Floating Face Down (boyxboy)

Chapter One

One of my best memories at school was back in primary school, year four. The drains in the main school playground had clogged up in the night and poured down with rain, the lake-like basin slope to the ground filled with water and drowned the grass, reaching up to the top of the little tree we'd planted and affectionately named Gerbil.

The school hadn't apparently thought of this as warranting a day off, and we were all forced to trudge in with our boots and raincoats, trailing carefully around the newly crafted lake in the centre of the school grounds. But of course they'd had a little too much faith in our dedication to that path and we'd naturally ended up jumping into the water, filling our boots and chucking the water at each other.

The mud lifted up around our legs, soaked from head to toe, if you put your head in the water you wouldn't be able to see a thing.

The first time I put my head down under the brown blanket that reflected the heavy clouds in the sky, their movement disguised by the rippling in the water, as I headed toward the deeper centre of the ground, I saw a the shadow of figure suddenly drift into my murky view and in my shock I nearly inhaled and came up gasping, rubbing my eyes and nose, coughing.

The second time I dove under I opened my eyes just in time for some of the mud to clear, lowering back down to where I had disturbed it, and I saw the figure of another boy moving into a crouch, down in the very centre, the deepest point where there was no drain. Clouds of earth twisted up from the ground like upheavals of dust, and through the stinging of my eyes I floated and stared, seeing him sinking down toward the bottom, a scene that happened so quickly I witnessed in slow motion, how he was drowned out by the dark sediments rising over his head.

We'd played for only about twenty minutes before the teachers came out with the bell, red-faced and yelling. We'd been told off loudly while we were made to strip and towel down with the kitchen towels, and put on spare uniforms while ours were put into plastic bags to take home.

Unable or unwilling to teach us while they waited for our parents to get out of work to pick us up they pulled out the TV on a trolley and put on a movie, switched off the lights and closed the blinds.

The room was cold and we weren't really dry but no one complained so neither did I, just sat there shivering as I watched a video that compared the size of the earth to other planets, and then stars, and in my head, for whatever reason, I kept repeating the memory of the boy that was swallowed by that black shroud.

I'd been worried waiting for my mother to arrive, watching the other kids get picked up one by one, their parents upset with them, telling them off as they pulled them back to their cars, going through the back of the school where the car park was. I didn't want to see my mom look that way.

But she hadn't, she'd breezed on through without a care in the world, laughed at the way I looked and waited for me to accept her hand.

We left my clothes by accident but she didn't bother to turn back as we walked home, and when we got home she made chicken nuggets and gravy, the at the time, favourite meal of mine.

I hadn't thought about it much at the time, that it was a kind of day I would never get to experience again.

Because only two months after that, my mother would pass away, I would eventually move on into year five of Rosewood Primary school, the dynamic between myself and everyone else I knew would change. Before I knew it, dark clouds were rising up around me.

~⌣︵⌣︵⌣︵⌣︵⌣︵⌣~