Arrow - Final Draft

Arrow

            The room laid out thinly like the air, sparse and shattered by the roar of the crowd outside.  Their infectious words were cutting mad - rampant tears through the walls and window as I stood, a nervous wreck.  A wreck fit for the widest highway to halt traffic for hours.  It was the best day of my life, and the most frightening.  I was not a man that was keen to be so public with my private life, but here we were, doing exactly what I had always feared.  It was, however, also a good feeling because, although I had feared it, it was also the one thing that I had wanted since I was a boy.  I took a breath and began to use her voice in my mind to drown the noises out.  And as I stood waiting for her, the words from outside would slip through, here and there, just like the gumballs that would fall from my pockets in my youth. 

            When life was much different, way back, when I was a boy I loved the movies.  And each Saturday morning I would rush down to spend my day at the movie theater soaked in the fantastical worlds of the silver screen.  On the way there, I would always stop at Witherby's Candy Shop to stuff my pockets with Witherby's Mystical Gumballs in preparation for the day.  These tiny pieces of painted joy would be difficult to contain in two small pockets, and would begin to rain and fall as I ran, filled too full at the candy counter.  They would start to fall one at a time, and I would notice and watch a gumball go bouncing and rolling  across a busy street or into a rain gutter.  As I would begin to speed and run downtown, I would stop noticing the sound of the candy-coated colors falling from my pockets and hitting the pavement, the worries and cares diminishing with each step closer to the black and white movie, excited and looking forward to the magical show about to come tumbling forward from the projection booth, careening across the dusty light of the theater above our heads, splattering itself across the screen, completely exposed as light - immeasurably thin and rolled out like raw pastry. 

            I met Sara in the summer.  It was a particularly hot southern summer, so I and a group of young boys were, as usual, collected together at the local swimming hole which we called the 'Old Man,' named for the nose and eye shaped features that were formed in the cliff the stoically rose from the water on the other side of the river.  It was such a hot day, it had seemed pointless to gather up a game of baseball at the field out behind Finney’s junkyard, so we raced our bikes down to the river below the town, where the train tracks run out into the woods and run on for miles.  There were never any ‘old’ people there, so we could cuss and spit and walk around without our shoes on.  Usually the boys would sit along the big rocks with their feet dangling down in the water talking about things that all boys do; telling jokes, talking baseball and looking at dirty magazines, filled with pictures that somehow, never really did anything for me.  I would play along like I liked them, but I was always a little different from the other boys, and I knew it.

            “Arrows,” one of the boys suddenly muttered in the direction of the path leading it’s way from the field behind the graveyard.  Upon hearing that word, just like those Saturday morning runs, a gumdrop spilled from my pockets somewhere deep within my soul.  There were two girls from school walking down the path.

            Sara had just scurried toward us and swiftly away from her friend, who had then continued along the path away from the river. The head nod that they left each other with implied that they might catch up later for some previously discussed activity.  She was wearing a neon green bathing suit top, a pair of cut-off jeans, a pair of flips flops, and had a freshly plucked white daisy sticking out of the side of her dark black ponytail.

            Sometimes, there is a person in one's lifetime that swoops in and uproots the whole thing completely.  And for seemingly no reason, at that moment, she was that one for me.  It’s strange how something as simple as a singular smile can be so devastating.  She was never one to be discreet.  Sara truly knew how to live her life, even then. 

            I was sitting with my feet in the water, mostly listening; a skill I had perfected in my short social existence.  I never seemed to have much to offer to the conversations had at the river.  This particular summer day the water creeping over the river stones into the giant standing pool of water before us was an incomprehensibly rich blue.  I remember seeing the color and trying to think how I would describe it if I were a painter, asking an assistant to go and retrieve a tube of it from my supply closet.  I couldn’t come up with anything good but I was bored with the particular monologue that Davey Lohman was into, going on-and-on about chewing tobacco and how it sharpened thinking for the smart men in town, and how that was why he had been chewing it for the last week.  He always was a ranting idiot.  I always figured that he just needed to feel like people liked him so he wouldn’t ever shut his mouth and give them time to decide.

            I was sitting and trying to think of a name for this newly discovered blue in the water when I heard her voice.  “Hey you!”  Sensing that the greeting was aimed at me, I turned around quickly and, although I was no longer facing the water, I still saw the color.  There were two drops of it seeming to fall down her face from her dark hair.  I recognized her from the neighborhood and instantly decided that the perfect name for the color, the only possible name for the unbelievable color, was Sara.  Sara blue, and that was what I called her too, but not yet.

            “Yeah?”  I could have come up with a more distinguished and graceful response, but, my early teen shyness prevailed and they were the only words I could come up with in that moment.  It didn’t matter to Sara, she wasn’t listening for any lofty words. 

            “Can you follow me for a minute?  I have something to show you.  Well, I guess it’s something that I want to ask you, or talk to you about.  I…would you just follow me?”

            “Alright.”  I was always one of those people who tried to live my life like a novel, and in a novel, the best chapters always seemed to follow dialogue like that.  So I got up and followed her.  I never really let on to anybody that I read books, but secretly I loved them and I always sort of envisioned myself as one of the protagonists from the stories.  It was a guilty pleasure which I indulged in quietly and often. 

