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It started very slowly, as I had planned, but then gravity betrayed me, sending the rock pin-wheeling through the air with murderous speed. I hadn’t intended it to go so fast. The rock blazed down the hill, thumping the ground and gaining speed until it seemed a blur of gray a moss green. The world slowed, objects moving through time like viscous mud. At first, I thought it would be okay, that my little joke would be harmless. My eyes shifted focus, turning in my head like rusted spheres. She was moving into its path, directly in front of it.
She was the sister of my best friend’s girlfriend. Though younger than us by two years, she was always around when we would hang out as a group. There was no ambiguity when it came to her feelings for me. She was smitten, but I had my sights set elsewhere, and she was not what I was looking for. Her persistence did earn her some time with me on a night when I was feeling especially vulnerable after getting a rejected by the girl of my dreams. We were at her house while my friend and her sister were in the back making out. I had her shirt off and was getting ready to make a terrible mistake. I didn’t have feelings for her. I was only using her to put sexual salve on my wounded ego. I felt terrible for having rejected her in a manner much crueler than that which I had received. Perhaps, deep down, that is what I had wanted. To be cruel.
Even more frightening to me was the possibility that the rock was on its way toward here because I wanted it to be.
The rock jumped and rocketed down the hill. I don’t even remember now if there was time to say Look out! It seemed the rock would hit her in the chest, but at the last moment, in a moment of dark serendipity, it bounced upwards toward her face. If it hit her face or head, there would be little chance for her to survive. From my viewpoint atop the hill, the rock flew over her and landed in the stream far below. Immediately, she dropped to the ground. I couldn’t tell how badly she had been hurt, or if she were even still alive. I don’t remember walking down to her. I must have stayed where I was, frozen.
The next thing I remembered was my friend carrying her, unconscious, and blood running down her face, her hair matted with red.
We walked the quarter mile back to the car and sped to the hospital. The guilt welling within me kept me at a distance. I waited outside the hospital while her fate was decided inside. Though I didn’t want anything to do with her emotionally, I certainly didn’t want her to die. I sat beneath a small maple tree waving gently in the breeze. I looked heavenward, and looked for guidance from above. Now, later in life, I can not recall what promise I made on her behalf. I wonder now if I have fulfilled that promise, or if it still weighs upon me.
She received several stitches to her scalp, the wound nearly three inches long, cutting all the way down to cranial pay dirt, but she would be okay.
Now, she has been through several terrible relationships, with children by three different fathers, and her life seems to be constantly in a state of chaos. Is this the punishment for not fulfilling my promise? Or, is that the life she had chosen for herself, regardless of my divine pledge? Sometimes, at night, I think about those few seconds when I set the rock into its terrible motion, to seeing her drop like a marionette cut from its strings. The horror I felt; to know that I was capable, even unintentionally, of completely destroying someone’s life. Only a few inches lower, and she would have been killed, and I would have been convicted of Man-Slaughter. My life would have been inextricably changed.
It is sometimes devastating when the veil of illusion is ripped away, revealing the horrible viscera which lies beneath, spouting the truth we don’t want to know about ourselves. We all have some vision of ourselves, and how we fit into the machinations of the universe. But, with the truth revealed, I can no longer tell myself the little lies we use to gloss over our shortcomings, and our more insidious selves. The horrible truth is sometimes we are not as full of light as we would like to believe, but instead, can be capable of terrifying action.
Even worse, is the feeling deep down, hidden and cowering within me, that I’m glad its there.
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Suffer the little children...
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