Don't Look Up

The Trampoline

Besides being cold, it also rains every day, and if it's not raining, it's snowing and if it's not snow, it's the wind. There is not one minute of peace.

I returned home slowly, trying to keep the heat inside my coat, cursing the idea of ​​shaving my head before winter. Even with a beanie on, I still got chills from the cold.

"Fucking hell of a day." I cursed, looking down the endless street that led me home.

I wasn't really sure if I wanted to get home. My parents needed to sign the warning letter I got from school. I was written up because I got caught drawing in geometry class again and the school doesn't like my drawings. Well, okay, maybe I wasn't written up so much because I was drawing 5-eyed, sharp-toothed monsters, and maybe it was more because I hate geometry and I'm one step away from failing the class. Or both.

A I'm walking down the street, looking at the houses and the initial signs of pathetic Christmas decorations; the light covered bushes, the Santa Clauses with their hats freezed over from the amount of snow, and the sidewalks, so swamped with ice that if there was ever something underneath, it was now just concrete water.

One of the houses on the street had a Jesus on the cross in the garden and other various religious style Christmas decorations around it... all swallowed up by the ravages of the cold.

I'm reminded of the time a nun came to one of the career days at school and the poor woman ended up seeing one of my drawings. She knelt down and asked God to save my soul from hell, just like my grandma did when she saw them too. I got lectures from both of them to stop drawing demons. I may not be the purest of people, but I tried to explain to the woman, pleading on her knees, that they were just drawings and that I didn't believe in Heaven or Hell, there were no such things as demons, just like there were no such things as angels and stuff. It was fun.

I kept walking, watching the houses, each one worse than the one before. One had a penguin dressed as Santa, which I thought was okay. Another one had a punk styled snowman. I thought of trying that one this weekend, I actually kinda liked it. The next house was the best. It had a trampoline.

I stopped, looking at it at the side of the garden. It was hidden by some trees full of branches that had been abandoned by its leaves, now only covered by strips of ice. I examined the house, there's a pile of newspapers on the porch, one of the windows was broken and the snow was not shoveled from on the stairs or the sidewalk. Nobody lived there.

I looked at both sides of the street, as empty as my geometry notebook. I rushed into the garden, tossing my backpack somewhere, and started climbing into the trampoline.

It was always my favorite thing to do when my parents rented them for my birthday parties, but they stopped paying for them when I turned 13. They also wouldn't let me play on them even on my stupid cousins stupid bithdays as well. "You're too big Evan, you can't play with the kids anymore, Evan. It's going to hurt them, Evan." Stupid.

"Nice!" I exclaim, climbing up and flexing my knees. I feel the trampoline sway and creak.

I start to jump. There's a lot of accumulated snow, it bounces and flies everywhere. Snow falls all over my body, but I don't even feel cold anymore. The effort of jumping warms me up and my laughter creates dense white clouds in the air around me.

I pick up momentum and go higher, higher, and higher. When I'm about to touch the farthest branches from the trees, I lift my feet up and lie down in the air, letting myself fall onto my back. I look up at the cloudy gray sky and, for a second, I remember a silly thing that my grandma used to say when I played.

"Be careful, Ven! Always jump on your feet, dear. Be careful on those playthings! Don't look up!"

From one second to another, in the time that it takes for this memory to come to my mind, of me falling and hitting my back on the trampoline, It just doesn't. My back doesn't touch the trampoline, but the snow flies around me as if it had. And now, as I'm looking up, snow flying around me, I'm also looking down.

It was so quick, it was so fast. The same time it takes your body to slow down and start falling after you jump up. The moment when inertia ends and gravity pulls you back down.

Then, what once was a gray sky was now red, orange and black. It was boiling hot and I could see pairs of big, dark eyes staring back into my soul. Its teeth were roughly my size, its mouth smiled at me as if it saw my soul as dinner. Horns grew out of the sides of its heads, protruding from its shoulders along with the strange collection of wings and other limbs.

I was looking down as if I was falling straight to Hell. Suddenly, I feel my body going up and the snow swallows me up.

I'm back on the trampoline, face down and buried in the snow. Right then I start screaming and kicking. I sit up, dripping with sweat, my heart is racing and my body is shaking. I dig into the snow in a pointless desperation to find something that I couldn't even say what it was. I found only the fabric of the trampoline. Nothing beyond that, and snow.

"Fuck!" I hurriedly stood up, shaking and falling down from the stairs to the floor.

I shake the snow off my body and run in a hurry, trying to put my backpack back on as I fix my beanie, almost falling from my head. My ears were burning. I trip over a stone walking through the garden, fixing myself until I'm on the street again.

With my heart pounding and my breathing uneven, I walk on autopilot in a straight line trying to understand what happened. What was that? Was that Hell? But I was looking up!

I couldn't stop sweating.

Even so, in the midst of my despair, a little voice inside me insisted on asking itself:

"If I was looking up, could that actually be Heaven?..."

I stop in the middle of the street, euphoria taking over my body.

"And what if I jump the other way and look down, what will I see?"

Guess I'd have to stop by that house tomorrow to find out.