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When Cassidy awoke, he knew that today would be bad. Not only did he know, but he could see it would be bad, though it was beyond the fleeting lucidity of his dreaming mind. He couldn’t quite recall that shout of forewarning, that nagging ache at the back of his head that something would happen today, but he knew it would. When this feeling occurred, it was inevitable.
Groggily he rose from bed, and sleepily he continued through his day, brushing his teeth after drinking orange juice, pulling his socks up to his calves, making sure he packed his homework, and put his yellow jacket on today. Between tasks did his teeth itch in a figurative way, a wriggling sensation in the pulp of his teeth that bugged him that something wasn't right. It followed him all throughout the day.
It bothered him through arithmetic. It bothered him through lunch. He hardly minded the red marks he saw on the quiz he got back, concentration focused on the overcast clouds outside, not yet threatening to rain, though warning that it will eventually fall.
His stomach was performing cartwheels and his skin was sweating bullets, and all throughout third period his foot nearly wore a hole through the floor. His hands clenched and relaxed, fingernail indentions digging their way into the fleshy parts of his palms. He felt so bad, so alert that he nearly asked to leave to the nurse’s office, his breathing shallow and his eyes wide as he watched the clock, watched the secondhand land on minute forty-nine. Fifty. Fifty-one. Fifty-two.
Lunch was a hazy mishmash of bland colored items pooled out on a red plastic tray, gravy from his mashed potatoes spilling into the syrup of his preserved fruit. His eyes spun as his hands locked around the edges of the tray, gripping and feeling for something to remind him it was real. Something to focus his hands on. He sat with his friends at grimy lunch tables and hard backless chairs, constantly shifting around to get comfortable, to somehow ward off the growing feeling of foreboding.
They were playing four-squares at recess when it hit him, not all at once, but a steadily climbing intensity, as if the foreboding was an orchestra reaching a crescendo. The undersides of his skin itched, deep within the muscle, and Cassidy squeezed the red rubber ball with the intensity of a man facing an oncoming train. His teeth clattered violently and rattled his skull, and his friends urged him to throw the ball. The gravel and dust from the ball dried the sweat on his hands.
The ball.
Though it were fuzzy, as if the TV were out of tune, an image was starting to break through, and as the signal cleared some more, he started connecting the dots to what he saw last night and what he would witness today, and he didn't like what he saw at all.
Before his friends could ask him where he was going, before his teachers could stop him, Cassidy pitched the ball haphazardly back to his friends and made a break for it, sprinting towards the outer fence of the compound. A recess monitor seemed to notice what he was doing and attempted to snag the trailing hood of his yellow jacket, but Cassidy was faster. The metal gate squealed under his weight as he scaled the side of the fence, huffing from the adrenaline and the exertion.
He dropped over the other side of the gate with a grace that nearly snapped his ankle in two, recess monitor and two teachers screaming at him to come back, but Cassidy stumbled and then sprinted on. There was no time to slow down. No time to think. Cassidy had to run because he was going to run out of time.
There was only one thought in his mind, one motivating factor that made him forget the aching of his lungs, no matter how much they burned, the sweat that dropped into his eyeballs, the beating, skipping, thudding of his heart, how it filled up his ears and muffled the world around him with a single, sobering though:
Artie is going to die.
It hammers in his head up on repeat, bouncing around in his throat, in his heart, all of which ached terribly from exertion and the gut-wrenching thought that he would be too late. Still, he ran on, a small part of his mind congratulating him for knowing the way home and getting there all by himself. That was with barely recognizing the houses as he whizzed by in a blur.
He hears a car speeding through the stop sign before he sees it. His shoes connect with the concrete with enough force to send shocks through his ankles, with the wind whipping his hair in his eyes, and through it all he could see the finish line: the front yard of his home.
Then, when he feels like his lungs will pop, he rounds the corner of his block just in time to see a red ball bouncing into the street, a little child to follow it. He sees William and his own eyes land on the same horrid, incoming sight, hears his shouting echo down the residential block, seeing as he tries to sprint the distance between the driveway and the street. And, before Cassidy can vocalize his worst fears and nightmares and let the sickly feeling of failure settle like syrup in his stomach, the world comes crashing back to its normal speed with a single, sickening BANG.
