This World

Prologue

Truly extraordinary things happen in the most ordinary of ways to the most ordinary of people. Through a sunny day or a child’s game, stepping through a wardrobe or being whisked away by a storm. So many great adventures started in such ways as to set them in an ordinary world. Such is my story. When I was younger I could walk on air. Not ordinary at all and I know that to most people who are reading this that statement sounds completely invalid and somewhat insane, but, there are a select few of you that are reading this and going “You too. Yea?” Then this story is for you. That is not to say, however, that if you have never experienced this walking on air phenomenon that you cannot enjoy this story. In fact, quite the contrary. I believe you will find this story just as intriguing, if not more so, as those who have experienced it. This is for those rare individuals who shared in that experience with me. I know that those who know first-hand what I am talking about will need no persuading to continue reading and that is why I say this is for them.

When I was younger I could walk on air. A simple statement if, like most people, you write it off as the misunderstood and misguided fantasies of a child. Let’s not forget here that the fantasies of a child have inspired many of the greatest achievements of adults. I am here to tell you this is no fantasy.

I can remember it in vivid detail. My family and I lived in a double wide trailer in a small town in rural south Alabama called Home. Yea, I know. First the walking on air thing and now a town named Home. I promise its true, look it up if you don’t believe me. The trailer was settled in front of a large field planted with corn or cotton or peanuts or whatever other crop was in rotation for that season. Just a hundred or so yards up the road was my grandmother and grandfathers house who I had always referred lovingly to as MawMaw and PawPaw. All year long, no matter the weather, these great green pine trees filled the path between their house and ours. It was always amazing to me as a child that these trees seemed to endure whatever the world threw at them. Always green and always tall even through the worst of the hurricane winds and freezing cold rains.

Our double wide was really nothing special or it wasn’t to anyone that wasn’t me. Its brown color had been worn down and faded from its years of abuse by our constantly changing weather. The interior was much the same due to another constantly changing and growing force of destruction, my brother and myself. We were hell on everything we could get our hands on. Not intentionally mind you, hell on everything the way boys can be in that “oops I accidentally flipped the couch over by tackling my brother into it even though mom said to not to” or “the crap I broke the window with a baseball by throwing it in the house but it was really Keah’s fault for not hitting the ball when I threw it” kind of way. The thin carpet on the floor barely gave any protection from the floor boards beneath it. When the wind blew the slightest the walls and roof would moan and pop from the strain but it, like those trees, endured pretty much anything the world threw at. The furniture matched the trailer, well-worn and outdated, and was decorated with pictures of flowers, wagon wheels, and milk churns all in subdued hues of browns and oranges. An old rectangular shaped coffee table set in the middle of the floor about five feet in front of our old television. When I say old I mean this was the type of TV that had no remote and a turn dial to pick up the five or six stations we could get on our big aluminum antenna that towered above everything in our yard. To anyone else these things may have seemed dull and drab but not to my brother and me.

Heck no. To us this trailer was a castle standing hundreds of feet tall with stone lining the walls to the very top. The vents in the floor were not vents at all, they were in fact murder holes cut into our castle to allow us to fire our cannons (straws with uncooked peas for ammunition) at the incoming enemies (rats, roaches, flies etc.). The couch would quickly become a truck over which would fight about who was going to drive and who had to ride in the back and keep off the Indians, a.k.a, our dog Lady.

It didn’t matter what it was in our double wide we turned it into something fun or dangerous. Looking back now I note that the two seemed to be intertwined, can’t have the one without the other. The table became a fort or a bridge which our hot wheels raced across. The red clay knob there in our front yard would become a mud track for us to run our toy trucks through. That table however would play a role in something, this particular story I am telling you now, that would forever stand out in my mind and would eventually shape my goals and my future though I wouldn’t recognize it for some time. In fact, I would not recognize it until this story was over and I sat down to write the events.

One rainy day during September, a short time before my birthday, my brother and I got out of bed early with every intention of playing mud trucks in the front yard in the mud puddle the rain had left from the day before. Sadly, the rain had not left and we were stuck inside. We quickly adapted our idea of mud truck into one of encyclopedia races. For those of you who have no creative mind, encyclopedia races is not a race to see how quickly you can read an encyclopedia for that would be both boring and un-destructive. It is where you put the encyclopedias in a variation of patterns, end to end, and push your cars down them to see who gets to the end first and has the most awesome crash.

The races were fun for about five minutes at which point my brother decided he wanted to take a bath, rather mom decided he wanted to take a bath. It was a few minutes after mom dragged him off for his bath that the thing I want to tell you about happened. I was bored and decided to play one of my favorite games, don’t step in the lava. Again, I know there are those of you out there that know exactly what I am talking about but for those of you that don’t, this game is where you start by standing on the couch, chair, pillow, etc. and attempt to make it around the room without touching the floor or lava as it would be.

Starting from my normal spot, the couch, and I used a couple of throw pillows thrown on the lava to allow me to advance to the love seat. This move took no thought as it was the same move I always made. Then it was a small leap to the coffee table at which point I would normally jump to my dad’s lazy boy recliner. I say normally because I hadn’t realized it until I was standing on my coffee table and it was too late to turn back that my mom had rearranged the furniture and dad’s chair wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Instead it was about five extra feet further away. Just far enough that my boney little six-year old legs couldn’t launch me to it.

Well the rules of Lava Floor are clear. You cannot back track and you must either die a most fiery and painful death in the lava or finish. Since I couldn’t make the jump to the chair I had only one obvious choice…walk on air. I don’t know if it was because I’d been watching some magician do it on TV or because being a kid I just knew it was possible, but my six-year old brain told me that was the logical thing to do. Simply walk out onto nothing and reach the chair.

