The diamond-like shoeprints from my dusty converse lie in the dirt behind me as I press toward whatever salvation I hope to find. These train tracks that I am following should lead somewhere shouldn’t they? All day long, all I do is jog a little here and there, and walk. There is absolutely nothing around; save for a couple of rolling hills here and there, a bunch of undergrowth and foliage, and the occasional tree. If the jade ocean beneath my feet wasn’t there, this place might as well have been a desert. My trepidation is subsiding now, and my thoughts are becoming clearer, mostly.

I’m guessing now that the police either don’t know I even exist, let alone ran away, or they just pity me enough to let me go, probably the later. The simple lack of sufficient food or water is getting a little pestering. It’s not hot at all out, it’s actually very cold, but I’m becoming incredibly thirsty. I threw a few canisters of water and ten bucks into a canvas bag, before I left and ranaway, but it’s by no means enough.

Gray, bland clouds have set in over the once blue sky, and I have no clue which direction I’m heading. Maybe that’s how this whole thing carries over into my mental state-of-mind; how I have no clue where I’m going, and how I hardly wish I had been where I was. Fits nicely doesn’t it?

A train whistle once again crawls into my ear. It’s very far away this time though, but it’s coming at me fast. I instinctivly move to cover now since walking on train tracks is illegal, but a simple thought jumps into my mind. How could I have been so ridiculously ignorant to not have thought of this several days ago when my “adventure” began?

I crouch down behind some undergrowth next to the train tracks and wait. The rumbling sound grows louder and the Earth begins to vibrate. My stomach twists into knots as I rifle through the repercussions of jumping onto a quickly moving train. I could see myself innocuously jumping and missing the train only to be uninnocuously run over by a steel train wheel. Even if I made it onto the train, what would I do aft--- a gargantuan train engine blasting past me brakes my thoughts. My chest is closing in on itself in fearfulness and nervousness. I let several traincars zoom past me before I get myself ready to run. I sling my canvas bag over my shoulder and choke down my nervousness. A multitude of colors from the train cars rush by me, they all melt away into a fierce wind that slams against my face.

Involuntarily, my legs spring me forward, toward the blurring colors. I navigate myself parallel to the train and move as fast as I can. Left leg. Right leg. Left Leg. Right Leg.

Intense amounts of heat stumble off the metal beast and it’s already making me sweat. I’m beginning to loose my energy so it’s now or never. I jump, angling myself to my left just enough so I could grab ahold of a ladder rung on the side of the massive red boxcar next to me. No more sleeping on the cool ocean I think.

A minor time frame of an eternity passes once my dusty converses no longer leave their diamond-like shoeprints in the dry dirt. I close my eyes and wait.

I miracuously feel a cold, rusty, metal pole slam into the other side of my left hand so I grip it as hard as I can. Metalic pain rips into my palm; I’m guessing it’s from where the metal has been cut by the erosion of the train’s distant travels. I flex what beceps I have and whip around my right hand to grab the ladder rung as well. There’s the same metallic feeling piercing my skin again. Dull thuds of pain also rocket up my legs until I realize that I’m not that far off the ground and that my knees and shins are dragging the Earth and hitting every rock possible. Tucking my legs up towards my chest helps, but this makes my arm muscles quiver with the newly positioned weight. A fire erupts in my left shoulder and my right arm threatens to release.

I somehow manage to pull myself up another rung, and then another and another until my feet can slip onto the bottom, rusty rung and are able to support my weight on their own. A massive weight is lifted on my arms when I am able to swing myself around and in through the open boxcar door on the left side of the ladder. I take one look around me to see what mess I’ve gotten myself into this time. The car is half-full of large canvas sacks that look to carry flour maybe. I can’t tell because my face is now heading for the wooden floor. A dull thumping sound rocks my skull and then continues as a beat after I’m on the floor, so I decide to just lie there for a while.

My legs are bleeding severely and my denim jeans are torn and cut nearly everywhere. In fact, my right pant left just below the knee has already fallen off somewhere. A metronome of throbbing sets a steady beat in my cranium, and my entire body hurts to move. I am able to put my hands in front of my ocean-crystal eyes, which only makes me whince.

