1. A ball sits untouched in the middle of a field. A man walking past, on his way to a blind date, sees it. His first thought is to kick it good and hard like he’s kicked balls in his past. So he veers towards it. As he comes closer he begins to wonder why a ball would be left untouched in the middle of a field. He would never leave a ball behind. A ball is large and hard to forget, unless one is deliberately leaving it behind, he thinks. You don’t just go out with a ball and come home ball-less, in the same way that you don’t go out wearing pants and come home trouser-less. Unless it was deliberate. Why would someone leave behind a ball on purpose? he thinks. Maybe it isn’t a ball at all, he thinks. Maybe it’s a bomb. It might be a bomb disguised as a ball, meant to blow the first fool to kick it into a million foolish shards. That seems insane to him, such random violence, especially since it would most likely be a child victimized. Children like to kick balls. But even if there isn’t a bomb, there might be something else in it. What if it is slit in four places and filled with dog shit, so that when you kick it dog shit flies all over the field, your shoe, your suit. Or perhaps someone has filled the ball with cement so that when you kick it, the ball doesn’t move but your foot bones shatter, and maybe your ankle. The man has been fooled by coins glued to the floor, he doesn’t need to be fooled by a cement-filled ball. By this time he is very wary of the ball and incensed at the bastard who left it behind. He can’t believe that there are people like that in the world. He isn’t even comfortable thinking about the ball and so he changes his path and walks in a wide circle around it. He looks at his shoes.

2. A woman comes by not long after and she, too, is tempted to kick the ball. But then she thinks that the ball must have been left behind by someone. Someone who didn’t mean to leave it behind. Someone who would be sad to have left it. Tomorrow that person will come back searching for it. She instantly catalogues the significant things she has lost in her life: a stuffed rhino, her fifth-grade backpack full of library books, a wallet with her first driver’s license, a ring, a down jacket. If she kicks the ball it might get lost. It might get lost in the bushes, even though it might take two kicks to get it into the bushes, or even three because the bushes are quite far away, but all the same... She quickens her pace and goes where she is going.

3. Later, close to dusk, another man walking across the field contemplates kicking. He’d seen the ball earlier in the day but had been in a hurry. Now he is going slowly homeward, not hurrying home because there isn’t anything waiting for him there. His girlfriend has broken up with him. Why is the ball still there? Do people know something that he doesn’t? His ex always tells him that he is, you know, kinda dumb—that he doesn’t ever notice anything until it pinches his butt. He doesn’t always remember her birthday. He doesn’t notice when she is really, really sad. He doesn’t know how to act right around her friends so that she isn’t embarrassed. Really she doesn’t know why she was ever with him at all. Because he’s kinda dumb, because he’s been dumb his whole life, he always figures that everyone else knows something he doesn’t. It is a safe default. There must be a reason not to kick the ball, since the ball hasn’t been kicked. So he walks away. Besides, he thinks, It’s a volleyball. Not for kicking.
     The ball sits in the middle of the field as the sky changes from blue to orange to grey to deep, deep purple. It rains a little.

 

 
 

 

  
  1

     Imagine the love story graph and it always appears as a series of spikes and dips. It looks like teeth. The teeth of a monster, appropriately. I love you, I stab you in the heart, I love you, I crush you with my heel. But. Then imagine, charted on the same axes, a thin line that gradually curves up from zero—everything always starts at zero—and plateaus; it oscillates slightly, but it never comes down, it never severs, it never peaks, it doesn’t run into a wall. What about that?

2

     There’s always an obstacle unless there isn’t one; the obstacle is not always overcome. Then you cry for the star-struck lovers. So sad. And if the lovers are triumphant? You are torn up between horror and joy.