Abilities

It was awfully bright for nine o’clock in the morning. The newspapers had just been delivered. The sun had just risen above the trees and the houses. Fathers had just left for work and the moms were wrestling their kids out of bed to start getting ready for school.

Michael Vernor was already up. He didn’t remember waking up, rolling out of bed, or going outside. But there he was, standing in the front yard with no recollection of how he got there.

Without thinking about anything, his feet were already moving. He snagged the paper off the driveway curb and slid off the plastic wrapping. He dropped most of the paper on the ground and came away holding the sports section. He fanned it out and held it open so that he could clearly read. Oakland Raiders 10, Indianapolis Colts 6. The headline above the article read “The End of the Road.”

Michael noticed his neighbor, Mrs. Charles, throwing her bags into the back of her green Kia minivan. She was an older woman. Her kids were moved out, married, and living their own lives. It was just her and the retired husband. She was older, but tossed each bag into the van as if, physically, her best days were ahead of her. There was more clutter in the yard of the Rob family, the neighbors on the other side.

The little ones were kicking a soccer ball between them while their parents were dragging suitcases behind them. Mr. Rob was pulling two and had a couple athletic gym bags hanging from his neck.

“Would you guys please get into the damn car?” Mr. Rob yelled to the kids.

They weren’t his kids. Mrs. Rob and her ex-husband, Frank, had been divorced for about six years. Once they were married they moved into this neighborhood and have been Michael’s neighbors for the last two years. Frank stopped by the house every couple months. His kids loved him, but Mrs. Rob couldn’t stand him.

But there was Frank. He carried a box of canned food, bread, chips, and water out of the garage. He put it into the back of the car and slammed the trunk down. They were moving so quickly. Mrs. Rob pulled one of the kids by the hand while carrying the other one with one hand. She did a mother’s version of the Heisman pose.

Michael shook his head at both of his crazy neighbor’s antics. He went back to his paper to check the rest of the football scores. He read through all the 1:15 games and that’s when he noticed it. “The End of the World.” Michael blinked. And again. The headline of the paper article read “The End of the World.”

Michael looked back and forth from Mrs. Charles to Frank and the Rob family, and then noticed something he’d swear wasn’t there when he first picked up the paper—the entire neighborhood was in their yards packing. People were running around like lost cats. Cars were speeding down the road dodging an accident at the four-stop intersection. Nobody was stopping to help, they just drove around it. There was an eclipse in the sky. Michael got caught in its dark beauty. He dropped the paper and, with his hand sheltering his eyes, looked up to the sky in awe. It was big. Really big. It looked like it was only a couple hundred feet from the hot pavement.

During a normal eclipse, the moon moves in between the earth and the sun. Besides the bright ring that is directly around the moon referred to as the Ring of Fire, most of the sky remains dark. It’s not completely pitch black, but the moon covers most of the light. This was not a normal eclipse. It was the opposite of the normal kind. The ring around the sun was pitch-black, but other than that it gave off an unusual amount of sun. In this eclipse it was the sun that was in between the moon and the earth.

That’s when Michael understood why everyone in the neighborhood was panicking. Sparks, flames were flying through the air like asteroids or meteors. They were flying off of the eclipse. He couldn't tell if it was the sun or the moon that was producing each ball of fire. Perhaps it was a combination of the two. Each meteor-like rock came crashing down, imploding houses and cars on impact. Homes were being crushed to their foundation. The sparks were shooting through the ground and the road’s pavement like it was loose soil creating potholes the size of semi-trucks. Flames rose from each hole like they were individual, miniature volcanoes.

Mr. Rob came running out of the house with the family’s golden doodle puppy. Then there was a loud whistle. It wasn’t like a neighbor whistling at the hot girl across the street, but louder. Michael turned and looked all around but couldn’t find the source of it. He looked up and saw it. One of the rocks was flying through the air. Something that big free falling at that speed made the sound of a commercial airplane going down after a malfunction.

It was headed straight towards the Rob’s and smashed into their car before Michael could make a peep. Mr. Rob couldn’t move. The explosion shot half of the car over twenty feet in the air, and the other half was flattened underground, buried underneath the burning gravel. The impact threw Mr. Rob across the lawn landing on his back. He never dropped the dog. He fell, rolled backwards, and was sitting with the dog in his lap before he realized what happened. His arms went limp and the dog shot across the lawn and crawled to the giant hole in the ground. He cried yelped and tried to move closer but stopped when his paw briefly slipped over the edge.