With my eyes closed I concentrated hard on what needed to be done. By concentrated I mean I just squeezed my eyes shut really tight and stuck my tongue out of the corner of my mouth the way I had seen my dad do when he was working on a particularly tough bolt. Then I scooted my feet to the edge of the table, then scooted some more, and some more, and some more. Finally, I thought to myself, “Am I ever going to reach the edge.”

That’s when I opened my eyes. Suddenly I realized I was past the edge and standing on air and in the split second it took for my brain to process that I was standing on nothing and that was, in fact, not possible the spell was broke. I dropped like that coyote character that is always chasing that funny bird in those old cartoons my Mom used to love. It was only a foot fall but I sat stunned in the middle of the floor. It was not the fall that had me confused. It was the fact that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had just levitated, walked on air, hovered, or whatever you want to call it. No matter that it was for mere seconds, I knew I had done that. My head hurt from arguing with itself, because as much as I believed I had done it my mind still fought against the idea knowing that it was scientifically impossible to walk on air, yet still, I knew what I had seen. For a brief second, I was suspended in air, nothing holding me up except for sheer will and belief.

I immediately got up and tried again. I rushed to the edge of the table closed my eyes, mimicked my every move from before, scooted to the edge, and then…fell flat on my face busting my nose open and breaking my wrist in an attempt to break my fall. Mom, hearing the bang and scream, rushed in.

“What happened?! What did you do?”

“I was trying to walk on air Mom.” I said half embarrassed by how crazy that sounded. I rushed on trying to explain what I was saying barely stopping to catch my breath. Of course, when I tried to explain to her what happened she didn’t believe it.

“People don’t walk on air son. Now I have to take you to the hospital. Get your clothes on and get in the car.” I guess I left out the detail that I was at this point still in nothing but my Teenage Mutant Ninja turtle tighty-whities.

After about ten minutes I was dressed and my nose had stopped bleeding. I begged my mom to not take me to the doctor insisting that I was fine. She almost believed me. Right up to the point she gave me a glass of water to drink and the broken wrist revealed itself when I was unable to grip the cup and it fell to the floor shattering to pieces on impact.

I tried to tell the doctor to.

“Now isn’t that something.” The doctor exclaimed in that annoyingly over acted amazement voice. You know the voice. The one where people are only trying to appease you when you know full well they don’t believe a word of what your saying or if the do they aren’t at all impressed by it.

“Well, Mom, you have your own little super man.” He said again in that same damned annoying tone.

I didn’t think that was funny and I knew it was also in accurate. Superman could fly; I had simply walked on air, levitated at best. The doctor put a cast on my wrist and told my mom I would be fine. She followed the doctor out into the hall where I suppose she thought I couldn’t hear her.

“Doctor, should I be worried about him thinking that way? It’s kind of weird isn’t it? I know he is a kid, but how many kids really believe they can walk on air?”

The doctor’s reply only made me feel even more idiotic than my mom just had.

“Well it is a kid’s imagination.” The doctor replied. My mom not being satisfied with that pressed on.

“But doctor, I never hear any of the other mothers talking about their kids believing they can fly. I mean sure they say the pretend to be air planes or stuff like that but he really believes he can fly. (levitate I corrected her mentally) I mean there has to be something you can do.” She begged.

“It’s really nothing to be concerned about ma’am.” The doctor replied with a laugh on the edges of his voice. But again, mom wasn’t satisfied and it was at this point that I discovered my mom was concerned about me and my social well-being.

“Doctor, he doesn’t have many friends. He is a little different you know. He has a hard time paying attention in class, he is always making up these crazy stories, and he has the wildest imagination. Some of his stories really seem to scare the other kids. Even his teachers have started to be concerned. It isn’t that the stories he tells scares them I don’t think but it’s the fact he believes in them. Isn’t there anything you can do?” she spoke softly and with embarrassment on her words,

“Really ma’am, I think you just have a socially awkward, adolescent child…” he began but mom cut him off.

“Please doctor?” she said the desperation in her voice heavily apparent. The doctor stared at her for a moment and then with a shake of his head and a sigh he spoke.

“You say he has problems paying attention in class?” he asked.

“Yes! His teachers are always complaining and saying he could do more if he would only learn to keep quiet and pay attention.” She rambled excitedly seeing the notion of an idea and an answer form in the doctor’s head.

“We could test him for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I’m not sure that is what this is but if it would put you at ease we will run the test.”

“Thank you, doctor. I just know you can fix him.” Mom spoke excitedly. Her words kind of cut me a little. She thought he could “fix” me. Hell, I didn’t know I was broken. Well, other than my wrist.

Long story short, I tried to walk from the table a few more times before the next week. Of course, I only did it when mom wasn’t around which limited my opportunities. Every time I tried I got the same result, face plant. The doctor diagnosed me with ADHD and placed me on medication. After I was placed on the medicine I didn’t try to walk on air again. I didn’t ever really feel like it. I just kind of always felt drained, a feeling I blame entirely on the medication. And irritated. Yea, all the time just grouchy. At little shit too, like if there was a fly buzzing in the room it would just set me off. Or someone to close to me chewing food would set my teeth on edge. I don’t know if that was the medication or if it was just me. All I knew is being irritated at everything all the time was…was…well it was damn irritating.

The rest of my life was kind of boring and completely lacking of magical feats like my air walk. That’s just how it was. I woke up every morning, took my medication, went to school, and came home. I graduated high school somewhere in the middle of my class, I was a decent athlete but not extraordinary, just good enough to go to a junior college and play for two years where I earned my associates in criminal justice. Nothing out of the ordinary ever happened. That was nothing ever happened until about a week ago.