Flagstorm

I'm walking through the empty schoolyard, the remnants of weeks of snow crunching under my black Converse shoes. My hands are warm and away from the wind in my sweater pockets, though my eyes squint against the assaulting chill. I stop abruptly before a most familiar place. It's a bleak cement circle filled with cedar chips and those stupid prickly bushes with yellow flowers that are always filled with bees. There's something more important about it, though. The centerpiece of this natural table is a cloud-scraping flagpole. The worn silver seems naked and bare without the colors it is meant to fly. The counterweight thumps lonely, offbeat rhythms against the hollow tube; the silver carabineers clink desolately above my head.

Quietly, from the deep recesses of my memory, a small girl in white appears at my side, looking expectantly up to me. She has my eyes, my hair, and my silly button nose with a defined splattering of freckles. A small finger reaches up and taps the tip of my nose where the sunspots have faded over time. I put my arm around her as I look back to the empty pole. Other children and their parents begin to fabricate around us; the ghost sounds of the schoolyard return. The young girl tugs on my sweater, looking happily up at me with those wide brown eyes that I see in the mirror every day. I nod knowingly and she runs off toward the school building, a small brass key in hand. She returns with a folded triangle of patriotic colors held safe against her chest. I could hear the gleeful whispers between the two. It was Ryan--the imaginary being thriving within the colored threads. As she passed me by, the story he was telling grew louder. It was one that Ryan had made me so familiar with, the one about a dream he'd had. He was flying free high above the clouds with the American Eagle without a pole to ground him. I was there with them, and we were having a grand tea party in the sky.

In this reminiscence, time began to move quickly forward. I watch with my lip between my teeth as the dark Colorado storm clouds ominously roll in with a malicious intent. My sweater hood comes up to protect me from the pelting rain. Seconds more pass and the lightning comes, dragging the catalytic maelstrom that would soon provide the death of my childhood friend.

I close my eyes against the rain and I begin to remember. I remember watching from my desk next to the window as those same clouds thundered in from the mountains. The instant the bell rang I had my key in hand and was racing from the classroom. I had to get to Ryan before the storm did. Crackling lightning overhead dared me to help my friend from his captivity at the top of the pole. Cold teardrops of rain taunted me into throwing caution to the ever-rising wind. I barreled forward to the flagpole.

Suddenly, my velocity was halted; someone had caught my arm. I looked up into the face of my teacher shaking his dripping head at me. My gaze shifted helplessly back to the silhouette of Ryan's figure- distorted, writhing, convulsing against the storm in the sky. I could hear his helpless shouts resounding only in my fear-stricken mind. The calm riding wind he had so enjoyed and befriended had turned against him; it was now ripping into him, tearing at his innocent skin. My stomach was twisted into ice; fear, anger, and frustration raged through my chest as I waited to be released. The firm grip on my arm turned me towards home. I was sternly sent away without rescuing Ryan from the starving, bony fingertips of the ravenous wind.

I remember the echo of my steps the next morning, hard down on the cement of the school grounds, my heels pounding in every movement. I kept my eyes down until the last second when my gaze was forced to rest on the sight I had dreaded to imagine. He was limp. He was twisted. He was entangled in the cord, asphyxiated by his own support. The clay weight had been thrust into his body, binding him to the pole. Burning tears that I was helpless to escape threatened to fall from my wide eyes, the eyes of a child delicately stepping from the grace of innocence and into the carnage of a battlefield. The bustling of the schoolyard pressed in around me while my world defragmented. I hated the people's busyness, their obliviousness. I hated them for ignoring my pain, and yet was grateful for the freedom from interruption.

I stepped through the bushes, atop the well-burned trail, upon the cedar bark chips to the pole. Carefully, I raised my key and opened the lock. I lowered Ryan from his metallic grave, slowly in eulogy, my hands shaking as I fought the tears, my mouth deep in frown- a characteristic I have carried all my life from that moment.

The metal ring clanked to a jolting halt and I was forced to look up at my fallen friend. The torn nylon and threads tickled sadly at my nose and entangled my fingers in their dying, silken embrace. I met Ryan's starry eyes and I felt the poison of grief shaking through my young veins, burning a trail straight to the heart beginning to collapse under the strain. For those brief moments that I held him motionless in my arms, I couldn't understand why my friend had been taken from me. Why did he no longer speak to me? Where was his wispy, flapping voice that had sung stories to me for years throughout my childhood? Was there a Summerland for flags? Would I see him again in my own afterlife, years from that day? There was no one that could, or would, answer these questions for me.
Pure, unadulterated devastation incited the cold transition of my now matured heart. This was my first true contact with death, one that troubled only me and my soul. I was lost, bewildered, and unknowingly had come to a level of impassive detachedness that most reach over time, but that I had reached instantly. I bore the immobile form of my friend atop my clammy palms in ceremony, rather than round my shoulders as I used to, where Ryan would perch and whisper silly nothings and nonsense in my ear. As I moved him for the last time, it felt as though the unforgivingly cold nylon was snaking up my fingertips, saturating my veins with its deathlike density. It stalked my vulnerable mind with its frozen, malevolent ways and pulled me beneath the surface of an ice-cold ocean. It fed relentlessly on my emotions and my capabilities for innocent affection, eating them away until there was no warmth left within my shaking form. In the few moments it took to cross the schoolyard, to open the building's doors, and to lay the corpse on a library table, I had been reduced to a stony skeleton- bone white and livid.

Dutifully, I pulled the corners to match those of the table so the flag laid flat with the stars furthest from me. The stripes soon covered the stars as I folded it in half horizontally, again, and then began making triangles from the striped end. As I moved, my eyes slid involuntarily closed to keep my already fragile mind from the terror of the flag's wounds. Skilled fingers soon had a tight triangle perfectly folded atop the table.

Then I ran. I ran away from the library; away from the red, white, and blue mass suddenly haunting me; away from the white star eyes- now glazed thick in death- that bored holes into my back. There was a strangely familiar figure waiting outside for me, staring at the grave of a flagpole. Tall, slender, with hair just like mine- she was sanctuary.

Tears drove in rivers from my eyes as I flung myself into her arms, her warm black sweater a comfort to me in ways I couldn't begin to imagine. A red and yellow emblem was pressed up against my cheek, the silkscreen sticking to my face as my entire body wracked and heaved under the currents of emotion. She held me and she tucked my dampened hair behind my ears just perfectly, as though she knew just how. That strange being took me completely into her arms and whispered softly into my ear that everything was going to be all right. As she stood, I began to melt into her, taking comfort at the warmth pervading my chilly body. My limbs stretched with hers and my feet in suddenly black Converse shoes found the ground. In myself I had found the only comfort when no one else was around to appreciate my pain.

I open my eyes from beneath my now dripping hands and slip them back into my sweater pockets. The schoolyard is silent again.