Michael felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. He couldn’t move. It was as if his feet were cemented into the ground. All he wanted to do was help Mr. Rob. He just wanted to make sure he was ok. He couldn’t even clear his throat to call to him. Even if he could, Mr. Rob would probably never hear it. There was so much rumbling going on like they were in the middle of a racetrack. The chunks of sun and rock shot through the air destroying anything it touched. It sounded like World War III.

Michael’s left foot began to move. He took a full step to make sure his legs were working then ran across the yard, but had to travel an extra forty twenty feet to get around the giant hole in Rob’s driveway. And again there was the whistling sound. It was getting louder. That sound of a plane falling in the sky. Michael knew what was coming. He ran toward the last member of the Rob family trying to save him, but he couldn’t. There was no way. Another chunk of this eclipse landed right on top of him. At one moment, he was there clear as day and at the next moment there was nothing but ten foot high flames and a bigger hole than before. No Mr. Rob.

****

Michael sat up. Drips of sweat dropped from his forehead. It was cold, the freezing temperature from the Indiana winter was sneaking inside, but Michael was burning up from his nightmare that seemed too real. He stretched his right leg out from under the blanket leaving his left leg the only limb covered by blanket.

His dream wasn’t real. It seemed real, though, he knew it was just a dream, but couldn't shake the feeling of how realistic it was. Every step taken, every smell, everything that he saw seemed unbelievably real. Was it? Michael jumped out of his bed and raced to the window. He wiped the dew condensation off the window and looked outside. The frost on the outside of the house crept down the window and covered it completely. He couldn’t see anything.

He threw on a pair of black Crocs, tossed a sweatshirt on, and left the room. He raced down the stairs like a young kid on Christmas morning. It was cold outside. One day it will be warm and the next it could be below freezing. Indiana Januarys were the same way. Except instead of warm, it would go from cold to extremely freezing.Januarys in Indiana went from cold to freezing cold.

It was dark outside. He stepped off the porch and the small snowflakes landed on his face sending another chill down his body. The darkness of the sky made it hard to see just how much it was actually snowing until Michael saw the light under the street lampfury flakes under the street lamp. It was damn near a blizzard.

As crazy, and unpredictable, as the weather was, it was typical. There was no sun, no moon, no eclipse. All of the neighbors were tucked away to dream in their beds

Being outside in the cold cooled Michael off. Seeing that his dream was in fact a dream slowed his breathing. He turned to go into the house until that familiar noise came, a whistling that he had heard, starting faint but growing. There were lights in the distance, but it was simply a car driving down the road. It was the only car on the road. The headlights moved through the snow toward Michael, passed him by, and moved away. It looked like a hover car more than an actual car Because tThe darkness and snow made it hard to see the wheels, the car seemed to be floating away.

Michael watched it reach the end of the road and round the corner. After the car was gone, everything was still again. Things never seemed this calm in the city, only in the suburbs or the country.

Michael closed the door behind him. Gently. He realized now that he had been loud pretty noisy running down the stairs. Both of his parents had been sleeping and he probably sounded like a boulder crashing through the house. Like the sounds in his dreams. He walked through the living room on his tiptoes and headed back up to his room.

He flipped the light on in his bathroom and waited for a quick second while his eyes adjusted to the brightness. He tossed a handful of cool water on his face and stared into his own Hazel eyes.

He was clean-shaven for his important day tomorrow. His hair was short but in desperate need of being washed. He dropped his sweatshirt to the floor and straightened his back as if he were getting a picture taken. He watched himself in the mirror. His eyes, his face, his body. He wasn’t looking so much at his athletic build, but instead through it. He looked into his soul as the dream played games in his head. Keeping his eyes on himself in the mirror he flipped the light switch off.

CHAPTER 14

The next morning Michael woke up, got dressed, and walked out to the front yard where he watched people in the neighborhood head to work, get ready for school, and jog around the neighborhood. They were not running from Armageddon.

Michael was in his final semester of college. This last semester he didn’t have to spend it on campus, though. He was an education major and was going to spend the next four months student teaching. Today was his first day at one of the local middle schools. He was going to be working with a sixth grade English class, even though he eventually wanted to teach the seventh grade.

