Flash

Short Story Time: By short, I mean a cross between oompa-loopas and munchkins.
Enjoy this piece of creative non-fiction:


Flash

I was running, my feet washing over the sharp rocks below me like cold rushing river water. The cold dark air was piercing me at every angle, and every angle felt like the thick darkness of the night was consuming me from within, as if someone had planted a black hole deep inside my chest. I felt empty, hollow, and broken. I knew that the other fifth graders didn’t accept me—I was the freak, the loser, that point on the graph that was nowhere near the domain (as my math teacher would say). I was a shattered piece of glass, swept up and tossed into the depths of a black garbage bag. No one here liked me. They laughed at me, so often that every time I heard a giggle I flinched, as if a bullet was cutting through the air to reach me. I clenched my pale cold fingers around the disposable camera given to me to record this, “great experience”, this trip to Greenkill, a place I and the other fifth graders were shipped off to learn about nature. The only thing I had learned was that nature was wild, and that vultures (if they’re hungry enough) will attack and bite off white chunks of animal flesh while the animal is wounded, crying out in pain, not even with the courtesy to wait until it was dead yet. My fist began to compress the camera cradled in it, as the scene echoed in my mind…

… “Why did you tell him I liked him?” my voice echoed in naïve confusion, vulnerable and innocent, “I thought you were my friend! It was a secret! Why did you do that to me? How could you do that to me? I trusted you…”. She looked back at me nonchalantly and replied in a dead voice, cold and hard like a fleshless bone, “He wasn’t going to like you anyway, so I knew that I might as well just get it over with.”…

…Here I had learned that there aren’t good friends and bad friends, only friends and enemies. I was lacking in one department. And there I was still running, still blind, cold and broken—hard rocks stabbing at my sneakers, surrounded by the dark brisk night air, alone. My legs shuffled, stumbled and then I was tumbling, over those rocks, then embracing them on the ground. I was flying fast, slicing my body through the darkness. I felt a sharp ache, one filled with shock, as if someone had shot me in my knee like I was an enemy airplane that needed to be taken down. My camera fell out of my hands, and just as I reached the ground the darknesswas conquered by a blinding flash.