Last Moments

The sunlight cast a shade of green over the water, the stones underneath the surface glinting like gold nuggets. Fish swam around them and crickets quietly chirped in the nearby reeds. Lewis Haien lay in a small rubber dinghy which glided along the lake, staring at the snow-white clouds wandering slowly across the bright summer sky while his thoughts were once again swept up in his memories on the recent past.

They had gone across the narrow bridge which led through the marshland at the edge of the forest. The rotten wood creaked under their feet and, with every step, the bridge sank a little more into the muddy mass, washing the brown sludge around their sneakers. In the middle of the bridge, they stopped, leaning against the banister and stood looking out at the paltry marsh.

“What’s wrong with you?” Jake asked after a while.

“Nothin. Whit fur ye’re askin?”

“Well, you’ve a face like a bag of spanners.”

“Ah’m feelin awrecht, really.”

Jake looked at him. In the pale moonlight of the March evening, Lewis saw how his classmate knit his brows, so that he immediately regretted lying to him, but he did not possess the courage to grant him the truth. He did not want to lose him at all, because he had never met such a beautiful, self-confident, and intelligent boy before.

He glanced at him surreptitiously him.

Jake’s blonde curls were hidden under a Celtic cap. The tanned skin on his face looked perfect and his muscles bulged out of his beige-colored jacket with which he wore his torn blue jeans.

“But something’s wrong with you.”

An embarrassed Lewis swept his eyes over the marsh. He wanted to make eye contact—but he could not look at him directly.

“Come on, you can tell me. We’re friends and we’ll stay friends, promise.” Jake tried to ease his classmate into opening up. He knew from experience that it was not clever to be bottled up. After his parents‘ divorce, he had kept quiet about his feelings for months, and then he had lost his self-control on the class trip to Esplugues des Illobregat. He had collapsed crying in the middle of the Ramblas in Barcelona, although there was no particular reason for those tears in that moment. He wanted to spare Lewis a similar experience, and not only because he was the one who had comforted him once.

“Could be,” Lewis whispered. “Ah, well. Ah… ah… aye like ye, Jake.” Done. He breathed a sigh of relief, turning his head and looking at him uncertainly.

“Say, haven’t you noticed that I love you, too?” Jake leant forward, planting a kiss on his flushed cheek.

With tears pooling in his eyes, Lewis returned to the present.

His fingers trembled when he took out the Swiss pocketknife from the pocket of his short jeans. Jake had given it to him on his seventeenth birthday a few weeks ago after Lewis had revealed himself as a fan of the TV series MacGyver. For a moment, he looked at the wine-colored handle, and then he opened it.

Lewis’s thoughts succumbed to the past again, mixing up the different moments in his mind.

“Say, haven’t you noticed that I love you, too?” Jake leant forward—before an invisible suction tore him away and threw him carelessly down to the ground a few yards away.

The two boys had been standing on the platform, waiting for the express train to Hamburg where they wanted to begin a long, relaxing weekend with Lewis’ uncle in Bavaria, close to the border with Austria. As it did every morning before the rush hour began, the freight trains raced through the station.

In one single moment, he lost everything.

With blood pouring out, Jake remained lying on the platform. Lewis heard himself screaming his name. His piercing blue eyes were open and Jake stared at him. Lewis slowly sank to his knees next to him. The pool of blood around his head kept growing. He heard somebody say something, but he could not understand it.

As if in slow-motion, the event came back to him once more. Again and again, the goods train raced past them and swept Jake away.

Tears ran down his cheeks while he threated the knife to his artery.

Someone had dragged Lewis away from the lifeless body of his friend. Another man crouched down close to Jake and took his pulse. With a sad shake of the head, he stood up.

Lewis felt the cold metal on his skin.

The man who caught hold of him said something, later loosening his grip. Lewis tore off him immediately, crouching next to Jake, caressing his cheeks and whispering unintelligible words. He could not understand why his love had been taken away so brutally.

That morning, the last thing Lewis clearly saw was the daily triumphal rise of the sun in the East.

And it welcomed the boy with bright, warm light.