From my fingertips to my wrists, pieces of rusty-red metal protrude from my skin and red liquid swivels around them. Individually, I tear the metal out quickly. Some pieces are small and easy, but most of them are an inch or so long and make a squishing noise whenever I’m pulling them out. A moderate pool of blood is accumulating at the base of my elbows on the floorboards. I scream quite a bit through this process, and I’m really hoping that the sound of the train drowns it out.

Soon enough, a bottomless orange collects on the horizon, waiting to attack, but rather decides to retreat over a hill in the distance. I am now able to lie on my belly with my chin on my elbow at the edge of the boxcar door, and gaze at the blurring tracks beneath me, and the evening sky around me. Sneakily and steadily, a great artist stitches his black canvas over the previous orange and purple one, and I can see in my mind, stars in some distant land, waiting in a single-file line behind a vast amount of empty nooses, waiting.

In my mind, a man in a ridiculous midevil outfit reads from an old, yellowing scroll. He states the stars’ offenses and their punishments: Arson: Execution, Abandonment: Execution, Undecisiveness: Execution, Too much regret: Execution, Making the roads wet with rain before a mother drove over them on her way home: Burning at the stake; all of them fatal mistakes. The first star in line is taken forward to his respective rope by an armed guard. The loop fits snugly around its neck, almost comfortably. There’s a shout and the wooden floor beneath of the brilliant light falls away, only to be saved… by a tightened rope.

A star pops through the canvas into my view. “I know what happened to you,” I whisper. Another star shines right next to the first now, “And you too.” After a while, the brightest star in the sky burns through the canvas, “And you... you killed my mother.”

Very little sleep reaches me as I lie on the solid, wooden floorboards. I long for the cool grass the brush my fingertips and to encompass my face. After a long while though, the steady hum of the train engine, which is many cars ahead, and the occasional whistle, lulls me to sleep.

My dreams are consistently the same. I wake up in a cool, green, grassy ocean and see my mother, post-car wreck, bleeding and whispering something. Something that I can’t quite make out. Something that is on the forefront of my mind, yet it escapes me. I can almost tell what she says… but then I wake up. To be perfectly honest, the last words that I ever said to my mom were “I hate you.” Look, I didn’t mean it, I was just frustrated that her and dad got divorced, and how her second job meant that I never saw her. The next day, I woke up and found out that she had gotten into a fatal car-accident; I never got to apologize to her, so I ran away from my pain. Obviously, the main word of my last sentence to my mother was hate. It’s funny how one word sticks with you and can do and mean so much. Anyway, so this dream always ends in me waking up. Tonight is no different, except as I wake up, the train is stopping.

My eyes shoot open and my ears are bombarded by the loudest screeching sound I have ever heard, train brakes. I steal a glance at the still blackened, deep canvas and then force my drowsiness and stiffness out of my mind. I hop into a space between some flour sacks and drag one big bag in front of me as quick as I can. Faint voices expand in the distance, it sounds like several men talking. I’m guessing that they’re checking all of the cars; checking for stowaways, or hobos, or whatever… checking for me.

I must have let quite a few boxcars fly past me yesterday before I jumped on the train because the voices are still very far away. Soon enough though, the men’s voices grow louder and my hands begin to tremble. I feel a few beads of sweat rolling down the sides of my face. My heart skips a beat whenever I hear one of the men step onto my car.

“I’ve got this one Don,” the man says in a gruff voice. There is some mumble of a reply from “Don,” but I can’t make it out. The man’s flashlight passes over the bags of flour on the other side of the boxcar. There’s no way he can miss me. I could see it now, the man’s flashlight beam passing over me only to quickly come back. The large man would pull the sack of flour out from in front of me and stare down at a scraggly teenage boy with black hair, a white t-shirt, torn-up jeans, and a scared-to-hell stare.

