The Boys could be found on the Rock whenever there was sun. Their brown and pink tones dappling the grey jut, an image of the languid summer they all wished could last forever. At most, there were seven of them; at least, they were three. If ever only two came to the Rock, the day would be over before it began; a pair of kids was never enough and each of them would arrive at some excuse to go home early, well before the sun scattered red and gold across their skin. But if all of them could come together from their disparate loneliness, then for that day, time might be suspended, hung like a frozen pig in a butcher’s den, impervious to decay.
Each of them knew grief in some small way. One had lost a grandmother, another had moved just the year before and was forced to give up many friends, another had parents who were going through a vicious and bitter divorce, yet another had an older sister who was sent away to a rehab center where her parents could hide from shame, and another had a cousin who was given the word cancer at a frightfully young age, still another had been to the hospital with an uncommon heart condition and had been in the labyrinth of dying for weeks before being dragged free by the doctors.
The Boys didn’t know grief equally and they had not met it symmetrically, yet each of them sensed the impending weight of what it meant to be alive. Perhaps that was why they congregated, why they stood on the Rock, baking their blood as snakes do and waiting for tourists to finish the climb.
Though the Rock belonged to the Boys’ callused toes and off-run sweat, it was deemed a must-see destination online and every day over a hundred eager visitors hiked the slick stone staircase in order to gain a view of the ocean and the Town—a sweeping understanding of irrelevance as the enormity of the ocean seethed against the many homes and lives built at its skirt. The water seemed as if it might swallow the wood and shingles and concrete and every inch that had been built and had weathered the world for much longer than any of the Boys had ever lived. The tourists might not have understood why they felt the way they did, standing on the Rock, and the Boys certainly did not.
The Boys waited until the pale tourists—drenched in hats, sunglasses, and SPF—crested the last steps with wheezing lungs and sting in their eyes, and once the unsuspecting audience found a semblance of composure, the Boys took flight. Just as soon as the newcomers would find their footing and start to take pictures with their glinting phones, one of the Boys would burst from their loitering and in three, four lithe steps launch into the air, hanging for just a moment—a moment without weight or desire or purpose—before plunging out of sight and into the glassy green waves that welcomed new bodies with explosive ease. A gasp. A cheer. A splash. And then the tourists would know that at any moment one of these kids could take to the air, claim free fall and vanish into the ocean.
The Boys often did flips or held statuesque poses until the very last instant before impacting the surface. The leap was nearly forty feet high, though to anyone who had just finished hiking the Rock it felt closer to a hundred. The water had a way of distorting space and glazing fear over onlookers. Standing on the precipice, the undulating waves made the distance impossible to guess. The trick was to time the jump just before a wave passed through. The Boys would enter the air above a trough, when the surface was at its furthest and their stunt at its most magnificent, then as they glided through the air the massing wave would slide forward and catch them with up-reached hands.
At the base of the Rock, the waves not yet curled into white froth would slide alongside the cliff with minute friction as the shape of the land corralled the ocean towards a beach-lined shore. Sometimes the Boys followed the water, allowing the heave of the ocean to take them to shore, bodysurfing the curl and foam before arriving on the beach with a churlish grin that they carried all the way back to the Town, satisfied with the day’s performance. More often though, the Boys would cling close to the salt-battered cliff and clamber onto a hidden shelf, catch their breath, and scale a secret path that returned them to the crown of the Rock where they could take the stage once again. Some believed that is what made you one of the Boys—knowing the secret path that allowed them to endlessly repeat their escapades.
If asked why they did this, the Boys would answer with empty and pliant words.
“It’s fun.”
“Because you can’t stop us.”
“Nothing better to do.”
And yet the real answer lurked in all their hearts, secret from their thoughts: flying was the only way to freeze time. In between the Rock’s scaly surface and the cold plunging water, time gave up its infinite coiling. Their bodies were free from the erosive heat of existence. The closest any of them came to expressing this feeling was when one of them said, “Because when the summer is over, we’ll have to stop.”
