The Red Wagon

Just a short story I wrote...

The boy’s name was Jack Alden and he could usually be found on his bed during the drawn out heat of the summer nights, his body sticky with sweat, sticky like the surface of his mind as his thoughts rolled like waves in and out of consciousness. College was a steamship glistening on the rise of the future and fear was not an uncommon pang in Jack Alden’s stomach in the months leading up to his departure. The fact that summer was only halfway completed gave him the liberty of forgetting every once in a while the pressures of academic imprisonment.

The air of the evenings was thick, soup-like and often held the thoughts that would stream into Jack’s subconscious and resurface like forgotten ghosts around two in the morning. Three in the morning. Sometimes Four. Sometimes during that moment just before dawn when anything seems possible. Over the past year, Jack’s eyes had gradually developed draperies of yellow-green, deepening to purple the closer they got to his pupils, which were dark and had a pronounced forgiveness even when he was in the deepest of furies. Each evening on his bed, he thought about life. Not the storybook bullshit life of television, but the essence of existence. He lay, sometimes for hours, contemplating, thinking, mulling, and stewing in his mind until his mother called for dinner. And even after he had finished his meal, he lay, thought, and dreamed.

One particular evening in the summer transitioning into his senior year of high school, he abruptly sat up. His eyes widened, blinked, and then his brow furrowed them into a crumpled napkin shape. Anyone who had been in the room at the time would have realized that something enormous was happening and would have probably laughed at the cartoonish look on Jack’s face but an intelligent person would have become thoughtful. Jack Alden was at a dangerous cornerstone his life. The feelings he experienced were reminiscent of the feelings of a middle-aged man realizing suddenly that he has not accomplished anything and never will. He fell back onto his crumpled sheets. Jack felt crushed and at the same time larger than everything. A vast expanse of rain soaked jungles; desolate tundra, misty mountaintops and ethereal Romanic ruins swirled about in the reaches behind his eyelids upon their squinting shut. Endless possibilities. The entire universe balanced precariously on a blade of grass beneath the swirling vortex of a mower, a nanosecond away from blinking out of existence. His eyes blinked. The emotions surging through him were enough to bring him quivering to his knees with tears standing out on his cheeks or send him into a laughing fit so strong that his stomach burst. Jack was calm and collected and he realized that he could do anything and he could do nothing. That teenage feeling of immortality, walking on legs of spindle along the edge of a knife. Jack Alden relaxed and breathed deeply. The feeling he had was the closest he would ever come to achieving Nirvana. A feeling perhaps known only to the Buddha himself, something as common as it is rare. He levered himself up and off of his bed, looking forlornly out into the dark summer night; the abyss, which, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, was looking back.

Downstairs, the house was silent and close and Jack slipped, almost preternaturally out the side door adjoined to the kitchen. The sky yawned above him and the trees that spattered his moderately impressive front yard swayed, their leaves full and robust on the stem. Jack’s hair parted on his brow and he relished the feel of a warm pleasant breeze. He walked a few miles until he came to the boundary of The Shenandoah National Park. Jack had often explored the park as a young boy and was confident that even at the late hour, he could find his way through the woods and if he could not, surely, come dawn’s light, the way would be made clear. So Jack walked and he thought. His mind turned over and over the events leading up to this point in his life and his mid-life crisis mindset had soon worn off. With the loss of that driven mentality, Jack realized with regret that he was, in fact, lost. He knew what to do in the situation; a year in the cub scouts had taken care of that. He sat down on a tree stump and waited. The sky began to grow light and Jack’s stomach rumbled impatiently while his head bobbed in a semblance of sleep. The birds woke him up and he stood, stretching his legs and arms, his back cracking to his enjoyment. He walked again and while he did, his thoughts turned back to the night before. His mother would be up by now and probably worried to the point of insanity. She always worried and he often teased her about it, playfully, but not without a twinge of guilt. As he walked, fate, God, and luck danced a jig above his head and the forest swallowed him slowly as the day wore on.

It was half past two in the afternoon and Jack Alden’s shirt clung to his torso, his sweat forming a greasy layer between the cotton and his skin. His tongue lolled wolfishly from his mouth, tasting like nothing. He spat and was disgusted at the foamy spit that issued from his mouth. The sun had risen and its rays were progressively baking the flesh of his neck, which was already sporting a burn from a few days before. Jack gazed up at the sun just as he was coming to the peak of a hill and a snarled root caught his foot and he fell forward. The ground sloped off, the steep grade acting as the side of a weathered ravine with a depth of about fifteen feet. Jack’s life did not flash before his eyes. All that he saw in the time before the hard packed, rock filled dirt met with the side of his face, fracturing his jaw, breaking his nose, and severing his spinal cord, was a red wagon. The toy had been Jack’s favorite when he was seven and he had used it so often that the wheels had dwindled to nubs of scarred plastic. Around his eighth birthday the wagon had mysteriously disappeared and was replaced by a bike with training wheels, a tool more fitting to his big boy status. The red wagon flashed once behind his eyelids and Jack felt a burst of juvenile happiness and then nothing. His body lay in a heap like logs piled haphazardly for a funeral pyre that no one wanted to build. His eyes lost their luster and Jack Alden became one with the Earth.

A deer approached him three hours later, gave him a sniff and scampered off in search of a more edible food source. A squirrel did the same and a bear stayed for a while, delighted with its dumb fortune. That night, a heavy rain blanketed the countryside and the Alden household fell into chaos. The woods were searched the next day, and the next, and for several weeks. Signs were posted within a fifty-mile radius but of course, proved to be fruitless. If a stranger were to look upon the remains of Jack Alden, they would surely feel uneasy under his lifeless stare but his mouth would be the real source of discomfort. It was suggestive of The Mona Lisa. A knowing smile, slightly upturned, wise and captivating. The smile of a person who is glad to be where they are.

Four Years later, a family of five hiked past the ravine, oblivious to Jack’s remains. A few weeks after that two children who had strayed a bit farther from camp than necessary stumbled upon his ribs, jutting like piano keys from the rich patch of earth surrounding them. The children summoned their parents, who dismissed Jack as the skeletal vestiges of a deer. The youngest of the kids, a little girl, walked to the remains, knelt, and plucked a purple flower from among the multitude of ribs. She raised the blossom to her nose and sniffed, inhaling its heady aroma. She blinked and for a moment felt an inexplicable sadness coupled with an instinctual gratitude for the planet under her feet. The little girl grinned and ran back to her mother’s side, clutching the floral print of her spring dress in her pudgy hands. Then together they walked to their car, climbed in, and were soon on their way home.

 

Reviews

[Marianna Venodecci]

You are amazing with imagery. Your writing reminds me a lot of my style in that aspect. I really enjoyed this story. Jack is so real and vivid, as are his perceptions. My only thing is that, I'm writing this right after reading so I have yet to give a lot of thought to the symbolism of the red wagon and what message you were trying to convey, so it's still a little confusing to me. However, it's evident that there is some kind of underlying point to the story. I think you did a really good job with this, just a few grammatical errors. I would also like to see the story expanded, because I think there's more to tell about Jack's life leading up to his death. Overall, though, good job.