The man’s flashlight beam crosses over me. It stops, so does my heart. It stops and sinks. The huge black man approaches me. Step Step Step. His dirty, black boots exchange grime and noise with the wooden floorboards where I had slept last night. He examines the sack of flour in front of me for but a second until a scream explodes from outside. The man quickly turns and rushes out the door only to be confronted by a barrage of cussing.

There was an exchange of words outside the car, but the only ones of signifigance came from Don. Pretty much, he said that he had cut his hand on a metal ladder rung.

“God, you’re bleeding everywhere Don!”

“No crap Sherlock,” replies Don with his Jersey accent.

“We need to get you up to the engine to see what Jeff can do, there’s nobody in these cars anyway.”

Fading footsteps and more swearing followed the exchange, following that was a sigh of relief coming from a bag of flour.

The train and I press through the countryside all day. I watch as small houses and towns flash by. There are times when the train stops, but only for a few minutes to refuel. These times though, nobody comes back to check the boxcars. I pay special attention to the signs in the towns whenever we are stopped, so I could tell just were I was at.

At what I guess to be around 4 o’clock, a peaceful little town appears over the horizon. Since this area is relativly flat, I can clearly see how my train’s tracks shoot out in front of the engine, make an “L” around the far side of the town, and then continue through the side of a hill a few miles later. As the town approaches, a sparse layer of snow begins to drift down from the gray soup lingering overhead. The train’s whistle blares a few times before we roll to a slow, steady, screeching halt at the town’s train station. There is now some yelling and shouting coming from up at the engine, but it’s, for the most part, routine for the crew. I peer cautiously around the side of the open boxcar door. The train station is to my right towards the front of the train, but from where I’m at, I have a perfect view of the twelve or thirteen streets in this town. There is a two-laned road that enters the town from the same direction as the train did. The road goes over the train tracks after the tracks curve to make the “L” shape, and then the road exits the town. Straight through I think. I browse the few signs that the town does have and I find four things. Number one, the town’s name is Califon. Number two, I am in New Jersey. Number three, There’s a nice little diner/general store calling my name. Number four, I’m only about 30 miles from the salvation I’m seeking; New York City

The timing was a little off and the moment wasn’t what I expected, but my first stab of true lonliness hit me whenever I decided to step off that train and into Califon. If New York City was really that close and the train tracks appeared to go in a different direction than New York, according to the signs, then this stop is my chance. I peek up and down the side of the train only to see nothing behind me, and only a refueling hose running from a huge tank at the station into the train engine in front of me. I grab my canvas bag, which holds my one full water canister, a few empty ones, ten dollars, and my thoughts. My left, dutsy converse touches the gravel around the train tracks simultaneous to a shout originating from the engine. One, simple word assaults my eardrums. It’s funny what a word can do. This one word in particular leaves me with a profusly bleeding cut somewhere on my heart because I realize that human words have not been directed towards me in over a week… this simple word was, “Hey!”

Ensembles of footsteps clatter on the wooden floorboards of the train station, which was about seventy feet to my right. Panic erupts inside of me, so I sprint straightforward onto Main Street. I bust out from the shadow of the train station building and onto the sidewalk. I take one glance over my left shoulder before running across the street only to see several large men turning the corner of the station, one of them is yelling for the police. I don’t even think about it, I dash across the street, past moving cars, and take a right onto the next street down called Mayberry. I sprint along a brilliantly white picket fence. I run across the road to the other side and hop a silver, chain-link fence only to get my already torn, denim jeans snagged on the top. Before I even realize what’s happening, my face slams into frosty, cold mud. I wipe my face and turn around to see my pants caught on the fence. I undo the snag and continue running. I cross through a lot of people’s yards and jump some more fences, all of them resulting in failure. After a couple more minutes, I jump another fence and fall again, face-first, onto the ground, except this time, the ground is pavement. I untangle myself, get up, and run another block only to successfully jump my last fence of the day. Blood begins to trickle out of the cuts from earlier as I suppress a shout of pain. I crawl a few feet to lie behind a dumpster in the alley. The men must have lost track of me because I imagine that by now, they could have caught me. I tuck my torn jeans up to my chest and I lie here, shivering, listening to the sounds of a police car or two in the distance, and try to stop the bleeding on my face, and in my heart.

