The Red Ball

Author’s Note: It surprises some people when they learn just how far back my childhood memories go. In this piece, I relate a single moment in time, but one that reflects my upbringing as a whole. Several elements introduced here become strong themes in later stories.

The following memoir piece is meant to be read as a stand-alone story. That said, it’s also part of a larger collection of short stories I’ll be sharing here on The Violet Storm, with the intention of eventually publishing them as a collection. Think of this story like a single Tarot card — rich with its own meaning and symbolism, yet ultimately part of a fuller spread once the other cards (stories) are revealed. As always, thank you for reading. ~SA

I am hardly breathing as I clutch the red ball. I am hiding from the light, from the worried faces, from being their miracle. I crawled away from my mother’s chair next to the pulpit, down the baptismal stairs, into the crawlspace under the church where the carpenters store their supplies. Covered in sawdust and spider webs, I sit amongst pieces of lumber and tools. I can see my father’s feet above me as he stands at the pulpit. Sunlight falls between the floorboards above me, lancing the piles of wood with bright yellow lines. I am hypnotized by the sawdust particles floating in the light. Time is slower here while the dust falls and my attention is focused between the cracks of the floor. A tiny spider dances, suspended on a filament of silver. 

The red ball is solid but gives when I squeeze it. It needs air. I press and release it while breathing in short gasps as if I could fill us both up. The pressure reminds me I’m real, that I’m not floating. The dust is swirling faster and I am afraid that I’m breathing in the sawdust and it will dry me up from the inside, so I hold my breath and squeeze the ball tightly again. Directly above me, my father is reading aloud from the Bible, the huge Bible from the pulpit in the house of God, with the shiny edges. Sometimes he shouts and hits the book with his fist. When he gets this excited he can’t keep his feet still. He leaps around and blocks out the light above me. His shadow falls across my face and my skin breaks out in goose pimples. The spider drops to the ground. That’s when my mother appears, climbs into the crawlspace, slides her arms around my body and drags me away from the dust, the light and lumber. The red ball falls from my hands, rolls away behind the stacks of two by fours. I open my mouth to protest, but my mouth is dry because the dust is in me like I feared. My legs slide behind me, leaving dust trails. They are healed, touched by the people above me, but they are still more heavy than the rest of me.

My mother has me in her iron grip. She is shaking with anger at herself for letting me get away from her. Everyone is watching us when she returns to her chair with me on her lap. Wrinkled faces stare at us with forced smiles. Rows and rows of frog men and lizard ladies dressed up in suits and dresses with fancy hats. I imagine any second a giant tongue might fly out of a pew and devour me.  

Everyone is waiting to see what I do next. I am their miracle baby. They all had their hands on me when my father prayed to God to heal me and they look at me with curiosity and ownership. As my father is their leader, I partly belong to them. All eyes glance at my mother wiping the dust off of my tiny black slacks. She is partly theirs as well. Now she is watching my father speak, pretending not to notice everyone staring at us. She is redirecting their focus back to my father as if we never went away. She doesn’t know it, hasn’t started to recognize the signs yet, but I am beginning to float away. I drift out of my body and rise to her face, see her smiling at my father with her head tilted as I rise higher and higher, above her, above my father, until I am like a balloon bouncing back and forth amongst the rafters of the house of God. I float freely up here, over the congregation, but I cannot go farther than the rafters. There is an invisible barrier that the trees and the wind and the sun cannot penetrate.

After my father finishes dancing and thumping, everyone in the church stands and takes out books from the pews in front of them. They shuffle through the pages to find the words to sing. I always return to my body when they do this to hear my mother’s voice. When she sings, her song echoes in my chest, adding an extra warmth to my body, exciting my heartbeat, grounding me in my blood. In the nights after the doctor visits, when I woke up in the middle of the night thrashing around with the plaster casts on my feet and the metal bar between them, my mother came to me, held me in her arms and sang. She placed a cold washcloth on my forehead, a quilt on top of me, up to my chin. There weren’t always specific words, sometimes just a melody, but the humming distracted me from the heaviness in my feet, the dull ache in my joints. 

When everyone rises up and sings together in the house of God, they are of one voice and the church fills with the warmth of their breath: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise Him all creatures here below.” The vibration of their voices enters me, roots me in place, lulls me into security. “Praise Him above, ye Heavenly host, praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” Then they sing “Amen” and the song is over, the breath and the warmth vanish and I am once more adrift among them, floating in the rafters. I leave again because this is when the congregation becomes individual people and their attention, their desperate focus, is like a heat lamp on my skin. I will break out in hives and start to sweat if they touch me, make me look into their eyes, hungry with their singular need for attention. They want my miracle to rub off on them, to heal the secret corners of their lives. They want proof that God listens to their hearts and cares about the contents. So they pepper my mother with questions, “How is the little one? Is he continuing to improve?” and plaster her with compliments, “The Lord smiles upon you and your family. You are truly blessed.” My mother turns up the corners of her mouth and nods and when she touches their shoulders, the old women blush and lower their gaze. They waddle away with renewed energy, hoping it lasts until next Sunday. My mother holds me close and motions to my father who is surrounded by the men folk. She is ready to go home, her body is ready to release its tenseness. “That was a most powerful sermon,” the men tell my father, “The Lord was working His will through you. You are an instrument of His Word.” My father puffs out his chest, stands tall, and vigorously shakes their hands. He pats them all on the back and leaves their circle when they start to congratulate one another as if they have won a game. My father takes a moment to put his arm around the piano player. “Thank you for your service,” he coos, “You played well,” and the young woman shrugs her shoulders so his arm falls away. She  avoids my mother’s stare and another woman, twice as old as she, escorts her from the piano. More handshakes and somber nods, and the voices are too many and too loud, talking over one another as they take their time vacating the building. My mother walks beside my father down the aisle and when we exit the double doors, the bright light of the sun falls down upon us like judgment, harsh and unforgiving. The air of the natural world rushes into the church and forces the staleness of the last few hours out. It is warm outside under the sun, but a chill wind blows around us, and I feel trapped between the contrasting pockets of cold and hot air. I’m limp in my mother’s arms and she places her hand over my forehead, blocking out the sunlight in my eyes. The wind’s telling me something, but I can’t leave my body to listen more carefully, not when my mother is holding me so tightly, and her hand is heavy on my head and I can feel her heartbeat added to mine. Not when the air feels sticky and cool at the same time because the sun and the wind don’t agree. The red ball is still downstairs under the building. I can’t hear what the wind is telling me over the voices of all the people and I can’t escape them. I fear that I am made of dust and if I breathe, the wind will blow me away. The red ball is lost.