By Aryn Joy Tomasetti

They call me Henry, it’s been two years, and I’m still ten.

Kids don’t think about time the way adults do. We don’t count it quickly and we’re not visited by the ghosts from our childhood. We are the ghosts from our childhood; we just haven’t made it to the future yet. All the same, I thought I knew what Dad meant when he said I’d only be ten for a year — to make the most of it. I thought I knew he meant that he wished he were ten, or had cared when he was ten. And I cared for all the reasons we usually do: I was bigger, better, and could walk alone to the baseball diamond.

We are the ghosts from our childhood; we just haven’t made it to the future yet.

My whole life split that summer, when Mondays and Sundays still blurred together. I woke up when my mom interrupted the phone’s buzzing and I could hear her jangling bracelets and her smacking lips, and I felt the world slide by my bed and through my body while she told the phone how soon August had come. I remember wondering how it’d snuck up on us.

That day, I ate mac and cheese for lunch, with ketchup mixed in it. Dad crossed his eyes at me over the table and stuck his tongue out — he can’t stand mac and cheese with ketchup. I still remember the tang of the ketchup coating my tongue and the way the milk sparkled in my dad’s mustache where he was eating a quick bowl of cereal. 

The day my life split was a hot day; a heavy, sunny day, and I felt the heat weigh the soles of my shoes down as I drifted toward the baseball diamond. I knew Gabe, Joe, and Anthony were there ahead of me, with their trading card tins glinting fierce and blue in the sharp sun. I wanted Gabe’s David Ortiz. He was my best player — I had a signed ball in my proudest place on the shelf. This summer, we were at the diamond every day so we could play in little league. Try-outs hung tantalizing at the end of August. 

In the diamond, sweat trickled through the creases of my palm inside my hot glove. Gnats died in my eyes beneath the rim of my hat. Tunthk, the glowing baseballs hit the sun, and fell into the yellow grass, rolling.

I don’t remember the faces I saw floating over the green from left field—someone told me later who they were. I had looked the other way and watched a dragonfly lightning by as if it had no time in the world. Then I was cold. I think I knew the ball was coming, hurled at the speed of sound — at the speed a fifth grader could hit, anyway. It scalpeled the air, zeroed in, uncalculated. 

I think I knew the ball was coming, hurled at the speed of sound — at the speed a fifth grader could hit, anyway.

Then it hit me, blasting the skin into the cheekbone until it split and burst two inches from my nose. Blood pumped through my right eye socket, darkening it. My face reeled around so hard that my brain bounced off the back of my skull. 

Anthony said I howled.

Joe said I was dead and came back.

Gabe thought a shooter was coming out from the woods, and went witless, and peed himself.

I guess the lawn mower man came by later and cut all the field grass and ate up the ball that did it. No one saw that ball again.

I could see again in a white-blue room and I thought my mom was talking on the phone because it was buzzing. And then I realized she was talking on a different phone, because the buzz kept going on and I wondered why she didn’t hang up and stop the other phone from ringing. She was saying: “Honey, oh honey — can you hear me? Honey, they sewed up your face. Honey, don’t cry — why are you crying? What hurts, darling? I’ll get the nurse — honey —” and she kept going but I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

Then my dad came in and I thought he would pick up the phone but he was already talking on a different one. He was saying, “That old Joe gave you a shiner — a real one — like the movies. You’ve got a scar right under your eye. I won’t let them heal it just right. I’ll let it heal like you want it to — I know, I know —”

Their voices tangled together so tightly that I think I forgot to breathe because I don’t remember what happened next.

My mom and my dad were there the first time. But I didn’t see them again for months. 

The next time I woke up, a woman with hair like honey glowing around her face watched me from the window seat in the room. She had a stack of books next to her, on the side that meant she’d finished with them — I still can’t explain how I knew about those books.

She stood up and came over softly. Her lips made a damp smacking sound when she opened them. “Honey, how do you feel?”