The sun begins to sink quickly in the winter sky and the temperature begins to drop. I decide that this is a perfectly fine spot to sleep for the night, so I curl up a little tighter, throw a side of a box from the dumpster overtop of me, and wait for the stars to be executed once again. I longed for them to be be hung so that I could have something to blame everything on, which would relieve some weight off of my shoulders for the night, and then maybe, just maybe, I could get some sleep. At least I was able to master the art of fence-jumping, I thought, and I lie here and laugh to myself quietly until a deep canvas is stitched over me and I fall asleep.

The sweet, amazing aroma of coffee surrounded me as I sat at a booth in “Ma and Pa’s Diner” on Mayberry Street. After waking up stiff from a full two hours of sleep, I cautiously navigated a few streets up to this diner which I had seen yesterday during my little “stroll.” No police sirens penetrated the air this morning, no large men with Jersey accents chased me, and the train no longer sat at the station. A nice old German lady comes up and takes my order, which I had preplanned out to ensure that I still had five dollars leftover. I also order a fifteen cent newspaper. It reads $00.15 TRI-STATE TIMES: MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1959. Good God, I have been away from home for ten days already? There’s absolutely nothing interesting in it at all. My breakfast arrives soon after I read through the headlines, and I don’t think that I have ever tasted anything this good.

Afterwards, I walk, still cautious, over to the general store and buy anything that I may need with my remaining five dollars. My items include; a cheap, black jacket, some gloves, a few crackers, a silver canister of water, and a free brochure map of the area. I check out and sit down on the bench in front of the store. The map shows me exactly where I’m at and I am able to find the exact route to get into the city.

After, I go down a few streets and pick a white house on the left. I approach slowly, and go into the backyard. Quietly, I turn on their hose and fill up my four silver canisters with water, and then I head for the edge of town.

Going up Main Street, I pass the train station once again and I move by it quickly just to be safe. As I’m staring up at the two-storied wooden building, a siren turns on right behind me. I immediately rush for a nearby yard and just as I’m about to put my newly acquired skill to the test on a picket fence in front of me, a fire truck, an ambulance, and a police car all race by me down a street. Thank God. I decided that I wanted to see what was going on, no, I didn’t decide, I was compelled; something pulled me to that burning, bloodied little canary yellow house on Academy Boulevard.