The same reason that propelled the Boys acrobatics also drove them to run through the Town barefooted, into the shops where they would steal candy that they could afford and take it into cool matinees, where in the velvety blackness of the theater they would call out at the screen knowing how this irritated other patrons, and when they were banned from the shops and the theater, the Boys would go to the beach where a football could be tossed just near enough to sunbathers, so whoever was chasing down the catch could nearly crash into the prone, lathered bodies before saving the play with a diving tumble over the loungers who protested with annoyed shouts and upraised arms, to which the Boys apologized with a wry grin in the same way they apologized to cars forced onto their brakes by sudden street crossings, and if the driver went so far as to honk or cuss at them through the windshield, the Boys never responded with more than a flash of white teeth—a smile like the white froth of waves just before collapsing—because that was the goal, that was their want, and their wont was to want without knowing they deeply desired rebellion, that constant push against what time had in store for them, the inevitable eventual, symbolized by roads and rules, schedules and polite company, common sense and goodwill, civility and everyone that named the hour of the day, day of the week, month of the year, for these were the enemies of youth, these were the bureaucrats of the everyday whose imposition of worth demanded the measuring of each moment, the counting of every second in order to ascribe value as if the next step could only be taken, if the one before had been forward (while the Boys dared to silently, unknowingly, ask if a step could be nothing, if a body in free fall could even move, if the ground were to wash away and forward progress became impossible, would time vanish too) and it was these bureaucrats that clambered up the Rock when the sun was hot to chastise the Boys for their reckless abandon, and it was these bureaucrats that named them the Boys, for they were boys but also girls and neither as well (though none of them could grapple the idea into reason, each of them could sense at this age that gender was another machination of time, a classification purposed for procreation, a taxonomy based in the idea that a life would inevitably be consumed by time and could only be recognized by progeny, which led to the unrequested title of boys and girls, so they could find each other and make new bodies while their own corroded, and yet somehow it became that anyone who rebelled against the preordained purpose of their lives were deemed the Boys, when really they were simply Rebels, because rebellion against society—that hallmark of existence—and all of its reaching fingers was their endeavor, whether it be parental guidelines or civil decency or the base need for safety as they threw their bodies into the air, above the waves and away from the shocked masses that would caution them with shouts, such as “Stay back from the edge,” “It’s not safe,” “You’re too young to be so reckless,” “Don’t do it just because someone else did,” but each plea was really an upright fence designed to funnel them forward even as they wanted nothing more than to be still, void of inertia, free from anything that might suggest it all must come to the close, anything that demanded propulsion through life also demanded growing nearer to death; growth, that ancient enemy, that came in conspicuous and insidious forms alike (for instance, growth came as puberty but it also came as completion, such as when a parenthesis opens, it remains in parenthetical space until it closes) and only once it has closed does it grow into something new, and if it never closes it remains ongoing, frozen still in its possibility, a paradox of time the Rebels fight by refusing to count how many parentheses have opened and how many have closed (refusal is their great weapon—when they are flying it is refusing to fall and when they are falling it is refusing to fly and even though the story should end with one of them dying, and the mixed epiphanies of grief dotting their tongues like sour candy (a formal completion of the themes promised by the opening paragraphs) they must refuse, because in reality the Rebels simply grow older and in that way each of them dies as they become the same bureaucrats of time they battle each summer, and so they must refuse reality as well, with its ceaseless nature that is forced upon their bodies by your reading, your understanding, your consumption, the tools of which are syntax and ink, but these might be disrupted, disemboweled, disassociated, dissatisfied dismembered disintegrated
transmitting eligibly is a slow death to time’s hands
are
you
anangrydriveronaroadwithRebelswalkingslowandyouhonkthehorndon’ttheyknowtherulesoftheroad
The Boys can be found on the Rock whenever there is sun. Their brown and pink tones dapple the grey jut, an image of the languid summer they all wish could last forever.
Eric Oman Callahan is a writer from Portland, Oregon who explores themes of family, grief, and desire through short fiction. He is an MFA student in the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. His work also appears in Doubly Mad, ANMLY, and Clackamas Literary Review.