Death day
Copyright © [2023] [Michael Harper]
All rights reserved. No portion of this book, story, or concept may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions, contact the author directly.
The characters in this book are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
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Today, I am fifty years old. I finished building my dream bookshelves for my library. Damnation that it fell on top of my ass when the heart attack struck me. The vise in my chest was less painful than when I went. I was at war, but damn it was the one that killed me. There is a finite processing capacity, and when your ability to pump blood through the second most vital muscle in a man’s body comes into a car wreck inside — profound fatigue strikes, and down goes the giant.
My hand gripped the cherry oak shelves that expanded over the wall, as if they had been planted as seeds and grown by virtue of the sunlight that filled the room. The same light that punched me in the face as my eyes grew supersensitive.
Fools make a romance of death, for it is brutal and cruel. I knew enough of this betrayal of my body was an accumulation of my “I don’t give a fuck” diet with occasional fruits, and my workout habits. I grew lazy after my military days, because... well, because after two decades of marital living, and before that all the crazy shit I did before I joined the one percent club, I grew weary. I dread feeling my back muscles ache from that sit-up or rowing from where the heavy ass rucksack pinched me during a helicopter flight. Or how my calves would feel if tension wires were ready to snap. Oh, how it feels to be an old warrior.
Here I lay, my face smudged into the carpet as the sunlight danced like fairies over me. Not a dog in the house. All the souls that live under the roof have left for the day, not expected to return until the moon regains dominance in the sky.
I caught sight of the rainbow coalition of tomes that I had organized. All fonts and sizes, skinny books and thick novels, all of them unique and full of words that grip your imagination or truth.
Much as a woman does.
Is my cock hard? It feels like it. Maybe my blood flow doesn’t know that my heart spasming doesn’t give a fuck if I cum or stay flaccid, but suddenly I feel like a paper airplane thrown in the rain from a skyscraper roof.
Rolling thunder can be heard as I feel the book’s avalanche on top of me. A streak of lightning bolts into my brain, and I understand the bullshit “white light” or “tunnel” people speak about. Chemicals in the brain and religion scholars don't fuck matter right now. I felt death’s chilly fingertips scraping across my soul’s chalkboard.
The warm sunlight on my face tethers me, but the rest of me...
I’m back at the white two-story house in the south suburbs that my parents owned. I see I’m twelve years old. I’m sitting in the park close to the neighborhood with my classmates and a few neighbors.
I’m the only fawn-skin-toned negro here among the umber, russet, and sepia friends. The loudest boy has a deep sepia color, richened by excellent deep genes from his daddy. We know that by looking at him, he is confident and lanky, possibly fourteen or fifteen years old. I’m thrilled to be among the lively group. We’d already finished two pickup games of basketball and didn’t want to return to our empty homes. Most of us are latch-key kids, and damn if internet and cable television hadn’t been invented yet.
As we laughed, teased, and joked in solidarity, a frail-looking girl was tall and moved with the grace of a gazelle. Her golden ochre skin glowed in the gentle sunlight. She was retrieving an off-white Frisbee nearby from the warm grass. I remember the smell of charcoal grills and young boy sweat as I caught her eye. Her jogging pants interrupted her smile, but her eyes glimmered at me. There was a grin playing in the corners of her lips.
Forty years later, I still don’t know how I was so bold to go from my jeering friends and approach her. I remember how nervously her fingers nervously played the disc as she stood there listening to me introduce myself. A seventh-grader shooting his shot. What surprises me is that she agreed to return to the park the next weekend.
The summer months pass until Autumn kindles in the treetops, the vivid hues chattering as new friends wait for the holidays soon to approach. We met every weekend at the park. Twice, we met at the mall and even at a skating rink. I recall our first kiss, my very first kiss. It was gentle, sloppy, and at the roller rink by the lockers. The low light and pounding music gave us the privacy and inertia to press our lips. We were both inexperienced and awkward, but it felt right. After that, we became a couple. She went to high school, and I went to my last middle school year.
The times we could meet grew more and more apart. She was so full of life, as if the sun rested inside her. Her smiles and laughs always drugged me from the drudgery of family life.
It was bright when Halloween arrived, when a warm fall weekend and we met up at our hiding spot in the park. Among the thicker trees thatch, we lost our virginity. On a brown blanket and falling, crisp leaves, we explored one another’s bodies. It was painful for her at first, but as she relaxed and became comfortable with our bodies joining, we made love gently and tenderly. She was my first love, and I had wide-eyed dreams of graduating and marrying her with kids and the whole package.
She avoided meeting me after that special night, and I was too young, naive, and oblivious to the signals before me. It was at her funeral that I found out her mom was mentally unstable, her dad was abusive and an asshole, and how horrible her home life was. As I began my first year in high school, her suicide was when my soul kiss flew into the winds on the back of a paper airplane into the watery alphabet of the clouds. For years afterward, I froze as the watery sheets wrinkled my skin on contact.