The house was no more than sixty feet away from my alley that I slept in last night. I begin to run once rising smoke catches my eye. Another two police cars and an ambulance blare past me on my way. Gunshots turn my run into a sprint up until I’m about a block away, when I begin to move more carefully.
A few screams. My footsteps. Another gunshot. My breathing. Some more screams. My heartbeat.
I can now see the little yellow house. Flames lick the gray soup overhead and dark-grey smoke pours up from the blaze and blends in with the sky. Golden flashes of light burst from the house and from the police cars’ windows simultaneous to sharp cracks the graze my ears. Ever-so-slightly, I move up. Why? Heck, I don’t know, but it sure must seem like this little town gets a lot of excitement, probably more than the citizens wish for. After several minutes, six houses around the canary-yellow one catch fire. Now, I don’t know what you think of when I say “catch fire,” but whatever it is, think bigger and hotter. Several police officers lie face down on the road or in the yard with puddles of liquid around them. My hands tremble uncontrollably as I step forward.
I have no clue what my plan is, I just move across the street. The gunshots stop and a silence sets onto the town. A young boy’s screaming pierces the stillness and the shooting flares back up. A total now of fifteen houses are ablaze, and atleast a dozen police officers are shot. A few officers who just arrived on scene, storm into the house. The shooting ignites with a new intensity, and my ears feel as if they’re about to explode. My head rings, and thuds once I crouch behind a police car in the middle of the street. All at once, the auditory bombardment stops and all that can be heard is the flames reaching to touch the gray sky. Peace momentarily falls along with black, searing ash until a small boy is carried out of the canary-yellow house. He is kicking and screaming like the devil, and is soon set down near me. “He’ll be alright, he doesn’t need medical attention,” said the policeman.
The boy sat there in the middle of the street and cried, while now dozens of houses burnt, paramedics yelled and rushed by, and black ashes fell from the gray soup above. I plucked a cooled ash off of the street and observed it. It was black; a dark charred, dirty, filthy shade of black. It wasn’t deep though, like the night canvas. Black is a unique color. It surrounds us and gives depth and layers to the things around us, yet we don’t appreciate it, or, at least, notice it. This ugly black ash which lies in my hand, also lies all over the boy, he can’t be more then eleven. I waited for his parents to be brought out the door by a police officer so I could tell them how sorry I was.... they were brought out alright. Two policemen carry them both out, a father and a mother, and the men lay them in their front yard. They‘re dead. The mother is completely burnt, almost everywhere, and her purple dress that she was wearing was now black. The father has a large red hole on the side of his head and a red liquid leaking out of it and onto the cool grass beneath him. Black snow gently, innocuously, falls on them.
The boy had nothing left; no tears to shed, no voice to scream with… no parents to love. He runs over to his parents’ corpses and stood. He stands, and something stands with him, something huge, heavy, and regretful. I recognize this all too well and my own tears hit the pavement. A huge, heavy, regretful memory stands next to the boy with dirty blonde hair. It leans on him and practically jumps on his shoulders. I can see the weight of it making him slouch.
More corpses are carried out, all of them wearing black masks, while pistols or rifles lay on their lifeless bodies. None of these corpses are burnt, but they all are leaking a red liquid from a dark crimson hole. The boy weeps terribly now, but is drug away by a paramedic and is put right next to me. The boy accepts it, which is miraculous to me, and turns his head to the right. I will never forget the look he gave me, it was a facial expression that I recognize all too well. It was a look that is full of pain that can never be expressed through words.
I stood up and so did he and I hugged the little dirty kid with every ounce of compassion that I had left, which wasn’t a whole lot.
“Jimmy,” the boy said.
“Johnny,” I replied and smiled at his green eyes. Green, I thought, just like the cool, emerald, grassy, ocean. I knew, this kid would be my best friend.
Chapter 5: Never Look Back
It didn’t take too much convincing to get Jimmy to come with me; actually, it was his idea. After I told him that running away was the plan for me, his eyes brightened a little.
Jimmy didn’t have a single thing to his name except the black, cotton jacket, dark green shirt and dark blue denim pants that he was wearing. From Academy Boulevard, we went straight to the train station and to the right towards The City. Main Street turned into some state road and went up a hill. Here, we both look back and see dozens of huge pummels of smoke rising from Califon. Sirens still drift in the air and it’s still snowing ashes. I look over at Jimmy only to see a stray tear flowing down his cheek. We press on and never look back again.
“You know Jimmy, you remind me of myself.”
“Really? Why?”
“I’m not sure, maybe because of what’s happened to you and its almost what’s happened to me,” and Jimmy grew silent. I know what question he wanted to ask, but he never spoke it.
I could still feel that cut on my heart, from that man’s one word. It felt smaller now though, like it was almost shrinking.
Cars drives by us as we walk; some drive at a leisurely pace, some faster, some honk their horns, and some stop and the people inside ask if we needed a ride. A few times we hitch-hike with people if they look okay, but only for a few miles at a time. The scenery is absolutely beautiful. We are still in the countryside, but in the distance, suburbs are coming into view.
We walk and hills pass by, but the ever-lasting gray sky remained. I made sure not to walk to fast because I did have a ten or eleven or-
“Hey Jimmy, how old are you by the way?”
I had caught him in the middle of a deep thought, “Eleven,” he replied blankly.
Ok, so I have an eleven year old, and I don’t want to hurt the poor kid, he’s been through enough already, he didn’t need to have to cope with exhaustion too. I give him a piggy-back ride every now and then, and he feels like a little brother.
A little brother, I had one of those once, or I was supposed to. I realized that I had accidently said this aloud.
“What?” Jimmy asked.
Oh God, “Uhm, I was supposed to have a little brother, but…” I trailed off.
“But what?”
“Well my mom came home one day and was so happy, but then my dad and my mom got into a huge fight, and my dad, he just left, so my mom went to the hospital, and…”
“And What?”
“I don’t know what happened, I just know that I never had a brother.” The birds fell silent and Jimmy stops and looks right into my ocean-crystal eyes.
“You have me,” he says
“I know,” I reply, and we continue walking under the gray soup sky.
Eventually, we came upon a moderately sized suburb city. WELCOME TO WESTFIELD! A rusty old sign read on the edge of the town. This town has relatively big buildings in it and graffiti on some of the buildings. We walk through the town, towards some of the big buildings and look for a place to sleep. Another sign on the main road in town says N W RK 9 M LES “I’m guess that’s supposed to say New York 9 Miles?” I ask. Jimmy snorts a little, but doesn’t smile, “yeah.”
As we’re walking, I spot a fire escape mounted on the side of a red-bricked building. “Let’s go up there,” I say.
I give Jimmy a boost up to the ladder since it’s not right on the ground. I now pull myself up and we begin to scale the ladder. Once we make it to the top, we can finally see it. My salvation, our salvation, sits there, surrounded by water and roads. The Statue of Liberty stands, waiting for us, the huge buildings call our names, this is it. The overcast sky is beginning to break up a little and small amounts of the now orange sky can be seen.
Jimmy beats me to saying it, “It’s beautiful.”
“It sure is man, it sure is…”
Sweet smoke rises from the restaurants below us, it tempts us, but we don’t have money. The sun is setting now, yet it is hidden behind a mask of clouds, so we just decide to sleep up here tonight.
A nice little thought crosses my mind as we go to lie down on some cardboard I just brought up. It stirs inside my head and I keep it to myself, and it makes me smile. I can feel Jimmy’s body heat next to me and it too, gives me a feeling of comfort. I get about as cozy as one could get on a cardboard bed, and tell Jimmy all about the night sky and the color black (since there are no stars out tonight). I tell him a lot about me, and how my mom died. I tell him that I don’t know what we’re going to do once we get to the city, but that doesn’t matter. Eventually, I hear his breathing slowing and realize that he’s asleep. I laugh a little to myself, lie my cardboard over Jimmy, and close my eyes.

