had finished sucking. Now it was time for the wave to start.

Thinking that some miracle had saved me, I took advantage of the still water to fight my way toward the surface, I had no time however. The wave took hold of me again, this time pushing me forward.

Have you ever been slapped by a giant? Neither have I. But if I had, I imagine it would feel the same as being slammed down to the bottom of the pool by that wave. Slowly, as the force of the wave ground onward, my body dug into the textured floor of the wave-pool, getting pricked and sliced with every inch of ground I covered, until at last, the forces pushing forward exceeded those pushing me down. Straightening my back like a dolphin I became a human missile.

Ten miles an hour doesn’t sound fast, but if you’re under water that speed is amazing. I jetted down the length of the pool like a rocket. What had taken me thirty minutes to swim was going to take me less than a minute to make-up.

I didn’t wash up on the shallow end like a beached whale. I was stopped long before I got that far. Opening my eyes as I continued along my deadly trajectory, I saw the ass of a fat woman, barely contained in a one piece bathing suit. I was headed right for it.

As I drew nearer my target, I could make out every stretched, cellulite creased pore of her ass. Her fat seemed to shine with a light of its own in the murky water. I opened my mouth to scream and that’s when I made contact… with her ass crack.

As though I had been punched in the face by a boxer with a very cushy fist, my head snapped to one side. As my body deflected upward and out of the water, I flew through the air in a majestic four-foot arc… directly above a family in the shallow end.

Everything that happened next was total confusion. Being too intent on breathing, I could barely think. The family I had landed in the middle of wanted to know where the fuck I had come from. The fat woman I had collided with was screaming that there was a shark in the pool. This had caused a crowd to form around her. I was just about to tell the kind looking man who was holding me out of the water what had happened when I heard my father’s voice coming toward me.

“God damn it Brandon, you got your towel all wet.”

He took me from the nice man who was helping me to breathe and wrapped me in my wet towel. His hands were like swollen wood. They hurt.

“I’ve been looking all over for you. Your sister’s hungry. We’re going back to the hotel to get something to eat.”

As my father carried me over his shoulder like a large bag of laundry, my head swung to and
fro like a pendulum. In such a state I could only thank God my sister didn’t have to bear the indignity of an empty stomach. It’s about time there was some justice in this world.

Author's Note: I author the weblog DunceUponATime, more recent stories are available there.

It was a chilly autumn morning. I was wearing a puffy red coat that made me look like a blood-soaked tampon and a pair of shoes that were two sizes too small. My only possessions were a gaudy fantasy novel with a pink cover entitled “The Heart of Valor”, and a sacked lunch. I was and in some ways, still am a walking bully magnet. As usual I was tardy. School had started fifteen minutes ago, so Mrs. Raburn made sure to give me a full dose of the stink-eye before she signed my slip and let me go to class. On average, I got to see Mrs. Raburn about three out of every five school days. She used to ask me why I was tardy until one day I responded with “because I’m too young to drive.” After that she became content with the stink-eye. It’s always nice when you’re a child and adults don’t like you.

I was eleven so it’s not as if I had any great expectations for the day. I figured recess would be a plus. I was finally going to show that little prick Sean what happens when you use Black Magic on the four square court when the server explicitly states that Black Magic is illegal. I wondered if maybe I could get half of Kyle’s Twinkie at lunch, but other than that I had just intended on going with the flow. I certainly wasn’t expecting to look up during reading time to find that my teacher had dropped dead of a fatal congenital heart defect.

When I got to class it was reading time. I took my seat and read “Heart of Valor.” I found that it was as crappy and engrossing as I had expected it to be. As I read a story about heroes, completely unlike any of the people I had grown up with, I gradually lost all sense of the world around me. For the fifteen minutes of reading time I was gone from the room, and therefore I missed the tragedy. Somewhere between the hours of nine and ten my fourth grade teacher’s time simply ran out. Tick. Tock. Stop.

I have no recollection of the sound his body must have made when it hit the ground.

Finally, the murmurs became too loud for me to ignore and I looked up from my fantasy world. Mr. Greeber was laying face down on the ground, his arms close to his sides in a position I knew at once was not natural to a living being. I realized that everyone else had been staring at him for the past five minutes.

Seeing my fourth grade teacher laying face down on the ground, his death murmurs still rattling away, was “interesting.” It was so interesting in fact, that for a brief while, I could do nothing but sit at my desk, hold my book, and think about just how “interesting” it was. My stomach, like a fist, clenched in on itself. I was simultaneously overcome with the desire to vomit and pass out. I felt like a balloon tethered only loosely to the earth. At any moment, if the wind became strong enough I would simply float away. I dropped the “Heart of Valor” on my desk without realizing that I was no longer holding it.

Lots of people will make the claim that “sometimes the time just seems to drag on and on.” Most of these people are full of shit. For the few seconds that everyone sat there and did nothing time distorted beyond all meaning. It flowed like molasses. That being said, in reality I probably only sat there for thirty seconds. Inside of my own mind, however, I had been looking at him for the lifespan of a universe. His hair, not that different from the carpet his face was in, seemed to lack the luster it had had when he stood.

I was just about to get up and get help, when someone else beat me to it. I was relieved. I had no idea how I was going to go articulate to someone that Mr. Greeber had fallen over and stopped moving and that he needed help. It’s not something that four years of grade school had prepared me for.

A lot of people ask me if I still see his face in my dreams. I don’t. I only see his face when I watch Star Trek. Star Trek scares me shitless.
Mr. Magellan, the teacher next door to us, suddenly ran in and started to shout “Michael! Michael!” Mr. Magellan was white eyed with panic when he finally shouted “GET UP! YOU’RE SCARING THE CHILDREN!” Mr. Magellan was so wise. What we really needed at that point was some full out screaming to shock the terror right out of us. At this point in time, none of us had moved for about seven minutes. Looking from side to side it didn’t seem like anyone was going to either.

