"First Kiss, Last Bell"
by Joel Bowman
“Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath.”
~ Psalm 39:5
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "The inevitable A.I. takeover... a looming energy crisis... western civ on the brink... Ho hum. Ho hum. Dear readers will kindly forgive our melancholy disposition. It is with a heavy heart that we bring you today’s tidings...
On a blistering, late summer’s day, in what now seems like another lifetime, a nervous boy knelt on a worn pew in the primary school chapel, his stomach full of butterflies. From behind the altar, a solemn man in a purple stole preached of sin, repentance, redemption and other such matters beyond the boy’s comprehension. Confused and not a little unsettled, his young mind wandered from the father’s words, unable to avoid the immovable object looming in his immediate future.
Outside the stained glass window, set ajar to seduce a listless Lenten breeze, the crows and magpies cawed in the gnarled branches of the nearby melaleuca forest. The air in the chapel was still and dry, parched like the paperbarks. Distracted by the murder and the mischief, the boy thought of Ms. Zajczak, the short-tempered Polish teacher with the close cropped silver hair who, he had heard it whispered, arrived before class one morning armed with a shotgun, and calmly proceeded to blow the raspy birds clean out of the trees in a bloody massacre. Yet here they are, thought the boy, arguing and caw, caw, cawing, as is their nature.
The reverie afforded him little respite, for no sooner had the chatter and the clamor resumed when his mind turned once more to the impending lunch break and the true source of his anguish. It was not the ominous cawing, or the portentous sermonizing, or even old Zajczak’s shotgun that set the boy’s nerves on edge. Rather, as the reader has already guessed, it was a member of the fairer sex that worried him so.
Earlier that very morning, under the shade of a melaleuca copse on the lower field, beneath the cawing crows and the arguing magpies, he had made a terrible mistake. When confronted with the age-old schoolyard dilemma, he hastily chose dare over truth and, before he knew it, kissed a girl for the very first time. Worse still, by the time the recess bell tolled, through an unstoppable momentum belonging to some unwritten code of playground rules and etiquette, he and the girl were “going steady.”
The problem, glaring and conspicuous even to him: she was cool, funny, smart, and popular. He was... not. It was only a matter of time before everyone discovered this obvious, strangely overlooked fact. Then what?
Having failed to stay the momentum of the morning’s disaster, the boy understood the cold and pitiless nature of the task laid before him: preemptive breakup. And so, to his everlasting shame, he passed a note to his first kiss, asking her to meet him under the stairs directly after the lunch bell... where, without giving too much away, he mumbled through a half-prepared speech, the gist of which was that they were better off “just friends” after all. “Of course,” the girl responded, blinking her yellow-green eyes. “I was thinking the same.”
With an unsettling mixture of relief and guilt, the boy sat through afternoon classes, willing the last bell of the day to ring out over the incessant calling of the callous old crows.
The boy’s memory grows unreliable for the next few years as primary school turns into high school and college and the ensemble of classes and characters shifts before his aging eyes. Sometimes he sees the girl on the edge of a group, laughing at a joke he cannot hear, or parlaying a rumor he cannot quite recall. Other times he imagines that she left school altogether, maybe that same summer, moved away with her family, continued her life somewhere else, in some other town. Or maybe that was another friend, from another grade...
Some years later, not long after the boy had left his hometown and moved overseas, he ran into another childhood friend in a city far from home. Seated at the bar in a hotel lobby, the old playground compatriots talked for hours about their youth, summoning teachers and classmates to life, jogging one another’s memories with long forgotten anecdotes and water-cooler gossip.
When the girl’s name came up, the friend’s face turned from laughter to sorrow. “You didn’t hear?” she sighed, relaying the news to the boy even before the words came out. “She died in a motorcycle accident. That was, Geez... I dunno... That was years ago.”
The boy’s heart sank. Although he had not thought of the girl for a very long time, he occasionally recalled the days of his childhood, the smell of the wild flowers in the little school chapel, the taste of the eucalyptus drops from the school tuckshop, the sounds of the birds in the paperbark trees, down by the lower paddock. And sometimes, as when he ran into an old acquaintance, a long, long way from home, he remembered the girl, funny and cool, who agreed to be his friend.
Far from the crows, the melaleuca forest, and the days of his youth, and with no one close by to reminisce with, the boy’s connection to his childhood grew ever fainter as the years went by. Once or twice, when he ran into a friend abroad or visited family back home, he asked after the people from the neighborhood. Some had moved on. Others stayed. A few even taught at his old school, watching over the next generation, listening out for the same lunch bells.
Many years later (he cannot remember exactly when, or where), he ran into another friend and the pair fell into a familiar conversation. When the girl’s name came up, the boy, who was now a man with a wife and a young child of his own, felt the old pang of sorrow in his chest. “Oh, you heard that one, too?” his friend asked. “You know, that was just some silly rumor. Not sure where or how it started. But yeah, I swear. She’s alive and well. I see her little sister all the time...”
Overwhelmed, the boy recalled the girl’s face, resurrected, as it were, into the realm of the living. He thought of all the years he had falsely presumed her dead, more years – many more – than he had even known her alive. He felt an enormous, unexpected sense of relief, like a fresh breeze blowing in through the windows, an unburdening of his memory. He wanted to laugh, to celebrate this person’s life, ridiculous though that seemed. For in fact, he did not even know the girl, who after all was now a woman, in the slightest... save for the strange fact that she was suddenly alive.
For years afterward, whenever he ran into an old friend or found himself reminiscing about his childhood, he would quietly recall the girl who he thought had died so young, remembering all over again that she was, in fact, “alive and well.” He could not say why this brought him such joy. Perhaps it made the little boy inside him feel alive, too.
Then, this past weekend, the boy received a message from back home. The girl who once agreed to be his friend, once brought back to life, had passed away again. Cause uncertain, but verified. Now, what’s a little boy to do? R.I.P. ~ Joanna C. (1981-2026)"
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