My numb arms wouldn’t listen at first, but I managed to crawl one out of the heavy blanket so I could reach and touch my face, which squished and swelled under my fingers. She could see it better than I could. I didn’t know why she was asking.

“Honey,” she said. “It’s me…”

Maybe she knew I didn’t recognize her. My stomach wriggled and I grimaced at the woman’s narrowed face. “What’s your name?” I was trying to be polite. Then I noticed the sound of a fly in the room. “Catch that fly,” I suggested helpfully. I’d already forgotten what she called herself.

Her face blacked in and out, and each time it was different. I could tell she was worried about something, so I had an idea.

I told the man in the room he could play the game with us too. It was a classic: Twenty Questions.

“I’ll come up with it,” I said, and waited for them to ask questions. 

I was thinking of a fly. 

When the man guessed a fly, I was thinking of nothing at all.

When the woman asked me if I felt alright, I realized she was worried about something, so I had an idea. I told her and the man with his arm around her that they could play a game with me. “A classic. Twenty Questions.”

Tears hung from his bristling mustache. So I closed my eyes and waited for them to ask what I was thinking.

I was thinking of a fly. When she guessed it was a fly, I realized she was worried about something. I offered to play a game with them to drown out the flies swarming in my ears.

My hands were shaking and my feet felt cold. The woman was crying, and I realized she was really worried about something. “Tell me about it. Maybe kill the flies so it doesn’t hurt anymore. Then you’ll stop crying.” I knew I was giving her perfect advice. If someone could just kill the flies, my head would stop hurting.

This is normal. Many people who suffer from a traumatic brain injury will experience symptoms such as mild to severe displacement, amnesia, headaches, nausea, dizziness, a loss of coordination, smell, hearing, or taste. A patient may briefly recall certain memories before forgetting them again. With proper treatment, however, the patient may recover both his memory and his lost sensations and return to regular life.

In the movies, when the hero is coming to in the hospital or tied to a chair and you hear the ringing sound buzz and then fade out — that’s a lie. They fade the sound out because it’s a movie. My world rang until I woke up the morning that we left the hospital. 

My world rang until I woke up the morning that we left the hospital.

I went in the blue car with the same man and woman who had stayed with me in the hospital room. They were nice people and they wanted me to get better; I sort of liked them. The woman took off all her bracelets when I told her they were too loud, which was nice of her. I had it in my head she’d never taken off those bracelets before. 

They brought me back to a house that had my room in it and fed me and the man stood in the bathroom with a towel when I showered in case I forgot to get out. And when the sun shattered the shadow on the wall I ate pea soup. When it slid up and slit the ceiling I ate mashed potatoes and when I was awake before it had crawled across the floor I ate applesauce. The woman without the bangles brought it in and she always had so many smiles and words to say. She left whenever she cried, because it was too loud for me — and it woke up the flies.

Once, after I was done with the soup, I wobbled over the patch of sun to look at the ball on my shelf. It had red stitches, the same as the ones I felt under my fingertips when I touched my face. But it didn’t melt or move under my hand like my skin did. Someone had written his name on it in black. It was a perfectly good ball other than that. I asked the man about it.

“That’s David Ortiz’s,” he said. He said it like I didn’t need an explanation. 

“I’m not David Ortiz.” I was worried that person would want his ball back.

When the man laughed, fragments and scraps whirled up in my mind, the heat in my chest expanding like it had since the time I only knew him by his laugh and his voice and I lunged at him and hugged his neck while the feeling lasted.

He talked to me about baseball until I knew it again. I surprised myself with our old jokes.

“That scar’s healing up terribly,” he said after bringing me my applesauce, his mustache balanced on a grin. He sat at the end of my bed holding coffee sloshing near the top of the mug.

“Like Kylo-Ren,” I hoped.

My dad laughed. “Too bad it didn’t split your eyebrow too.”

I pressed my finger against the bristles over my eye. “You think I could get hit again?”

The woman’s cold shadow stopped the sun on my sheets. “No.” Her voice came like an icecube into my ear and I wanted it out.