He sees his brother’s small body fly over the hood and colliding with the windshield, the glass shards glinting off the sun like little macabre snowflakes as they fly through the air, a ragdoll of a child becoming weightless in the wind.
He rolls and hits the ground with a sickening crack, no doubt the sound of his skull fracturing, the last of his ribs popping from the impact. His wrist snaps under him and he eventually rolls to a stop.
Blood pours over the strawberry blonde of his hair.
For a moment, he’s in shock, his mouth slack-jawed in unbelieving shock as he watches the car continue on its way, the vehicle leaving behind a cloud of exhaust and an unmoving child.
He goes from silenced to yelling with so much force he tears the skin in his throat to shreds, somehow finding the air to sprint the rest of the block. His knees and lungs are not stinging as much anymore.
His eyes are, though.
Cassidy covers the rest of the distance and drops to his knees, aware of the warm liquid spreading under them. He tries his best to see his brother with blurry eyes, although some part of him is grateful that his tears leave him hardly able to see in fine detail.
William doesn’t even ask him what he’s doing there, his mind overtaken by the sight of the battered child in front of him, and he hysterically calls for Henry as he runs back into the house, voice cracking with a lack of composure and panic that he had never heard from him before. Cassidy does not doubt he’d be the same way had he remembered how to speak.
Artie’s lungs are crackling like a bowl of breakfast cereal, his chest barely rising and what leaves is a wet, labored sounding wheeze, as if his lungs are drowning in saliva and blood.
Cassidy feels hot tears pouring over his lashes again, hands hovering over the frame of his younger brother’s body, scared to move him, scared to touch him, as if even the tiniest of pokes would be the cessation of his life.
But Artie thrives on the love of touch, because Artie is on the cusp of four, and so Cassidy settles on cupping a hand against his cheek, ignoring the clammy way his brother feels under his palm.
Artie’s eyes managed to find his face. For that moment, it’s just him and his brother, and Cassidy never realized how much he loved his brother, how he thought he would live for much longer, and so he thought the time to appreciate him being here would be much more.
He can see the fuzziness in his eyes, the way they focus in and out, searching for something that perhaps none of them can see.
Cassidy sniffs and Artie coughs, his already reddened mouth oozing with a thick ribbon of crimson slurry, and he sniffs some more. He cradles his brother as gently as possible from where he lay on the asphalt ground.
Eventually, the light puff of breath against the crook of his neck stops, leaving him feeling awfully cold all over, and it makes Cassidy cry even harder. His cheeks are a wet mixture of tears, sweat, and snot, running freely and openly down his face.
The world fades into nothing more than desaturated hues of grey tone, everything around him losing the vibrancy associated with life. He hears but doesn’t make out much, though beyond the cotton stuffed in his ears he can hear his dad wailing at the same volume as the ambulance, anguish amplifying with every wave. Blue and red, the distinct chatter of authority figures and crowds as they’ve started to dribble in, everything and everyone isolated from he and his brother by a box of plastic yellow lines.
Eventually he is moved away, and he allows himself to be moved along like a flower in a gentle tide, like a marionette who cannot move on its own. A bright light flickers in his eyes, a hand waves, too, but he can’t even bring it in himself to be annoyed. He’s not sure if he even feels annoyed.
Perhaps he does, but he would rather a light in his eye and a tight cuff around his upper arm than the bodily fluids of his brother on his shoes. He feels sick and angry at himself, his knuckles turning from peach to white, and he wants to punch himself over and over again in a fit of rage. This was all because he couldn’t remember soon enough. All because he failed again.
And on his sleeves, and on his hands, were the drying colors of his brother, staining the skin under his fingernails brown from grime, the pads of his palms a dusty black from the fine rocks on the asphalt, and the sunny yellow cheer of his jacket to an unrelenting red.