Idol week 17 - Negative Reverse
Ben wasn’t in the mood to listen to anyone’s crap anymore. He was tired of his dad, absolutely sick of his mom, and one hundred percent through with his younger twin sisters. If he had to hear his mom tell them all that they should be thankful that they lived in a nice big three bedroom house one more time he was going to scream. No house was big enough for the five of them for even a minute longer. But Ben wasn’t an idiot, so he waited for his mom to re-engage in the board game she was playing with his sisters before quietly slipping outside. They could stress over a stupid game without him. The world had enough real problems. It didn’t need to also include three hour long European board games with trains and colored goods to move, where everyone fought over the rules.
Technically the curfew didn’t start until tomorrow night at 11:00 in their town. So tonight there shouldn’t be any problem with him getting some fresh air and walking down to the park. And if his mom flipped her lid again when she realized he was gone, that was her problem. Ben executed a little skip as he passed out of his driveway and into the neighborhood street. It was a perfect spring night for a walk. A breeze stirred the leaves on the big White Oak at the end of the driveway. With the sun down for a couple of hours now, Ben could almost trick himself into pretending it was an autumn night instead of a spring one. He halfway wished he could somehow skip ahead to autumn and not be stuck in a house with his family for months on end to finish his Junior year of high school. He was ready for Senior year and less stupidity.
Stupid virus. The problem though, was that it was not a stupid virus. It was a virus that had evolved to spread really effectively through the human population and now the humans weren’t reacting logically to it so they were making things worse. Ben shared his parents concerns about that even if his parents were dumb about stress management. He felt bad for his little sisters in a way, too. They were missing out on the last months of their last year of elementary school. No 5th grade graduation for them. But they were still pretty annoying.
An owl hooted off toward the south. Ben kicked some weeds growing beside the ditch. Why did everyone have to be so annoying? One of his sisters had come absolutely unglued earlier in the day. Dad had pointed out a great big caterpillar that was trying to dig itself into the dirt in the yard. When Ellie, curious as to what it was trying to do, tried to pick it up or dig it out with a trowel, she accidentally sliced it apart. In that moment she went from being a tough kid inquiring about the world to completely inconsolable. Mom had just yelled at them all not half an hour before it happened to leave her alone for a work call, but Ellie’s stupid grief for a stupid worm brought her out onto the front steps where mom almost started crying too. His family was a hot mess. And he was stuck with them. Covid 19 was the worst.
His other sister Jasmine wasn’t much better. She had discovered the world of fan fiction on the internet, so she just tended to ignore all the rest of them for hours and then get yelled at for not helping out enough. Which was pretty much how it was for Ben, too, come to think of it, but he had better things to do on the internet than read and write dumb stories about dumb cats.
Ben’s spirits improved as he walked. The far off sounds of sirens were halfway normal in the night and the nearer sounds of crickets and insects and the breeze in the leaves made him happy. He remembered some song lyrics he was working on and lost himself to musing on the right rhyme, right up until he found himself turning into the park that was halfway around the block from his house. It was kind-of creepy there in the night, especially since the city had come and wrapped plastic netting around the swings and jungle gyms to ensure that the park stayed closed and didn’t make anyone sick.
Ben wasn’t interested in the playground or picnic tables anyway. He headed across the park and down toward the little stream that ran through it. As he left the circles of light the streetlights produced, he pulled his little battery operated camping lantern out of his pocket and switched it on. He picked his way down the steep dirt and limestone banks of the stream carefully. He squatted for a moment beside the shallow water, letting its sounds wash over him. The flow wasn’t very great because they hadn’t had any rain for a while. Ben was 17 years old, and he’d been playing in this creek for his whole life.
At least corona virus hadn’t changed the creek appreciably. There was still plenty of green moss here. The azaleas still drooped long branches down toward the mud and rock. In the muddy places he could still see evidence of crayfish holes for the crayfish he’d taught his dumb little sisters to catch. He followed the creek in its little chasm upstream, back toward the road where the stream was contained in a great square concrete box of a culvert. His mom loved the creek but was always warning them away from the part where the road crossed. Why was he thinking about her? Her and her dorky friends who liked to talk about the creek in terms of it being a stormwater conveyance, and liked to wonder whether it was part of the city’s permitted system. They made everything so needlessly complicated.