Michael was dressed in his best suit, dark blue with pin stripes. He wore a light blue dress shirt under the jacket and topped it off with a dark blue tie with white stripes. He waited in the front yard for his ride.

That’s when a gray Toyota pulled up on perfect cue. Sitting in the driver seat was a beautiful blond. Her hair stopped at her shoulders. It was summer blond, with a darker layer hidden underneath. She had a beautiful clear face, clear green eyes, and a dancer’s body. Since she was nine-years-old she was dancing. She danced as a kid, through high school,competitively and that lasted through high school. and some inIn college her love of dance was a way to kill boredom.

With a stroke of luck, Brittany Goudreau was student teaching at the very same school. She was going to be in the eighth grade math department. Since she was a junior in high school she wanted to be a math teacher. It was that year that she had the most amazing, friendly, helpful teacher, Miss Hayes. Brittany thought that she did such a great job making learning fun that Brittany wanted to do the same thing for her students.

Michael carried his briefcase with him to the car. There wasn’t much of any importance in the case he carried, lots of blank notebook paper, a book on teaching, a book he was reading for fun, and some paper work that he needed his supervising teacher to sign. He opened the door and hopped in.

They gave each other a customary quick kiss. They were past the “honeymoon” stage after being together for over two years, and saved the passionate kissing for the private moments. Michael threw on his seatbelt and they took off down the street.

“Are you nervous?” he asked her.

“No, I’m doing ok,” she responded.

Michael laughed. He reached in his pocket and turned his cell phone to vibrate. A cell phone going off on the first day of class wouldn’t be the greatest first impression with the kids and especially his supervisor. Brittany always kept her phone in the middle console between seats. Michael grabbed her phone, knowing that when her phones needs to be on silent, it’s actually on full volume and when it needs to be loud, it’s on vibrate.

“Thank you,” she pressed her lips together. “I guess I’m a little nervous. I didn’t sleep much last night.”

“I didn’t either.”

“I wasn’t making fun!”

“Yeah, whatever, butt wipe.”

“I’m nervous, too, , you know that. bBut I didn’t have much time to think about it.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. She let Michael stare out the window and put his words together, but when nothing came out she pushed a little more, “Michael, tell me.”

“I had this real strange dream and I couldn’t sleep after that.”

“What was it about?”

“It just felt so real,” he began thinking out loud. “I don’t feel as alive right now as I did during the dream. Weird, right?”

“Michael, what was it about?” she asked. Michael didn’t give an answer. She waited, but it didn’t even seem as if Michael heard her. “Hey! What was it about?”

“I think…I think the world was ending.”

“Well,” she didn’t know exactly what to say but continued, “That would keep anybody up.”

“I remember everything about it. The smell, the feeling, the fear,” he thought for a moment. “There was so much screaming. Everyone was terrified. I was terrified.”

Brittany smiled and rubbed Michael’s shoulder. Brittany had an effect on Michael that couldn’t be explained simply by using the word “love.” It was more than that. As long as she was around, Michael knew that there would always be another day. Some would be harder than others but he would be able to get through each and every one because of the love and connection they shared. She always gave him the feeling that there would be another opportunity to right the wrongs, to fix anything that may be broken.

They pulled into the school parking lot. The staff lot was almost filled up. The kid’s hadn’t arrived yet and the place seemed empty without all the thirteen-year-oldsyoung ones running around. Brittany pulled into a spot and flipped shifted the car into park. She clicked off her seatbelt and tightened the scarf around her neck. Michael sat staring at the school. He didn’t smile, his nerves weren’t whacking away at him, and he wasn’t shivering from the January temperature. He just sat there. Calm. Ready to tackle his first day. He looked at Brittany. And that’s why he had no nerves. She was there with him. She was going to be in the same school with him for the next four months. She was going to be right down the hall from him every step of the way.

CHAPTER 15

The first day of class was always one of the most exciting for kids. It was actually more of a bittersweet day. No thirteen-year-old wanted their summer to come to an end, but it was exciting when they walked into each class and saw the pack of friends that would cause chaos with them for the next nine months. There’s always that small group of guys whose personal mission is to make a teacher’s life a living hell.