I can’t tell you exactly what woke me up, probably fate, but I don’t know if I believe in that, heck I don’t know what I believe in, none of it is fair so it doesn’t matter. Anyway, I jarred open my sealed eyes slowly. Before me lies a great, black, deep, canvas just waiting to be painted. This night though, there are no stars hanging from their nooses in the heavens. I flip over onto my belly and wait for the cool grass to encompass my face, and then I remember. I graze my hand over the flat, concrete roof and picture a train silently zooming past me.
It’s still incredibly cold outside, and I’m shivering like crazy, but I still reach under me and take my last piece of cardboard out and set it on Jimmy, except Jimmy’s not there. My stomach tightens itself into its usual nervous knot, and my eyes and ears search for him. A faint whimpering noise touches my ears and I move towards it.
A silhouette stands on the border of the building. A silhouette that is no taller than Jimmy… because it is Jimmy. I’m stuck in place with a fear that I have never felt. I can’t move my legs, my arms, or my lips. I stare at his figure and whisper. Only his silhouette teetering on the edge sets me into motion. His head turns and his green eyes, brimming with tears, widen at me as he thrusts himself off of the edge. I sprint across the large building’s flat, concrete rooftop as he’s falling. Left Leg. Right Leg. Left Leg. Right Leg. I think, he’s just a ladder rung, except he’s not rusty. I could have missed the ladder rung though and it wouldn’t have mattered to the world, but if I miss him…
I thrust myself forward and another small time frame of an eternity passes when my left converse leaves the ground and I am fully airborne. Slow motion embraces me and my right hand reaches for his black jacket. Everything is moving so slowly that it’s killing me. He seems too far away to catch now; he looks ten thousand miles away. I close my eyes because I can’t bear to watch with fall. Somehow though, a piece a fabric touches my fingertips, and then my palm. I grab on to him as hard as I can. My chest slams into the three foot high border round the building, but I ignore the pain that engulfs my thoughts. “I’m not going to lose you too!” I yell at him. Somehow, I am able to grab him with both hands and pull him over the border of the roof.
I clutch him in my arms as tight as I can. “What were you thinking!?’ I yell at him. I couldn’t help myself, I was so angry at him for doing that.
“I-I,” he began to cry now and I could do nothing but squeeze him tighter, “I’ve lost- I’ve lost everybody in my family, I don’t have a family anymore,” he sobs.
“I’ve lost my entire family too, there’s nothing we can do about it, we just- we just have each other…” I probably sound like I was trying to convince myself rather than him, which is true, but his crying stopped for a moment.
His sobbing kicked back up and he mumbled something unintelligible. He begins to get louder and louder, and I’m certain that someone can hear him, so naturally I get angry. “Listen to me, neither of us have family, we have to be each other’s’ family. You’re lucky, you have somebody who’s going to be there for you. I-I didn’t have anybody except myself! I know it sucks, and it’s going to suck, but nobody said that life would be easy!” I practically shouted the last sentence at him and he is just staring at me. Quieter, I say, “We have to be here for each other, I am your family.”
A smile slowly expanded on Jimmy’s face and I realized that this was the first time I had ever seen him smile, which made me smile too. It’s funny what little kids can do. Little did I know however, that this would be the first and the second to last time I would ever see him smile.

