Assignments-FAKKU School of Literacy

We sat comfortably on the small bench overlooking the retention pond of the forest preserve. I flipped around the zipper of my hoodie lazily while we sat and talked about all the things that confused us. All the things we wished we had. Time was a recurring subject in both topics.

In the distance, thunder clapped and lightning split the sky to the west, every few minutes the light growing closer. I look over my right shoulder and bite my cheek in mild concern.

"Maybe we should get going."

"Yeah."

We stand and dust ourselves off before walking side-by-side. My friend and I. One of the few I associate with that truly deserves the title. We walk calmly back down the path we came from, hands in our pockets.

It was instantaneous, and I mean that in the most literal sense. In a blink of an eye we were assaulted by rain and mixed hail. I smiled and looked to my friend, who simply shouted 'Run!'

We took off down the path, holding our hands in front of our faces to break up the water before it got in our eyes. We continued like this for roughly two miles until I tripped over a root and tumbled to the ground.

I tasted iron, and when I opened my eyes, I saw a single raindrop frozen above my head. It had stopped. The whole world stopped. My friend looked down on me, eerily more like a wax statue than a person. I was no longer of the waking world, though I knew I hadn't passed out. I wearily got up and looked around me, and I saw them, all of them.

A group of kids running between the trees yelling about pizza. A family of three standing outside a burning house, looking up at it in disbelief. There was an old Native American man named Gene in regalia sitting on a log looking listlessly into space. A nineteen year old marine named Ben did push ups with a look of extreme exertion on his face. But when I turned, I saw him, my father.

He smiled at me and shook my hand strongly. I smiled and clapped him on the back, but then I froze. Something was wrong. Everything was wrong. Those kids were hit by a bus. That family was my own. Gene died from cancer three years ago. Ben took that RPG in Iraq. My father...My father had been dead since I was five. I wasn't five anymore.

But I was, and I reached up at his sleeves expectantly. He knelt down and picked me up onto his shoulders. I smiled from ear to ear and he jumped around playfully, finally coming face-to-face with my brother in his crisp dress blues. He swiftly put a salute to his forehead, which my father returned before they both broke out laughing. I laughed too. I was never happier in my life, because for one moment, he could see the man my brother had become. For one moment, he existed exactly as he once did. For one moment, he could smile again, and with that smile I could barely remember, he faded and the raindrop above me struck my head.

I looked around quickly. The rain was still falling and my friend looked down on me nervously. I felt warm tears against the cold rain and hail on my face, and I got up. And then I thought about time. I looked to my friend nervously and grabbed his sleeve.

"Jake, I need to know the truth. I have time, right?"

For a moment, I did. I had all the time in the world to visit the dead. Maybe for that brief moment, I was dead. Maybe not. Whatever it was, it was all right there, in a single drop of rain.