Recess Wars
I must've been seven or six when I encountered evil for the first time. It was a typical day at the playground, during recess, one of those schoolyard memories that's embedded into the crevices of my outlook on life. Auggie Wright was the name of the boy who, in first grade, introduced me to an unfamiliar and uncomfortable world of casual cruelty. Auggie was a good friend in those days. Friends was an uncomplicated term to me in those days: anyone you could laugh with and share a good time recalling the last animated movies you'd gone to see at the theaters. We used to share many laughs in the homeroom, telling infantile jokes about flatulent teachers and comically obese animals.
We were playing one day, myself and a group of classmates, some variation of cops and robbers, except ours was called cats and mousies. Auggie and I were on the same team, the mousies. So there we were, make-believe mice crawling on those rubber platforms across those brightly-colors ladders and slides, trying to get away from those speedy cats tailing right behind us. The cats were making steady progress pummeling our team. Little by little, as the minutes passed, one mouse was eaten (tagged) by another one of those cats. Run as we tried; the cats could always devise ways to make cunning sneak attacks and ambush tactics. For example, while a kid ran in one direction, one kid would chase him, while another would come running from the opposite direction to lay down the sneak attack. And so it was through this trickery that Auggie and I ended up the last two on our team.
There we were on the top slides, two nervous, squeaky little kids feeling like this make-believe world of predator-prey dynamics truly was collapsing all around us. In our innocent heads, that game must have seemed as grand as the siege of Troy.
"No! The mousies are all getting eaten. Quick, think of something."
Auggie said: "One of us is gonna be the last mouse standing. That would make us the winner."
"We gotta think of a way to work together and outrun them before the bell rings."
We were surrounded in all directions at the top of that slide. Three kids are coming nearer and approaching, with one quickly climbing up backward through the slide itself.
Auggie looked at me and said: "you're on your own," then like it was nothing, he shoved me and pushed me towards the edge of the slide, where I tumbled over the slippery surface and, with rapid speed, came thrashing down. Being suspended mid-air felt like an eternity, but truthfully, it was only a second of screaming before I landed with a loud thud on that bumpy, pebbly plastic gravel surface. In those impish screams, I could hear the waning death trills of societal comfort and happy delusions.
My eyes saw purple and red, and for the next hour, my nose bled profusely. I remember as the teacher angrily held a tissue to my nostril and forced me to blow, all I could think, looking at my reflection in the mirror, feeling woozy, was how someone I thought was a friend could be so callous to me. '{Sometimes I wonder if that's why my head is so messed up now that I'm a grown adult. Perhaps not intellectually, though I am pretty slow to process things on occasion. No, I suppose my emotional problems and trust issues fomented into something strong from that day forward.
One day recently, I got bored and decided to look up. Auggie Wright was still alive these days, and if he was, what was he up to? To my shock, I quickly found an August Wright of my age. What would you know? I discovered he had recently been elected mayor of some sizeable town. My heart goes out to the residents of those people because even though I know nothing about the man he grew up to be, I knew one thing for certain: the evil and betrayal he delivered to me that fateful schoolyard day was not something that grew weaker with age.