Every now and then, I force myself awake just to make sure Jimmy was still there. I make sure that his little body still rose and fell softly with his breathing. This time though, just as the sun crests over the horizon, he wasn’t here. I shoot up and scan the border of the rooftop. Nothing. I run up and peek over the edges for a sight that I never want to see. Still Nothing. I turn around only to find an eleven year old boy climbing up the last rung of a fire escape ladder holding what looks to be garbage. “I got us some food,” he says.
“Good Lord, I thought I lost you,” I reply with a hint of frustration, “but anyway, what do you have?”
“I found a couple loaves of bread in the dumpster down there, they were sitting right on top in a bag!’ he exclaims cheerfully. He walks to the dead-center of the building, sits down, and places a loaf and a half in front of him and a loaf and a half at an empty space across from him. I sit down, and am a little reluctant to eat the bread at first, but he repeatedly assures me it was in a bag. To add to that, a small, gnawing hunger has been persistent on my stomach for days now, so I take a bite.
To be honest, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. It’s perfectly crunchy and crisp, but it still has that soft, fluffy bread texture on the inside, Heck, it’s even still a little warm. “Wow,’ I say, “thank you.”
Our walk to the other side of the suburb grants us some suspicious looks from police officers and a few cuss words from the locals. The gray sky apparently never lifts from this place. Powdery flakes descend from the ashen, steel sky, except this time, they’re not black or hot.
We walk and walk, The City seems so close, yet it doesn’t seem to be getting any closer. We pass a sign that says Manhattan: only 6 miles away. Soon after, a tall man in a business suit walks up to us and gives me a twenty dollar bill. He looks down, smiles, and says, “Happy Thanksgiving.” Never again did either of us see that man again. I stare down at the bill in my thinly gloved hand and think, is it already Thanksgiving?
Jimmy and I go to the 31st Street Diner on the edge of town and eat a feast worthy of two lonely runaways. Once we are done, I still have almost ten dollars left, so we hail a cab (it was Jimmy’s idea). The cab is a neon yellow, 1952 Ford Mainline, my mother’s was almost identical. It pulls up to the curb and the man asks, “Where youz kids headin’?” We tell him some random street name and he says okay, so I guess that’s a good thing.
The taxi sped through a few streets and then emerged from the densely crowded suburban sprawl right onto a block over from the Hudson River. The City’s landscape took our breath away, we had made it. We had an entire new life in front of us, it was a chance to make something out of our pathetic lives that we have lived. Sure, it would be slow and difficult at first, but we can find a way, I just know that we can. A new beginning.
“Hey Johnny.”
“Yeah?”
“Can I call you my big brother?”
A small, toasty campfire sparked to life in my heart and a smile played across my lips, “Absolutely.”
I ruffle his hair just like I remember my dad doing to me what seemed like a century ago.
The Manhattan Bridge lie under the cab’s rubber wheels as we sit, stopped, in traffic, it is Thanksgiving. The sheet of gray steel overhead begins to melt and rays of light thrust through. A perfect beam of terrific, golden light encompasses The City. A beautiful blend of colors from throughout the light spectrum blend together in perfect harmony as the traffic breaks and the taxi speeds up to normal roadway speeds. The snow still falls lightly on the car, and that little scar on my heart is fading. A new beginning. The taxi seat is still cold on my back, so we must be the first customers of the day. It was an incredibly cold night last night.
“We’re almost there little bro…almost there,” I tell Jimmy.
He turns his head to the right and smiles for the second and last time. His jade, cool, grassy-like eyes get caught on something out my window so I turn back and face the front.
I see it all happen.

