An Unexpected Exchange
Jake tries to get his ball back after an overenthusiastic kick, and finds it in the possession of a Fox - in an urban neighbourhood of Denver.
Jake kicked the ball. It was a hard kick, practised a thousand times on the street he’d been playing football on for the last 5 years of his life. It was a kick born from the hope that if he got great in this one thing, maybe he’d transcend the reality of his life. The crushing poverty of being born to a family, bereft of community or institutional support, and no ancestral wealth to pass on. The poverty of being born to a single working class refugee mother from Sierra Leone.
Who loved him dearly, but love alone rarely pays rent or puts food on the table. So she worked two jobs fuelled by her love of Jake. She certainly was not fuelled on sufficient food.
So Jake, being of the semi-studious but constantly moving type of child, dreamed of Football. The kind you play with your feet, not the kind you mostly play with your hands.
This was, perhaps, an odd dream considering he lived in central America. And by central America we are referring to Denver, Colorado. Not the other Central America where Foot-Football would be an utterly appropriate choice. The central America where real sports heroes played Hand-Football.
In this hot late august weather, Jake’s kick propelled the ball well over the makeshift net, that was two posts with no net at all. The 9 year old goalkeeper had no chance of reaching it, and gazed forlornly as the ball sailed off the road and the makeshift playing field.
“Doesn’t count!” the keeper said, wailing his disapproval.
“Yea it does!” Jake yelled back. “It was between the posts! We never said how high it couldn’t be!”
“Nu uh!” the keeper said defiantly. Mack was his name, and Mack was a whiner. “And you gotta get it! That’s the rules.”
“Why do I have to get it when you didn’t even try to stop it?” Jake said, kicking a loose rock on the ground to emphasis the complete bullshit of the situation. Some of the other kids voiced their approval and/or disapproval of the call, depending whose team they were on. Richard, the local dick, and also the ball’s owner agreed with Mack. His being on Mack’s team was “unlikely” to have factored into the call. Sometimes choosing the path of least resistance is the quickest way to more playing.
So he chased down the ball, which had tragically disappeared behind a tall beaten down wooden fence. It had been a very good kick. It was the landing that needed work.
Graffiti covered this wooden fence that had a surprising amount of moisture damage for the current climate in Denver. Someone had spray painted crude looking trees on the fence, and not a local forest, but one he’d never seen before. Jake knew that hadn’t been there two days ago. He paid attention to when things changed in his neighbourhood.
But he had snuck in the yard before, and knew there were damaged boards facing the alleyway behind the house that he could crawl under. So like any enterprising 9 year old, that’s what he did.
Whomever had graffitied the outside of the fence had done a more elaborate job on the inside of the fence. Artfully drawn, with some clear work put into the trees. Unlike the murals that were painted on the side of school walls or public park bathrooms, these were painted by someone who was really trying to create the feeling of being in a forest. He spared it barely any glance. He was on a mission.
He looked around the yard and saw his football lying on the ground. Underneath a shoe. Attached to a leg. Which was attached to a very tall pale skinned man with bright red-orange hair, slightly longer than was professional or fashionable. Dressed in a sharp-looking light grey suit, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Who was looking at him warily. Jake had never seen this man around town before, and so he did the same thing he did whenever a white man busted him doing something he probably wasn’t supposed to be doing.
He put up his hands and said loudly, “Don’t shoot me! I’m just a kid!”
The man’s eyebrows shot up in surprise and his mouth quirked in amusement.
“Why… would I shoot you?” he said to Jake, genuinely puzzled.
This was usually a good sign, Jake thought. So he put his hands down and leaned into the audacity of youth. “You wouldn’t. Cause you’re not a bad man. Right? Can I have my ball back?”
“I’m not?” The man said, thoughtfully. “No, I’m probably not,” The man blinked slowly a couple times, then grinned. “But this ball landed in my yard, so doesn’t that make it mine now? That’s how you all do it right?”
Jake scrunched up his face. This man talked weird. He was probably foreign. Good, that really brought down the probability he was going to get shot.
“Nooo… if a kid loses his ball, you’re supposed to give it back to him,” Jake said, boldly. “Please?” Trying on the magic word to see if that’d get the ball back. He could hear some of the kids waiting for the ball shouting for him to hurry. They sounded oddly far away.
The man leaned over and picked up the ball, and while looking at it, said, “So what will you give me for it, if I return this ball to you?”
Jake frowned, it wasn’t really his ball so he wasn’t going to give that much for it, “I dunno… what do you want? No funny stuff, I ain’t going in your house.”
The man looked puzzled at that, then he looked at the house, then back at Jake. “No, I don't think I want that. What’s your true name? Tell me that and I’ll return your ball to you.”
Jake looked at him suspiciously.
“What you want that for?” Jake said. His mom told him to avoid telling his name to the police if he could avoid it. They kept records. “You police?”
The man laughed, “No. Not the police. Just a collector of odd things. Like names. I’m very curious about this place and its inhabitants,” he winked at Jake. “I enjoy collecting all kinds of things, like balls, for example,” he bounced the ball up with his hands like a clumsy juggler would do, or an excited child who’d just met a ball for the first time. But he didn’t drop it, and looked very pleased with himself.
