Daily writing prompt: Have you ever broken a bone?

I’m travelling back in time to a condition where idealism and Zachary were still around. A place where I didn’t consider writing allegorically about a broken bone that happened in a soon-to-be broken home. Parents were moral arbiters. There was no danger in the world. Nothing could upend the stable, linear progression of my little life. Even I knew at that tender age, evil was futile.

As I pen these lines, Juice WRLD’s ‘Legends’ is pumping into my ears. I hear his voice, but I know he’s not coming back. He’s not there. Nor are the people from my broken bone story. So I draw the curtains with 5% light transmission and go back along my sober perceptions. Somewhere between feeling and memory I’ll recall what happened in a different voice. The voice of that lost time – of irrecoverable youth.

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I invited Shane over to play today. He’s my friend. He lives on the same street I do. We play street hockey and ride bikes. It’s fun. I feel like playing on my fort in the backyard today. My dad built it for me and my sister Amie. My dad can do anything. He works on cars but he can build stuff to. my grandpa and my dad made a whole part of my basement for my mom to cut hair in. its really cool.

Hey Shane! Shane come watch me-how I can do the monky bars! Can you do two at a time?- it’s easy, like this–

(Zachary falls 7′, face first off of the monkey bars.)

Ow. OOOO, owwiiee. Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow, oooo–mmm…

Shane I don’t think I can play any more today. im sorry…

(Zachary goes inside the house. He lays down face first on the living room couch. On one of her trips back and forth to the laundry room, his mom notices he is behaving strangely.)

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Young Zachary would be taken to the ER. An x-ray would reveal a small fracture in the growth plate at his elbow. The bone was reset and he was put in a hard cast for a period of weeks. Classmates willingly signed his cast in a variety of marker colors. His arm muscles atrophied during this period of immobility. When the cast was cut off, the doctor subjected Zachary to excruciating pain by straightening out his arm. It was like prying open a rusty metal door. The joint was unyielding, but the nerves were diligent to transmit news of the attendant pain–every bit of it. The jobless cast sat in a box, in his childhood home. This was until the basement was voided of all the family’s possessions during the procedure known as the division of assets.

If only the pain of a broken bone was the worst pain he would know.