Bugs - Day 3

He had watched the boy come out of his house.

He had watched him as he got interested on the ground and go into the woods.

He had followed him, wondering what could keep the kid so interested for so long. He saw the boy grab his arm, wipe it on his pants, and continue on his way, deeper into the woods.

Then it happened, so suddenly, he first thought it was another of his dreams.

FLASH

BANG

BOOM

CRASH

The seconds of silence which followed seem to stretch into years.

His eyes had been blinded by the flash of the lightning and took a good three minutes to come back to some sort of usefulness. His ears rang for a good ten minutes, the thunder had been so loud.

He shook his head and looked in the last direction he had seen the boy. There was emptiness, as if God Himself had reached down and pulled up a handful of trees like a gardener pulling up a weed.

Memories from way back in the junk pile of his sub-conscious cried out to be brought forth. Strong memories triggered by the light, the sound, the smell. Bad, bad memories he just could not let out.

Then the rain began. It didn’t start as a gentle rain, slowly increasing in volume, but instead began full on. Once again he thought of God. “Did you turn Your hose on to wash Your hands after pulling that weed?” he thought. “You didn’t need to turn it on so hard!” He said this in his mind, his tongue remaining still – a stillness it had maintained for going on forty years now.

It took him a couple of more minutes to turn his mind back to the boy.

“What in the hell happened to that little kid?” he mumbled to himself. “Himself” had been his only speaking partner for a long, long time.

He walked into the newly created clearing, staying away from the smoking piles at the edges of the circle and looked around for the boy.

“The boy was right here, then boom, no boy. No trees either. What in the …” then he stopped. He finally noticed, just down the hill there, a big ball of twisted limbs, leaves, and muck.

“You pick it up God, and toss it over there?” he asked. He waited, but as usual, he got no answer, so he walked carefully down the hill, toward the ball of trees.

The rain stopped as quickly as it had started, but he didn’t really notice. He was curious about the boy, not that he really cared one way or the other, but he was just curious.

“Help.”

He stopped and wondered if God was finally speaking to him. He pondered for a minute and decided if God were going to say something to him, it probably wouldn’t start with “Help.”

“Help me, I’m stuck!”

Now he was sure it wasn’t God. He didn’t think there was anyway God could get Himself stuck, and even if He did, He’d call on Jesus or those angel guys or the host or someone other than a poor, homeless crazy man.

“Must be the boy. The boy must be stuck in the middle of that ball of trees. Yep, must be the boy.”

His curiosity was satisfied, so he turned and started back up the hill.

“Strange place for a boy to be playing, out here in this mud. Oh well.”

His bedroom slippers mad funny sucking noises and he held his robe tightly around him with one arm and grabbing onto tree stumps with the other as he fought his way back up the hill.

“Yep, awfully strange place for a boy to be playing.”