WHEN WE WERE SOMEBODY ELSE
ISSUE SIX: December, 2020
WHEN WE WERE SOMEBODY ELSE
Bang, go, we’re off. Elbows hacking. Jaws locked. Breathing hard. Feet pounding. Eyes bulging. Teeth clenched. Breathing harder. I can’t do it. I can. I can’t. Lungs explode across the line already and who what me? Head spinning like a plate. I’ve won? Really?
School sports day and the arrogant running machine – now a relationship counsellor – who expects to win the sprint for the third year on the trot is outpaced by a skinny long hair who has never entered a race before, or since. You jumped the gun, the machine says right after we break the tape. But chest heaving I have to disagree. Never even saw a gun, I say, my brain still trying to catch up with my mouth – but if you believe you deserve gold you can have it, because that’s just how life works, isn’t it?
Turns out I’m also able to sidestep, parry and avoid a jaw-popping left better than anybody thought I would ever be capable of too, myself included. Never underestimate a daydreamer, I hear the socks and sandals wearing chemistry teacher say as I dash from the scene like my favourite musketeer in a book I must have read a dozen times.
New Girlfriend and I – she calls me New Boyfriend – spend the rest of that afternoon swigging vodka and orange from a bottle I stashed behind the cafeteria the night before. She regales me with what I assume are tall tales about her adventures in the Atlas mountains with her donkey riding, knife wielding, chain smoking, camel bone ring wearing cousin, while I watch big, thick, happy, clouds drift slowly across the June sky.
The next day New Girlfriend is a no show and that afternoon I hear from her sister that she has run off with a small-time drug dealer called Peter. Nothing lasts forever, I suppose. Even the chemistry teacher swapped his sandals for a pair of walking shoes and was last heard from while trekking through France on the Camino de Santiago, the waymarked pilgrim trail that ends up in northwestern Spain.
Occasionally, when I look at that sports field through my classroom window – I’m back there now, teaching literature to kids who mostly don’t want to be taught – I find myself thinking about that day. But not the running or the post-race row or that I never attended the prize giving to collect my medal. Not New Girlfriend telling me that she thought I was somebody she might want to fall in love with when she worked out what love actually was because I hear it’s such a complicated thing she said and me muttering, I’ve heard that too.
No. Instead, I always end up wondering why I put my name down for that race in the first place. What made me think it was a good idea.
Short stories and flash fiction by GARY MARTIN HIGHES have appeared in Necessary Fiction, The Honest Ulsterman, Visual Verse and The Cabinet of Heed. Born in Ireland, he currently lives in England and tweets @GaryMartinHugh1.