Because I didn't do the NPR challenge...

Here's my piece from our Flash Fiction challenge!

Calvin Foster

by

Blue McNiel

            Calvin Foster launched kick balls over the moon and took his time orbiting the yellow, painted-on bases of the York Elementary blacktop—bases which held so much meaning during recess that it seemed criminal for parents to drive atop them during band concerts and back to school nights when the blacktop was used as additional parking.   Blonde hair blowing in the breeze and breathing out of his mouth as usual, Calvin walked those bases with pride while some children scurried to retrieve the ball from a nearby yard and others waited impatiently for their turn to kick. 

            “I’ll probably play in college,” Calvin said, carrying his tray of rectangle pizza, corn and chocolate milk from the cafeteria window to his usual table by the stage.  “That or wrestle.  I want to hit a guy with a chair someday, on TV,” he’d later add on the walk walking back to our classroom.  “You’d be a fine wrestler,” the teachers often told him, and they meant it. 

            With winter came a mean streak in Calvin.  It could have been the fact that indoor recess did not allow kicking any balls of any sort, it could have been the fact that Calvin and his 7 siblings, who also had C names, lived in a three bedroom house with a basement full of pug dogs that constantly bred with each other and spread parvovirus back and forth again and again, none of them eating much—the children or the puppies—because Mr. Foster couldn’t get work in winter and Mrs. Foster daydreamed too much.  She daydreamed herself out of the house and the neighborhood and the city, out of any sort of reality at all, and she’d never come back as long as long as she lived. 

            The last winter Calvin lived in the neighborhood some men went into their house and took his mother away.  I rode my bicycle by his house that afternoon and I saw him and his older brother out in their backyard trying to dig a hole in the frozen ground.  I heard from a girl who lived in the same cul-de-sac that after I rode by they raked all of the puppies out of the basement and into the hole and covered it up with snow from their dad’s truck bed.  Someone came back the next day and took some of his siblings away, and then took him away, and no kids at school ever saw him or kicked as far as him ever again.  Long distance running became the new craze that spring.