I see it all happen.

I see Jimmy’s head looking past me, out the window at something.

I see the taxi’s speedometer at 50 mph on The Manhattan Bridge.
I see the bright baby blue car diagonally to the right of us hit an ice patch.
I see it all. The blue car’s front wheels slid to the left, towards our lane. As the back tires graze the ice, the car turns ninety-degrees to its left. The car spins twice more and lands perpendicular to us right in front of us. I see all of that in the time frame of less than a second, quicker than anyone can react.
I move to reach for Jimmy, to clutch him in my arms to keep him safe, but as I do, an intense metallic grinding sound punctures my ears and a bone-breaking impact shockwave rocks my body and then… blackness.
This blackness is almost the same kind as the night canvas. There were no stars though, just like last night. This black is deep and innocuous, very much unlike the ashes’ black, or the train’s smoke black. A small light appears in the distance, so I move toward it. It’s not an executed star, nor is it flames… it is a field. No, it’s not a field, it’s an ocean. Immediately, the small orb of an ocean explodes to incorporate my entire span of vision all the way around me. I fall, face-first, into the familiar cool grass and I run my hand over the tops of the blades. I look up and see the deep, black canvas with stars hanging from it. The second I look to my right though, I know what’s coming. This time though, there is no bloodied, horrid mother of mine lying there. This time, she is sitting, staring up at the night canvas like me. She turns her head and her ocean-crystal eyes meet mine and I brace my mind for the usual eruption of recollection, but none come.
She mouths the words she always does. I can almost tell what her lips say… It’s on the edge of my mind. I can almost…tell. Then I know. For the first time ever, I realize what she’s saying. She’s telling me the most powerful words that humans can speak, so long as they mean it. I know.
I pry my eyes open and see two amazingly green eyes staring back, thank God, I think, but I think too soon. As my eyes focus, I see my little brother, poor little Jimmy, laying, head pressing up against the driver’s seat, bleeding. His neck is twisted at an odd angle and his mouth is open.
I shut my eyes as quickly and as tightly as I can and scream. I practically rip my door off to get out, and stand here in the middle of the street. No less than twenty cars are intertwined on this bridge and people are lying everywhere on the street. Sirens and flames cut the air.
Soon enough, the driver steps out, his head bleeding, and pulls Jimmy out of the car, “Oh kid, I’m so sorry.”
I stare at my brother’s dead, lifeless body and cry. I get down next to him and hold his head in my arms and whisper the words my mother whispers to me in my dreams, “I love you.”
Soon, the paramedics arrive and tell me there’s nothing that they can do for him, he’s dead.
I stand up and take a good, long look at the now clear blue sky, what an insult. I don’t know what else to do, so I turn in the direction that I came from, towards Califon, towards the train tracks, towards Home.
“Hey kid, where ya goin’?” the taxi driver shouts after he realizes I’m walking away.
I reply with one word. It’s funny how much can happen with one word, how much love and pain you can bring someone, how much you can change. I believe that everyone has the One Word as well. That One Word that they are remembered by, or that describes them the best, or that predicts their future the best. My one word is simple. My one word is, “Home.”