Heavens For The Devil

Like puppets strung here and there in the tree, long-legged twigs, grasshoppers really...four boys. They lick the winds, relish the tempest, savor the electrics. Great storms alive, it's coming their way!

The air wears the perfume of squall and with it, ionized cotton candy, mixed with some loam of cowardice and the mint of plowed under corn. They make ready for the coming gale. Four boys, one tree and a very electric storm indeed!

The test? Simple. To pass, you have to remain, the four of you, tree-bound until the storm is behind you.

Been awhile since Pennsylvania had such an electrical storm.

And this the first!

But something shudders deep and different with this storm's approach. Nothing is like these tentacles, these ions, these amps edging close, audacious ohms, the voltage potent, ripe with menace and peril. Boys sniff the air, what with the homecoming of cyclones, carnivals, their dark taunt and tease...a match to the very tinder of summer itself. This is, after all...the test.

You think you man up. A rite of psychosis, really, fashioned from the marriage of dynamos and devils...the spoils of malady itself. Allen Crenshaw, Bill and Taylor Melton... you. The four of you, against the great storm electric. The malediction. Here.

Now.

You're lashed to the tree, the rage spasms, your voice lost... you dare not run, you dare not leap to the safety of earth. No, treebound, great coils of fevered light explode all about you; you're stitched to the branches, sewn to the leaves, roped to the bough. Malignant devices lurch, stagger, scrape against you, tree branches whipping like thumping lanyards of a dying ship. Sails flay and shred to ribbons, your breath torn by the thieving gale. Panic takes you, your crotch is wet with cold urine. You're a punk. You want to leap, run home, just a short block away.

But you don't.

Because...they don't.

You don't run, and these spooling electrics, these maelstroms prime from the fiercest blacks you can imagine; your guts spill to the gallows and you're going to give up like the punk sissy you are. Aren't you?

But wait...

The storm... it

hesitates...

Pall bearers whisper obscenities in your ear. It sniffs at your crotch, loiters uninvited. Ever the trickster, it dries the wind, sends the storm spit westward. You want to believe it's west of you, lessening, yes, but no, your confidence so... incontinent. You pray, god damn it, you pray. Does it pass you by, the first gruesome storm of the season? Or does it continue it's terrible game of Tag... and you've become it?

It shunts. Staggers

Done.

A walking melancholy, ever the charlatan, it masquerades like some good humored breeze. The four of you know better.

You can't look to Allen Crenshaw, Bill and Taylor Melton. Shame's in the freckled blood, grimed with spit staining your faces. The four of you scatter to the playful breeze, but you know it's anything but playful.

You don't talk to each other....nearly a week

And the day, you never mention it again.