He decided he definitely needed to check out the graffiti under the road. Maybe there would be some song-writing inspiration there. The flow of the creek was so low that he could almost step under the road without getting his feet wet at all. The square tunnel was so tall that he didn’t have to duck. He raised his little lantern to check out the graffiti near the other end of the tunnel and almost dropped it because he was so surprised at what he saw.
Sitting against the wall of the tunnel was an old guy with long silver hair and ratty layers of clothes, with a paper wrapped bottle in his hand. He grinned as he saw Ben’s look of complete surprise, wrinkles forming into smile-lines around his eyes and mouth. He didn’t have a full set of teeth, but the ones he had were fairly white. “Welcome to my corona squat, young man,” he said, and he took a swig from his bottle with a flourish. “I just need a place for a few nights, you know. TPD broke up a very fine spot we had going over by the pool at Trousdell.”
Ben struggled to regain his composure. The man didn’t look very clean but he seemed to be breathing fine. And he was easily more than ten feet away.
“You planning to put up some tags down here? Is that how k. . . people talk about graffiti these days?” The guy leaned forward, readjusting his position sitting there. Ben realized the old guy probably wasn’t all that comfortable there, and that he was trying to make Ben comfortable.
“Naw man,” Ben tried to be casual, though it felt dumb to just blurt out the truth. “I’m just getting out of my place for a minute. Just checking things out.” He didn’t want to retreat but he didn’t know what else to do.
The guy smiled at Ben again. “Well, I’d offer you this,” he brandished the paper-wrapped bottle, “But you don’t look dumb enough to want to share germs with a stranger this week.”
Ben took a step closer to the colorful words splashed across the wall opposite the guy, feeling reckless and brave. He might as well look at what he’d come to see. As pretty as the designs were, the words were all just names that didn’t mean anything to him.
“So, you probably wouldn’t be the kind of young man that goes blabbing to parents and authorities about dangerous old men under bridges, right?” The guy was saying, “I mean that kind of talk just gets a person in trouble for skulking around under bridges themselves, am I right?”
Ben took a step back. This was parental style reasoning coming at him out of a decidedly non-parental looking corner. “No trouble to be had here, man,” he said in a rush of bravery. “But my folks might be able to spare something that’d help you out.”
Who knew, maybe finding some help for this guy would help break the tension back home? Ben liked the idea of thinking of something other than quarantine, anyway.
Technically the curfew didn’t start until tomorrow night at 11:00 in their town. So tonight there shouldn’t be any problem with him getting some fresh air and walking down to the park. And if his mom flipped her lid again when she realized he was gone, that was her problem. Ben executed a little skip as he passed out of his driveway and into the neighborhood street. It was a perfect spring night for a walk. A breeze stirred the leaves on the big White Oak at the end of the driveway. With the sun down for a couple of hours now, Ben could almost trick himself into pretending it was an autumn night instead of a spring one. He halfway wished he could somehow skip ahead to autumn and not be stuck in a house with his family for months on end to finish his Junior year of high school. He was ready for Senior year and less stupidity.
Stupid virus. The problem though, was that it was not a stupid virus. It was a virus that had evolved to spread really effectively through the human population and now the humans weren’t reacting logically to it so they were making things worse. Ben shared his parents concerns about that even if his parents were dumb about stress management. He felt bad for his little sisters in a way, too. They were missing out on the last months of their last year of elementary school. No 5th grade graduation for them. But they were still pretty annoying.
An owl hooted off toward the south. Ben kicked some weeds growing beside the ditch. Why did everyone have to be so annoying? One of his sisters had come absolutely unglued earlier in the day. Dad had pointed out a great big caterpillar that was trying to dig itself into the dirt in the yard. When Ellie, curious as to what it was trying to do, tried to pick it up or dig it out with a trowel, she accidentally sliced it apart. In that moment she went from being a tough kid inquiring about the world to completely inconsolable. Mom had just yelled at them all not half an hour before it happened to leave her alone for a work call, but Ellie’s stupid grief for a stupid worm brought her out onto the front steps where mom almost started crying too. His family was a hot mess. And he was stuck with them. Covid 19 was the worst.