Following Mr. Magellan very quickly was Mr. Seabold, our principal. Without yet having taken any of us out of the room, Mr. Magellan and Mr. Seabold turned over Mr. Greeber, in an attempt to “give him some air.”

I would find out later that Mr. Greeber had some sort of rare heart condition that basically caused all of his blood vessels to explode. I could see every vein on his face, as if it were drawn on with a purple marker. His eyelids looked like they had been stuffed with cotton balls, and his entire body had taken on the color of a plum. Yup, he was one dead son of a bitch all right.

For a long time I had trouble remembering exactly what he looked like. In sixth grade I saw the latest Star Trek movie and nearly shit my pants. He looked just like the Borg Queen from “Star Trek: First Contact.” Exactly. When that satanic bitch made her first appearance on screen, my heart actually skipped a beat because the resemblance was so strong. I didn’t know if that woman was going to try to assimilate me into the collective or teach me long division. This is why I’m afraid of Star Trek.

Now that we’d gotten a good eyeful of a death and gore, Mr. Seabold decided the best thing to calm us was to shout again “EVERYONE OUT OF THE CLASSROOM! NOW!”

I can’t really blame the guy. This isn’t a situation they cover in your Masters of Education. So, after having seen my teacher drop dead in the middle of the class, been yelled at, and wondering exactly what the fuck was going on, I was hustled out into the hallway with everyone else for about five minutes before another teacher thought to grab the class and take us into their room.

It was decided the best way to help us cope was to call our parents and send us home. While we waited we were given crayons and paper. I drew a dead body. Mrs. Raburn gave me another full dose of the stink eye. I think now that I’m an adult I can safely say that Mrs. Raburn was a pretty shitty school secretary.

Predictably, I was the last child to be picked up. My sister had had Mr. Greeber the year before and when she heard something had happened to him she decided to freak the fuck out about it. This was typical Rachel. My parents were with her trying to calm her down. Not that I knew any of this untill later. They left me to color while they took care of the chosen one.

Yes, you read that correctly. I had just seen my fourth grade teacher fall down dead in the middle of class. Not heard about it: SEEN it. And my parents were taking care of my screaming sister. I only became aware of the fact that my parents were in the building when I heard my sister yelling at the top of her lungs. It’s a very distinct sound. I hope you never have to hear it. It starts out like Roseanne Barr’s voice. Then at some point it gets under your skin and worms its way into your sensory neurons. From there it begins a vicious attack up through the spinal chord and into every part of your brain that registers annoyance, hatred, and disgust. Upon hearing it, I sighed.

“YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!!! HE WAS MY FAVORITE TEACHER EVER!” then, because my sister is a conniving evil genius she screamed “I WANT TO CUT MYSELF!” I put my plump cheeks into my hands and sighed more deeply. I hate my sister. I finished the puffy eye-lids on my picture as my parents told my sister that they would buy her something really great for Christmas so that she didn’t have to cut herself anymore.

That’s when my Dad’s head peaked into the room where I was sitting and coloring a dead body. I excitedly raised the picture I had drawn to show my father what I had just seen, but put it down again when I saw him.

He was loudly chewing a piece of bubble gum, wearing a grease stained sweatshirt, and scratching his left ass cheek with his right hand. Why he scratches his left ass cheek with his right hand I do not know. All I know is that he looks very much like a crab on its back when he does.

He did the fatherly thing at that moment and offered me some words of comfort in the form of his cocking back his head in a signal meaning that he had places to go and people to see. I put my crayons away, and threw my picture in the garbage before going with him. It wasn’t a good picture anyway.

While my sister cried and moaned at the tragedy that had befallen her, my Mom and Dad looked at each other in order to decide who was going to be elected to “deal with this shit.” Meaning, who would get us something to eat, drive us home, and turn on the television. No counseling or anything like that. Counseling is for pussies.

“I’m fucking busy, Gary. I don’t work in a saw mill. I have to be at work. I’m in MANAGEMENT.”

“GODDAMN IT, DARCY! I have to run the fucking cut-off saw.”

My sister continued to scream and wail at the top of her lungs. Her voice is like mustard gas. It’s not something you ever get used to. I looked at her ruefully for a moment and caught her eye. She stopped crying just a bit to stick her tongue out at me and wink before she resumed.

As there was never really a quiet time during my childhood, I learned to ask questions even if people were yelling. “Umm… Mom and Dad, is Mr. Greeber going to be okay?” I had my backpack held in the front of me, as a shield between myself and my parents.

They both looked at me, and in unison said “He’s dead” before they went back to arguing over who was going to drive us home.
While I had been relatively certain that Mr. Greeber had passed away, there had still been a tiny sliver of hope that my magical vision of childish immortality might survive the day intact. I was wrong. I started to sniffle a little. Then I began to full out cry.

My Dad realized that I was crying when he heard me pop a snot bubble with one of my heaves. He then did the correct thing by turning away from my mother long enough to get before me on bended knee and, grab me by the shoulders, and say “Don’t be a pussy, it’ll be okay.” He gave me a hard, consoling slap on the back, and then he started to argue with my mother again.

I guess he lost, because he ended up taking us both into his car.

In my father’s defense I would just like to add that he did take me to McDonald’s. I got to eat about a third of my Happy Meal. Before I could finish my sister ate all of hers and wanted more. My Dad took it from me and gave it to her to “shut her up.”

That night I dreamed of my dead teacher and awoke in a cold sweat.

I hate my sister.