Who I am

A little story that I wrote in 10th grade English class.

The boy still laid idle in the hospital bed, his breathing slow, his eyes protected from the cacophony of nurses swaying, sprinting, hurtling themselves to attempt to save the boy. He was completely impenetrable, and so his soft, plush face remained relaxed and untarnished. For one moment, if you were to look just at his face, you could even believe he was just sleeping, unaware of the secret hiding on the back of his head.

   

I gulped a little bit, looking at him, my breaths coming just as fast as the sprinting nurses. The goose bumps that rose all over my body attested to the shivers that kept running down my spine, over and over again. In my mind, I kept seeing the boy in mid-air, falling faster and faster towards the rocks at the bottom of the hill. I kept hearing his shrill cries as he realized he couldn’t stop, the loud ‘crack’ that quickly followed, and then silence. It was the silence that had the greatest effect on me. How could something that looked so much sound nothing at all? My brain didn’t, couldn’t, comprehend. Even as the lights atop police cars and ambulances flared, no siren wailed in my ears. Instead, the sound nagged at my ears, informing me of its existence, and begging to enter my brain. But the world outside was not strong enough to get through the barrier that my brain set-up, and so it was my body that was left to the world.

   

The world beat my body so much that I had grown stiff, incapable of moving. It had grabbed my arms fiercely, yanking my shoulder out of its socket, tearing away the muscles, taking away my first limb. It then moved to my other arm, then to my leg, then to my chest. Suddenly, it seemed as though my heart wasn’t even beating. No oxygen seemed to pump through my blood. No, I had died while standing there at the top of the hill.

   

I did not comprehend when the EMTs grabbed my and asked me if I was okay. My brain gave the generic answer, ‘Yes,’ while my body screamed at it to tell them ‘No.’ My head was too good, even the fear that quavered in my jaw and throat didn’t exit with the ‘Yes.’ No, I was confident, I was okay, of course I was okay! I wasn’t the one who was dying, was I?

The EMT smiled, taking my hand. ‘Come walk with me,’ it said, and I had no choice but to comply, one robotic step at a time. ‘Do you know what happened,’ it asked, and I shook my head no. It looked concerned, but it also appeared suspicious. I was nervous, but my face refused to melt away to expose my emotion. The EMT then sighed, and asked if I knew the boy, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘That boy is my brother,” I said. I lied again.

    The EMT said it was sorry, and I couldn’t comprehend why, and so it brought me to the hospital. That’s where I stood, looking at the cacophonous nurses, still replaying the event over and over in my head.

   

“Hey, Jake, right?” I looked over to see a person kneeling down to my height, “Hi, I am the Doctor, can you help me out with something?”

   

I looked at it blankly for a moment, before nodding.

   

“Can you tell me what happened at the hill, Jake?” It smiled encouragingly, and I nodded again.

   

“We were playing,” I began slowly, hesitantly, “And we were racing to the edge of the hill. He tripped, and he fell down the hill.”

I was perfectly convincing in my innocent, 7-year-old voice.

The Doctor nodded, slowly taking my hand, “Would you tell me if he was pushed, Jake? Can I trust that you would?”

I hesitated.

The entire scene played through my head again. We were racing from the tree on the other side of the field towards the hill, and the boy had cheated at the start. I was mad, because I knew I was faster, but I couldn’t catch up. The redness was already pumping through my blood. Injustice! I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. The anger had to build up in some other way, some physical way. Why did he get to cheat? I asked myself. Was it because he was eight? No. No one was allowed to cheat, never! He had to be punished…

I nodded.

I lied.