The Whistling Kettle

Gone

He knew I was there.

I'd watch him as he sat beneath the trees, the earth cold under him and the sky grey above him. The wind would come through, and he'd look up from his book, and I would smile.

It wasn't always the trees. I'd see him walking along the creek that flowed through the back of our neighborhood, or sitting alone in the shopping district. He always ordered a cup of coffee, one with too much sugar and too much creamer, yet he'd sit there on the same bench and never take a sip. He did this every Saturday morning at exactly 2 in the afternoon, because he knew when I said noon, I really ment 2.

He was always on his own. From the moment I had met him, Arthur preferred to sit in the back of the class and lose himself in the worlds his books would lay out for his imagination. I remember watching him from my table at the front of the class, my feet already touching the floor as his just barely grazed it. My cheeks were still plump with baby fat, and his were too. We were children then, when we first met.

I can remember the years, years I had once wished away that I now would give anything to redo. We grew up together, Arthur and I. He moved in to the little yellow house across the street from us, and I watched from my window as the large moving van pulled into their narrow driveway. My mother had taken me over to bring them an apple pie; that was the first time I had ever really seen him.

Our town was small, and our schools were even smaller. We were in the same class every year, took the same bus, car-pooled until our senior year. Every moment we could have been together, we were.

But we weren't that day. Arthur had Creative Writing Club after school that day, and I had to get home so I could take my brother to his hockey game.

I could remember seeing him on the side of the road, that odd man that used to smile at me when I saw him walking down the sidewalks near our school. I'd stop and pet his dog, and he'd watch without a word. He was kneeled down in the rain, he looked like he was hurt. I pulled my truck over and got out to help. He said his bike was in the woods just a way, he said he had come out to the road to get help. I remember thinking that he just needed a hand, that I'd want someone to do it for me too.

The moment I died was what played in my head every moment I was here. We reached a hole in the ground, he said he had fallen in and that's how he was hurt. I leaned over to look in- that's when I felt his muddy boot stomp into my back and my body fell forward.

I hit the ground hard, and I knew something wasn't right. I turned and looked up at him, looked into those cold brown eyes as he raised his gun and shot until the barrel was empty.

I lay there, bleeding, dying, feeling the strands of my soul begin to untie themselves from this world.

I thought of Arthur. My dearest friend, my first love, my first kiss.

I watched him grab a shovel from behind a tree and begin to fill in the hole. I he stopped halfway through to wipe his gun clean and throw it in before he began digging again. For a moment, he stopped and I swore he saw me standing there.

I ran as fast as I could, ran to my truck, but my hand fell right through the handle. I panicked, I kept running and running and running until the world I knew was gone.

The police searched all of the small town of Cloud, Kansas. They looked for days and days, until finally a dog started digging. I watched them show my parents the vintage bomber jacket I wore that day, now dried with blood. It was one of the only three times in my life that I had seen my father cry.

Arthur fell to his knees that day the police came to his home.

Nearly everyone in the town attended my funeral. I was the quarter back, prom king,  everyone's friend and no one's enemy. The only one who did not attend was Arthur.

I loved his writing. My birthday presents would consist of short stories he'd make for me, and I memorized them all. Princes, heros, monsters, love- he wrote for me a whole new world that I could not find anywhere else but within the pages of his wonderful writings.

He finally broke after a month. His parents were gone, and he sat at his desk, the pages empty, before he finally stood and kicked over the whole table. He grabbed his journals from the drawer, journals that held years and years of poetry and stories, and ripped them apart. He took the bookshelf and pulled it to the ground, smashed every thing he could to pieces. I yelled and screamed for him to stop, to stop tearing apart his work, to stop ripping away his only solice. He began to smash picture frames, glass flying, wood splintering, before he finally grabbed for the last one.

It had been his birthday. I took him to the fair, and I kissed him on top of the  ferris wheel for the first time. We took a picture just moments before; we both smiled, both blushed, as the fireworks started behind us.

We both fell to our knees then. Arthur held that picture tight and wept harder then he ever had in his whole life. He realized then that I was gone, and no matter how much I yelled and begged for him to notice that I was right there, right in front of him, he wept still. That's when I, too, began to finally realize that I was gone, and that I was not coming back.

My killer was never caught, and I watched with hot and angry tears in my eyes as he died of old age, surrounded by the people he loved. He was not in my heaven, I wished he did not have his own.

I sat beside Arthur as he read under our tree, our initials still carved into the side of it from two years ago. It seemed like forever now, but it was just two years. Arthur hadn't picked up a pen since he had torn his work apart, and we both came to terms with the fact that he would never write again. I soon realized that this was not my Arthur, that my Arthur had died with me in the cold, wet earth. I was here now, walking the line between the living and the dead. I was not a ghost, I was not forgotten, I was existing in my own world. One day I would move on, when his hand was in mine again, but that day would not come for a very long time.

"Arthur."

He looked up from his novel, looked to the blue sky for a moment as a wind rolled through, and I smiled.