His other sister Jasmine wasn’t much better. She had discovered the world of fan fiction on the internet, so she just tended to ignore all the rest of them for hours and then get yelled at for not helping out enough. Which was pretty much how it was for Ben, too, come to think of it, but he had better things to do on the internet than read and write dumb stories about dumb cats.
Ben’s spirits improved as he walked. The far off sounds of sirens were halfway normal in the night and the nearer sounds of crickets and insects and the breeze in the leaves made him happy. He remembered some song lyrics he was working on and lost himself to musing on the right rhyme, right up until he found himself turning into the park that was halfway around the block from his house. It was kind-of creepy there in the night, especially since the city had come and wrapped plastic netting around the swings and jungle gyms to ensure that the park stayed closed and didn’t make anyone sick.
Ben wasn’t interested in the playground or picnic tables anyway. He headed across the park and down toward the little stream that ran through it. As he left the circles of light the streetlights produced, he pulled his little battery operated camping lantern out of his pocket and switched it on. He picked his way down the steep dirt and limestone banks of the stream carefully. He squatted for a moment beside the shallow water, letting its sounds wash over him. The flow wasn’t very great because they hadn’t had any rain for a while. Ben was 17 years old, and he’d been playing in this creek for his whole life.
At least corona virus hadn’t changed the creek appreciably. There was still plenty of green moss here. The azaleas still drooped long branches down toward the mud and rock. In the muddy places he could still see evidence of crayfish holes for the crayfish he’d taught his dumb little sisters to catch. He followed the creek in its little chasm upstream, back toward the road where the stream was contained in a great square concrete box of a culvert. His mom loved the creek but was always warning them away from the part where the road crossed. Why was he thinking about her? Her and her dorky friends who liked to talk about the creek in terms of it being a stormwater conveyance, and liked to wonder whether it was part of the city’s permitted system. They made everything so needlessly complicated.
He decided he definitely needed to check out the graffiti under the road. Maybe there would be some song-writing inspiration there. The flow of the creek was so low that he could almost step under the road without getting his feet wet at all. The square tunnel was so tall that he didn’t have to duck. He raised his little lantern to check out the graffiti near the other end of the tunnel and almost dropped it because he was so surprised at what he saw.
Sitting against the wall of the tunnel was an old guy with long silver hair and ratty layers of clothes, with a paper wrapped bottle in his hand. He grinned as he saw Ben’s look of complete surprise, wrinkles forming into smile-lines around his eyes and mouth. He didn’t have a full set of teeth, but the ones he had were fairly white. “Welcome to my corona squat, young man,” he said, and he took a swig from his bottle with a flourish. “I just need a place for a few nights, you know. TPD broke up a very fine spot we had going over by the pool at Trousdell.”
Ben struggled to regain his composure. The man didn’t look very clean but he seemed to be breathing fine. And he was easily more than ten feet away.
“You planning to put up some tags down here? Is that how k. . . people talk about graffiti these days?” The guy leaned forward, readjusting his position sitting there. Ben realized the old guy probably wasn’t all that comfortable there, and that he was trying to make Ben comfortable.
“Naw man,” Ben tried to be casual, though it felt dumb to just blurt out the truth. “I’m just getting out of my place for a minute. Just checking things out.” He didn’t want to retreat but he didn’t know what else to do.
The guy smiled at Ben again. “Well, I’d offer you this,” he brandished the paper-wrapped bottle, “But you don’t look dumb enough to want to share germs with a stranger this week.”
Ben took a step closer to the colorful words splashed across the wall opposite the guy, feeling reckless and brave. He might as well look at what he’d come to see. As pretty as the designs were, the words were all just names that didn’t mean anything to him.
“So, you probably wouldn’t be the kind of young man that goes blabbing to parents and authorities about dangerous old men under bridges, right?” The guy was saying, “I mean that kind of talk just gets a person in trouble for skulking around under bridges themselves, am I right?”
Ben took a step back. This was parental style reasoning coming at him out of a decidedly non-parental looking corner. “No trouble to be had here, man,” he said in a rush of bravery. “But my folks might be able to spare something that’d help you out.”
Who knew, maybe finding some help for this guy would help break the tension back home? Ben liked the idea of thinking of something other than quarantine, anyway.