A Small Act of Bravery

 

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A Small Act of Bravery

I am going to tell you a story. For some of you this may be hard to believe and to others, well others of you may still have what was left of that little child’s imagination left in your soul to believe what you are about to read. You may even feel right at home with this tale or see some similarities from your own childhood. For those of you that are like me, that still have that childlike flame burning inside, that still believe that there are trolls that live under rickety bridges in your town, that there are monsters still lurking in the forgotten corners of your room or strategically lying in wait under your bed, you will have no problem believing that what I am about to tell you is true. It is true; I know because I lived it and this tale or more correctly, life experience, had forever changed what type of person I would grow up to be.

This story begins just like any story, Once upon a time. The time was the fall of 1991 and I was ten. My mother and I had moved to Missouri after we had received word that my father had been killed as an infantryman in the Gulf War. There had not been the mass casualties as were predicted by the specialists on the late night television talk shows but there were enough in the short lived war against the Iraqi army and like so many casualties of war, they seemed to be forgotten when it came to the celebrations of such a quick and decisive victory. Along with the casualties’ of the soldiers in the war that seemed to be forgotten, so were those poor family members that were left behind like my mother and I.

Oh, at first we would get the usual, “I am so sorry for your loss,” speeches from people who looked to feel more uncomfortable with my presence than having any actual sorrow in their heart. Eventually we blended back in with the rest of society; pariahs on the edge of town that most folks seemed to avoid out of a sheer fright that the sorrow that filled our lives might be contagious.

And, so we lived.

I attended school at West Haven Middle School, the same middle school my father had attended, and never made friends out of fear that we would just move as we had constantly did when my father was still alive. See, living the life of a “military brat” had its privileges and its downfalls. One of those downfalls was when a soldier left for a new duty station his family followed close behind. You never could keep friends longer than a year or maybe two. When I moved to Missouri, seeing kids play together and talk about knowing each other since they were born sounded almost like a joke. It did not seem possible. I mean, seriously. How could one kid hang around another kid that long?

So school was filled with long days of whispers from behind chipped paint locker doors directed in conversation about the short, blonde haired boy, whose blue eyes seemed to be cut from the sky and quite possibly that was where his witch of a mother had gotten them from. A witch is what they believed she was. I believe that was because we did not socialize with anyone from the town, our house (my father’s childhood home) seemed to be falling in by its outside appearance but on the inside was quite nice, and I had no friends to tell them otherwise. It seems when a child has no information to go on they tend to make up whatever scenario they believe fits into their little world. In our small town, my mother was a witch, and I was a son of a witch. No pun intended.

Along with not having friends, being short and of little muscle mass but great bone structure I became a very ripe target for the class bully Max Brockis. Max seemed to have been plucked straight from the DNA of Satan and given the skin of a sixteen year old boy at the age of ten. He was a monster and my nemesis. I would spend what little free time I had between classes dodging him in the hallways, weaving between other students as they shuffled there sneakers across the crimson and tan colored tiles and talked, oblivious to the cat and mouse game that Max had involuntarily placed me in. Some days I could reach my locker and grab what items I needed before the cat’s paw could grip this little mouse’s tail and then on more unfortunate days, he would catch me.

“Hey dillweed.” Max said, his harsh voice causing chills to creep up my neck.

A part of me, the child in me, believed that if I pretended as if I did not hear what Max had said, then he would not be there, fist slapping into the palm of his opposite hand. The other part of me, the more logical part of my brain, knew that this beast would never cease his hunt until he devoured his prey; smiling through crooked teeth slurping the little mouse’s tail in like a spaghetti noodle. I would always have these days, my heart pounding in my chest, smelling my own fear seeping from my armpits, always squirming through life.

Always afraid.

“I said hey!” Max shouted as he slammed my locker door catching the fingers of my left hand in the door before I could pull them out. The predator had trapped his prey. Pain shot through my hand but I refused to scream out, as well as refusing to look at my tormentor. Once again believing that if I looked at him it would make him real even though the pain in my hand was all too real.

“Tough little turd ain’t you? Hope your fingers are ok.” He said, a snort of laughter shooting from his flaring nostrils.

In that moment, I am not sure what had really come over me. Maybe it was months of dealing with the loss of my dad coupled with moving to a place that I had no real familiarity with, or the fact that I really felt alone. When I had lost my father I had lost my mother as well. Though she was not a witch as my classmates believed she was, she was a nurse at Cardinal Glen. A nurse who worked long hours, pulling double shifts sometimes six days a week. We had received a large check in the mail from the government as a life insurance payment for dad’s death so I knew that we were not hurting for money. She had always said that I reminded her so much of dad. Maybe she felt more comfortable with the sick and dying than with her own son that reminded her too much of her dead husband. Either way, in that lonely moment I felt a flare inside of me that said that I did not want to be the scared little mouse running from the hungry cat for the rest of my life.

“Hey Max.” I said calmly.

