Chicken: A Short Story

My breath started to blow around me like smoke as the temperature continued to drop.  It was now pitch black outside, so dark that I could barely see the outline of my hand when I raised it to my mouth to thaw it out.  As I looked up and saw the stars, I was reminded of his mother and how she always loved to teach us about them.  She would tell us stories of how they came to be in the formation they now hold in the sky, that each star represents a fallen child, a life lost too soon.  How every night when she noticed a new sparkle in the sky, it was the innocent eye of a beloved winking at us, letting earth know they’re okay.  I wonder what she sees now when she looks up at the blackness.  Are they still lost loved ones or are they merely an interruption of the bleak darkness we like to lose ourselves in in times of pain? 

I look up and I see the unknown.  I don’t know what’s beyond the roads I grew up around, I’ve never been anywhere but here.  There is a world we’ve left undiscovered but oddly, I’m at peace with that.  Jordan always wanted to escape, to discover all that the world had to offer.  He would talk about needing to get out of these boundaries life has set for him.  To run and be free and be himself in a place where no one would know the image he has always held here and compare it to the person he wants to be.  

He would say that kind of stuff a lot.  That he can’t be himself in a town surrounded by familiarity and expectations.  That escaping was his ultimate goal.  He was looking at all sorts of colleges around the world, none within a thousand-mile radius of home.  He’d always say we should go off to school together.  We could meet new people, get into new things, learn new norms, but I was never too keen on leaving.  I never said I wouldn’t leave but I never said I would.  I knew my home.  I knew the ups and downs and there were memories hidden in every corner.  Like when Jord and I got into our first fist fight behind the old fish and chips place with these older boys who went to our school.  Despite getting completely pummeled, we left feeling like absolute champs.  

Or the times we used to play chicken, here on these very tracks that look so distant to me now.  Each of us would inch a little closer, the muted sound of the approaching train becoming more and more present with every passing second.  We would be looking at each other the whole time, daring one another to back out first.  In the last moments, when I think he could see me breaking, about to stand down, he would smile at me – not in a malicious, victorious way, but with a smile holding gentle endearment as his feet found their way off the tracks and his shoulders moved in a “maybe next time” sort of way.  I knew he let me win, I knew it every time but I never ceased to rub his face in my victory.

Thinking of this now makes my throat close, my palms sweat and tingle.  My chest tightens and my heart aches and every part of me is screaming with pain.  I don’t know how I got here, how life threw this at me so suddenly and so violently that I didn’t have a moment to catch up with it.

One day he came to my house.  We were playing video games and talking about nothing while he was dying to tell me everything.  He came to my house for the last time.  He told me and I hated him.  I refused to believe him.  He told me and I yelled at him and pushed him away.  He was looking for acceptance and I gave him judgment.  I was his place of escape, the world in which he could run away to and be himself and I told him that he wasn’t welcome. I closed the only door he felt he could walk through to find happiness and I slammed it in his face. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry.  

I didn’t listen to what he had to say.  I told him he was disgusting and that I hated him and that I never wanted to see him again.  He had broken everything that we were when he decided he was gay.  I accused him of ripping our friendship apart, dirtying our childhood so much that nothing could ever be the same.  In that moment, I hated him, truly and deeply.  In that moment, he was the enemy and the coward. Every part of me repulsed against the lies, the hidden secrets.  I now knew all of his faults and he mine.  He loved me and I hated him for it.  He was my best friend and the sight of him made my hands throb, my teeth clench.  

So much can change with a word, a moment. I resented the lies, not the person.  I hated the unknown, not my friend.  I pushed him away out of fear and anger.  I’m sorry I didn’t know this at the time.  I’m sorry I pushed you away because of your honesty. But most of all I’m sorry it took seeing your lifeless, limp body for me to realize this.   

He is my fault.  His lack of presence is the ever pressing weight on my shoulders.  My friend is dead because of a moment. How funny a thought it is that a single moment can change someone’s world so drastically and permanently, yet the world is still there.

It’s time for a game.  The sound is approaching; the whistle of the train being my cue to play.  As my hands surrender their choke on the fence, I see his too-white hands, dangling beside him.  My legs uncurl from below me and I think of the last words I ever spoke to him. I think about him walking home, hating himself more with every step, becoming increasingly lost as he turns away from me.  My feet grip the earth below me.  The sounds of his steps as he sneaks himself up the stairs to his bedroom pushes my own legs forward.  The image of him tossing the rope through the railing of his ceiling makes my heartbeat faster and my steps more confident.  I see him tying a knot and pulling up a chair.  I hear his last breaths as clearly as I hear the train roaring into the night, his quivering lip and beating heart, mirrored in the awaiting trembles of the tracks.  I inch forward as I did when we played, sure that I am going to be the last one standing when the train comes. 

He’s here, in front of me with that gentle smile and those indulging eyes.  He looks up to the stars with their forgiving winks and welcoming gleams as my feet plant themselves atop the shaking wooden planks.  I came here tonight to remember my friend; I stayed to forget.