Jake crossed his arms. “Just my name, you ain’t going to do anything with it?”
“Do… anything… with it? No, likely not,” the man said, shrugging. He tossed the ball back and forth in his hands. He looked at Jake and grinned.
“Fine… It’s Jake Mansaray,” Jake said. The man looked thoughtful, and then shook his head.
“That’s not your true name. Most of it… but not all of it,” he said. “What’s your middle name?”
Jake blinked. His middle name? He thought… he hadn’t thought of his middle name in a long time.
“Uh… Chalobah,” Jake said, remembering the football player he’d been middle named after.
“Jake… Chalobah… Mansaray…” The man said, sounding each word out like he was tasting them.
Jake felt something ping inside him. Like someone had just flicked him on the nose and his whole body shook with shock. He felt instantly awake, alert, and uncertain.
A cool wave of air washed over him. His environment grew moist, cold, and the sun dimmed greatly. Leaves, a solid dark green and the size of a car, floated by in the wind above him. Far above him, he could see mist in the treetops. And the trees around him were taller than the concrete towers of his home city’s core. All around him lay the largest forest he’d ever seen. A forest for giants.
And in front of him, stood the man - Fox. His light grey suit standing out like an out like an unnatural grey flamed candle in the dark heaviness of this forest. And despite this stark contrast in aesthetics, this man looked like he belonged here. Fox grinned at him, his canines oddly prominent.
“Jake. It’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Fox of the Godswood.” Fox said, half bowing, his face the widest grin Jake had ever seen on a man’s face. The man tossed the ball back to Jake, who caught it with slightly deadened arms. The ball dropped out of his hands from this clumsiness. Jake leaned over to pick it back up in a daze, his mind reeling from the vastness all around him of an alien world.
“This… can’t… be real…” Jake said to his knees and shut his eyes. He started taking a huge breath.
“You can use the gate to leave if you’d like. No need to use the hole in the fence. I should probably fix that,” Fox said, more to himself than to Jake. He seemed to glow slightly in the late afternoon sun.
They were back in the city, the heat and noise rushing back in like the tide of a noisy and angry ocean. Jake breathed hard, his mind aswirl with doubt, feeling like something vast had just happened, and he was deeply unclear what that was.
Jake’s crisis mitigation side kicked in, and he immediately turned towards the gate, the ball now tucked under one arm walking briskly. But not running. Reality could be assessed more deeply at a distance further away from danger, instincts told him. What that danger was, was unimportant, only distance mattered.
“Have a great day Jake. I’m sure we’ll see each other soon!” Fox’s voice called out to him as Jake left to return to his game of foot-football. Jake did not look back out of curiosity, he looked forward out of habits trained in unsafe environments.
He played poorly after his encounter with Fox. His mind constantly wandered to the painted fence, the imaginary towering forests that seemed to call his name when he thought of them, and the strange but well dressed man that resided in both these contradictory worlds
At least he did, until he saw Fox leave the yard, and go for a walk in the opposite direction. Fox waved at Jake as he left, and Jake quickly looked away and did not maintain eye contact.
Once Fox had been gone for a time, Jake’s mind was finally able to let go of the odd encounter and return to what was really important. Foot-ball.
And he played the best game of his life.
He was clever. He was quick.
And he moved like a fox.
Editorial Notes;
The fun part about writing big self-accountability essays is then having to live with the consequences of that decision. It’s been a strange experience to start my days with reading my own essay, reminding myself of all the things I consider important to do, and then have that trigger a “oh yea, I said I’d do that” from some obscure thing that I’d forgotten about long ago.
Oof. My list of things I need to resolve is growing uncomfortably quickly.
I’ve always been a fan of to-do lists and organizing myself, but it’s interesting how if many things fall between the cracks - that list gets overwhelming, and my habit is to toss it out, and start afresh. What happens to all those to-dos that disappear with the list? Do they vanish into the ether and cease to exist? Or do they rattle about in some dark recess of the mind, reminding me of how something out there remains undone, and it will - until I do it?
It’s been a busy week and a half, and definitely not in the sense of writing stories.
I finally got around to building out the prototype for a Vipassanā meditation stool. Not that one *must* use it with Vipassanā, but it’s best use case is for us westerners who aren’t used to sitting in contemplation and simply lack the lower body mobility to be able to comfortably kneel for an hour at a time. Pretty happy with how it turned out, but I’ve still got some details to clean up. If you happen to live in physical proximity to me, I’ll have some of these to sell at a price that has yet to be determined. Stay tuned!
This promise was about two years old and it feels pretty good to have it move from “should do” to “getting done.”
Another thing I did was record and post some of my kenjutsu work. I’d had a few people ask me about what kind of sword-fighting I do, and I didn’t really have much to show them. So I asked my friend Kris to record an improvised sequence that I could share. Plus I wanted to show off my LED Katanas that some of my paid subscribers helped me purchase (Thanks Chris & Robert!)
Interesting melding reality with fantasy! Enjoyable.