“What do you want-“As Max turned, his guard completely down because it was merely a wounded mouse behind him, I slammed all 457 pages of my math book against his face. Later some kids would say that this moment was awesome, others would say that I cheated, and once again others would say that Max got what he deserved but in that moment all I heard was my own voice raised in a battle cry as I struck the larger boy in the center of his face causing him to fall on the hallway floor, screaming as if a wild beast had just latched hold of him. No longer feeling the pain in my left hand, the mouse straddled the cat and began to rain down punches while Max desperately tried to defend himself. Around me kids were chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

I let it all out.

All the loneliness, the hurt, the fear, I pushed all of those feelings through my fists and into the face of Max as I watched his nose blossom into a spray of red onto the crimson and tan tiles of the hallway floor.

I was still kicking and screaming when Mr. Montgomery pulled me from my mount on Max and was still shaking from the fight ten minutes after as I sat in the principal’s office as they tried to contact my mom at work to have a conference and then take me home. My mind was blanked. I was once again afraid. For a few seconds I felt like an untouchable warrior and now in the presence of superior adults I was back to feeling like a mouse. Even the bleeding and sobbing Max seated across from me seemed less menacing while we sat in the office. I had to hold back a chuckle as I watched him tilt back his head with a bloody tissue pinched in his flaring nostrils.

It took my mother thirty minutes to get from the hospital to the school and then another fifteen minutes for us to get home. She listened to what Mr. Craig, the school principal, had to say without saying too much to him and then escorted me through the school doors after signing papers saying she understood that I would be suspended from school for a week.

A whole week!

Once again I had to fight back a smile. I was going to get a week away from my tormentor and I felt relieved. We pulled into the driveway but my mom had left the engine running on our maroon Dodge Aries.

“Dinner is in the ‘fridge. I will be home later. I have another late shift tonight.” She said coldly. Once again she was not looking at me; just staring blankly through the windshield at the fall leaves tumbling into our driveway.

“Yes ma’am. Can I watch T.V.?”

“Sure. Are you ok Bryan?” This time there was a bit of motherly love in her voice.

“Yes ma’am. I will put ice on my hands.”

“Good boy. Gotta go. I love you.”

“I love you too, Mom.”

I stepped from the car and watched her pull away before I walked across our cracked walkway to our front door. The house was a complete image of how I felt; broken and falling apart on the outside, empty and lonely on the inside. I briefly thought about eating but the excitement of the day had put a drain on myself and I just wanted to go to my room and lay on my bed.

The bedroom was as I had left it in the morning. Blankets pulled back and clothes lying about as I had tossed them. I placed my bag on the chair by the desk and walked to my window. I had always loved the fall. The changing of the leaves, the cooler weather, no bugs, all had a way of pulling me into a better mood when it seemed to pull others into dreary moods. I watched from my moisture touched window as darker clouds seemed to gather and slowly lumber towards our small town. I welcomed their presence as I was sure I would welcome their lullabye tonight as I tried to sleep while my mother worked through another long night. The rain was a great way to mask the creaking sounds of the old home; a way to keep my mind from drifting into thoughts of a strange beast lurking in the halls.

While staring through the window at the world outside I was almost so transfixed that I didn’t notice that slight squeaks coming from somewhere in my lonely home. At first I assumed that it was just some boards settling after I had walked over them to get to my room but the more I focused my ears towards the slight noise and realized there was something different about the noise. It seemed more of a desperate cry rather than a creak of a board. I slipped my shoes from my feet and began to softly walk through my house, a trick my dad had showed me to move quietly, and began to search for the source of the noise. I stepped through my doorway and into the hall and stopped. The squeaks were working in a short rhythm, sounding more desperate. I began to think that another bird had flown into our house through the chimney. This had happened the week prior and had made quite a mess that took me hours to clean up after I had finally gotten the frightened sparrow through the front door.

After deciding that the sound was not coming from the bathroom or my mother’s room I walked into the kitchen and the squeaking stopped. I slowly scanned the kitchen counters, turning my head ever so slowly so as to not startle the bird but could not see him. The squeaking began again. This time more frantic and I was able to pin point the sound closer to the floor. If the bird was on the floor, most likely it was injured and I would have to perform some sort of first aid to the little critter. As the squeaks became more frantic, so did my search. I did not like the idea of a small animal in pain and afraid trying to find its way from our kitchen. I crawled on my hands and knees looking in-between the cabinets and the refrigerator and found, to my surprise, the source of the squeaks.

It was not the frightened sparrow that I had assumed I would find but a white mouse. A little white mouse stuck firmly on one of my mothers’ sticky mouse traps. But what had me dumbfounded was not the fact that it was a creature that I didn’t think to find, it was simply the fact that this little white mouse was wearing what appeared to be a brown long sleeved shirt and small black boots. Lying next to him, stuck firmly to the glue was a shiny steel colored sword and a shield that appeared to be made from leaves folded over many times. We had frozen, we both locked eyes on one another with a breath held tightly in our lungs when the squeaking white mouse finally broke the ice.

“Think you could give me a hand friend?”

I passed out and bounced my head off of the kitchen floor.

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