That might not have been the case for Michael’s first year. Sure, he was going to get a couple of pain-in-the-asses for the semester but the teacher that he would be working with was a living version of the Grinch; Mr. Kruger was a grouchy man in his late forties. This was his twentieth-year teaching, but first at this school. Nobody on the staff ever asked why he transferred but personal reasons were the most popular guess. His glasses were round, and he wore an ugly white belt that was engulfed by his stomach hanging over. When he talked it sounded like he didn’t want to separate his teeth from touching. At his old school, he made quite the reputation of being a hard ass and the kids quickly learned and it only took August to December the past semester for the kids to learn. It didn't take long for his new students to understand why. Some of them learned the hard way, which was Mr. Kruger’s favorite way of doing business.

When the kids weren’t around, he was an ok guy, though. He was nice but he acted like an old-fashioned stereotypical nerd. He told jokes that either didn’t have a punch line or were worse than a bad knock-knock joke. He thought they were funny and after each one, you could hear a small snicker through his teeth.

As soon as the bell rang, the kids were already in their seats. It was like a scene out of Dead Poet’s society. Now they weren’t all waiting with their backs straight and their hands folded on the desk, but for a seventh-grade class, Mr. Kruger got the attention that he demanded. The first thing on the list agenda was a spelling test. It was officially a pre-test because Mr. Kruger wasn’t going to enter it in his grade book; he kept that a secret while he was handing them out.

“Just try your best,” was all he said as he called on Michael to pass them out.

As the kids took the test, Michael was assigned to walk up and down the aisles to make sure the kids weren’t cheating, or sleeping, or talking. Michael glanced down at some of the kid’s responses.

The test was a multiple-choice exam. Usually during spelling tests the teacher will walk around reading the words out loud and the kids will write them down. Kruger gave the students four words and one of them was spelled correctly, the other three weren’t. Experiment. Decision. Gauge. Those were a couple of the trickier words. There was a challenge section at the bottom for which Mr. Kruger usually rewarded extra credit points. The hardest of those words was “beauteous.” Good luck seventh graders.

“Ok. Time is up. Mr. Vernor is going to walk around and collect the tests,” Kruger nodded to Michael to begin picking up the tests. Some of them were finished with no errors, while others had a couple of selections scratched out. There were drawings on the back of the tests from the students who finished ahead of the time limit given. There were houses, cartoon faces, hearts, and rainbows. No student showed any hidden artistic ability.

Mr. Kruger then explained that the test wasn’t for a grade but just to see where each individual student was. The rest of the class was used for student and teacher introductions, rules of the classroom and, finally, the syllabus.

During this time, Michael was sitting at his desk on the side of the room grading the tests. Most of the students got every regular word correct, but there were a couple of errors. Lieutenant was the word most often misspelled. Only one student got all five of the challenge words right. The rest of the students answered one or two of them correctly.

Michael looked over the perfect paper and scanned the room trying to put the student’s name to a face, but he knew it would be a couple of weeks before he would be able to do that. Michael was impressed. He was so impressed with the paper he found himself nodding as he double checked each answer. He nodded in the direction of the test, he would have recognized the student, but again he had no idea who Jamie was.

He flipped over the paper and felt like the air was sucked out of the room. He couldn’t breathe. He was screaming but nothing came out. He was panicking. Choking and fighting for the air to get back into his lungs. He put the paper on the table and looked at it. He looked it up and down and from corner to corner. He scanned the room thinking that now he would be able to figure out who Jamie was, but he still had no idea and that wasn’t going to change. Michael started tracing the drawing on the back of the page with his finger. It was so detailed. Jamie must have finished the test in a matter of seconds. They only have five minutes to finish the whole exam, and the drawing looks like it took no less than five minutes.

It was a drawing of a couple of neighborhood homes. There were three houses with a family in each lawn. Stick figures, but there was such emotion in their posture and facial expressions. The arms and legs were drawn in different positions. Some were knelt on the ground and looked like they were screaming. Other figures’ legs were bent in “L” shaped letters that gave them the appearance that they were running. The houses were damaged, falling apart. The sun in the sky was the size of two of the houses combined. It was so big that the bottom of the solar giant was hiding behind the houses. Then there was the moon.

Wait a minute…Michael thought. He looked up because he felt all eyes on him but the students were all focused on Mr. Kruger who was beginning a new lecture. This is a picture of my dream.