I rubbed my ear into my shoulder hard. “Get out of here —”

The woman made a noise — like a fly was caught in her throat — and her shadow wobbled in my lap and my dad jumped up and spilled the coffee in splotches over the blanket and caught the woman in the doorway. 

I watched him hug the woman in the doorway, and lead her out.

I shivered even though the coffee was hot where it soaked through the sheet to my shin.

I tried not to tell her to leave anymore, so she wouldn’t cry or make that choking noise. It made the inside of my skull itch.

One of the times she brought me applesauce, though, I went out of bed and slid my socks over the floorboards. She didn’t move in the doorway while she watched me, face frozen. I reached my arms out, then rushed to put them around her. I felt that hugging her might turn me back into myself. Against her shoulder — smelling something that sharpened the pain behind my eyes — I almost knew I had been hers once when I was very tiny and had fit in her arms. The scent made my head feel sick and when her throat clenched and she hiccuped into my scalp and her hands pressed my arms tighter I had to break away from her and sit in the cool pocket by the window with my head denting against my knee caps.

I don’t know when I started thinking about her as my mom. She didn’t cry in front of me when I said it the first time — I said it carefully, like lowering a heavy brick into place and jumping your fingers out of the way just in time.

Anthony, Joe, and Gabe used to visit when my mom and theirs made them. The second year, though, they came on their own. They were starting sixth grade when Physical Therapy discharged me from its office, when we’d begun to be friends again. 

But there was always something they weren’t telling me.

And that second summer after The Accident, I knew what it was. It hit me like the ball had, in the jet black empty of my bedroom. The clock with its red letters broke across the dark: 2:00 a.m. AUGUST 14. My sense of time sharpened like a scalpel in the wash of red light. An onslaught of thoughts rode in. In two weeks and a day, school would start. Fifteen days, and I’d participate in the Bus ride, and Classes, and packed-in Lunch tables with nothing more than elbow room. And I’d be back in fourth grade. And the faces of Anthony, Gabe, and Joe floated in my mind’s eye, staring out a window of sixth grade. I knew what they weren’t telling me, that I was still ten. That I’d been alive twelve years, like they had, but hadn’t gotten older for two of them. I’d been stuck. I was stuck. And I needed to get free. 

So when the clock lit up seven, I creaked out of my house, clicking the back door closed behind me. I ignored the helmet mom got me to stop any other baseballs and jogged down to the diamond. I went out in the middle and stood where the grass touched the backs of my knees and the sun fell flat into the weedy red palm where baseball used to happen. 

Early bees buzzed around the field.

I pressed the scar for good luck, feeling the thinned ridges where the ball had split the skin. And I started at first base, digging my sneaker into the flat red earth. I counted down, then burst off, slamming through second, tapping third with a worn sneaker, and trampling across home again at last. I bent over, hands pressing into my knees. I breathed in the red dirt and buzz and taste of summer morning. I started at home again, then sprinted off. 

I had it in my battered head that if I just ran the bases long enough, hard enough, I’d be free of ten. I’d join Anthony and Gabe and Joe at home plate at last, and be twelve. I thought I had to run the bases for every game I hadn’t played, every game they’d played without me while I was lying in my bed, letting time slide by my body. 

Sweat trickled through the grooves of my scar, bees hummed in the grass, and my feet pounded around and round the bases. 

I was running for almost twenty minutes when my dad found me and told me I had to stop. He carried me to the truck, listening to me babble about why I had to run. We drove back home, and I asked my dad how the past had made it to the future without taking me with it. 

I know now I wouldn’t have escaped even if he’d let me keep running. I still can’t get away from what Gabe and Anthony and Joe aren’t telling me. Or away from the sick looks from teachers, from my mom, from the other ten year olds. They look at me like I’m a ghost of myself. 

And… I am a ghost of myself. 

I haven’t made it to the future yet.

Aryn Joy Tomasetti is a junior studying English.