            My friends said a couple of vaguely ridiculous things at me and I flipped them off.  They were childhood words, slurs, funny volleys that we could say when old people weren’t around.   It was apparent that they would give me a hard time if I went; and I wouldn’t have, but there was something about this girl.  That blue in her eyes was impossible to get over.  And I was hypnotized into compliance with her request.

            I had to run to catch up with Sara.  She was out of sight by the time I dragged myself from the ground, dispelled my friends prodding and brushed myself off in a careful stride that seemed non-anxious and naturally composed.  I could still hear her wild feet crackling a path into the forest floor.  I envisioned that it would fade if she got too much lead on me, so as soon as I was out of sight of my watchful peers, I ran.

            She had stopped and was waiting for me when I finally caught up to her.  She was standing in a way that I wasn’t used to.  It made me slightly uncomfortable, but I kept my cool and approached her casually.  She was looking down at the ground, arms crossed, and head tilted to the left side, hiding her eyes, by the time I got close.  Then she looked up at me without raising her head and smiled.  It made my heart pulse faster.  It scared me, I had seen that look before in the movies, I knew what it could mean.  I was unsure how to react so I let go.  Threw myself to the wind, and there came the scene in the movie.  There was no turning back.

            “What is it?”  Again ungraceful but to the point, I was out of breath.

            “Well I see you at the water sometimes,” she began to explain, “and you’re very…um…”

            “Very what?”

            She bit her lip and glared at me.  “This is hard,” she explained.

            As anyone in my situation would, I intrinsically knew what she was getting at.  It was as if it had been burned onto my life since my birth.  This moment was going to happen.  These words were destined to come out of her mouth.  I knew.  I may have second guessed it for some sake of drama or consciousness, or maybe it was just to draw this moment out and make it more vibrant and colorful, but staring into her eyes, that incredible wash of blue, I had to help her.  “It’s alright,” I assured.

            With a slightly worried and slightly relieved look she smiled a little; slightly worried because now she was closer to saying it, and slightly relieved that now she was locked in and she would have to say it.  She could no longer run out on her intent and leave it in the air to be explained as youthful insanity, or a joke.  It had become intimate.  “Are you sure?” she asked.  She took a step closer to me and mirrored the movement in kind.

    “I think so, yeah.”

            She smiled, and like in the movies, we kissed.  First, as if we were taking a test run, and then we picked up pace and ran it straight into a brick building.  ‘You break it, you buy it;’ and did we ever. 

            She slipped me something in a quick grab of my palm.  It later turned out to be three pieces of paper folded into a small triangle.  I could see that there was writing on it, in blue ball point pen ink.  “This will explain everything,” she said.  “Please read the whole thing before you say anything.”  I agreed and she took it from my hand and put it in my pocket.  She pulled me close and whispered in my ear, “promise you won’t read it until you get home.” 

I could feel her lips brush my ear as she spoke.  The feeling that it evoked was insane.  There is still nothing like it in the entirety of the world.

            “I promise.”

            She kissed me again, this time longer than the last, wide open mouth and the softest lips.  It was as if she wanted to never stop, or to die here for the chance that, eternity is spent, frozen in the moment you go out.  Her tongue on my tongue, her silver rings on her perfect fingers on my sweaty back, and her waist on my palms.  Life went from sepia to Technicolor in an instant.  I was destroyed, and saved.  I was in for the duration, I was hooked.

            When we were finally able to tear our lips apart from each other, and then carefully our hands, it had only been moments.  She smiled a few more times as she slowly stepped backwards into the field and then turned away.   She looked back several times before she faded out of sight through the tree-line.  Each time smiling, and biting her lower lip.  All I could think was, ‘goddamn you Sara Blue.”

When I came walking out of the woods back to the group of boys sitting along the rocks I tried to act natural and calm, as if nothing had happened except friendly advice, maybe about another girl, or schoolwork.  I had taken a slightly longer path back just to collect myself.  I knew I was in for it.  As soon as they heard me, they started in with the chorus of “ooh’s” and “ah’s” and other basic ridiculousness.  I knew it was all in good fun, and I played along.  I didn’t smile with guilt, I played it perfectly cool.  I was really good at it by now.  They calmed down a little bit and asked me what it was all about.  I told them that it was about someone at school that she had taken a liking to, and that she had wanted my opinion on the matter.  They basically bought it, we all laughed in some discomfort and I sat down and plunked my feet in the water as if nothing had changed.

I sat there for a few minutes while there was silence.  One by one, we were skimming stones across the water, using the rope swing hanging from an old oak tree across the river as a target.  We could never hit it, and had decided it was too far away.  I had hit it once when I was out here alone in the morning, thinking, but had never mentioned it since no one would have believed me and I didn’t want to have to try to prove it to anyone.

            We were sitting there listening to the plunking of the stones when it happened.  It was Billy who broke the silence with a word that I somehow knew was coming.

            “Shot,” he said.  I smiled as if it was a casual joke but I hated the word.  It was designed to cut hard and deep.  As always, I let it drop.  I was distracted.  That blue was hard to get over.  In fact, I never did.

So here I was, standing, years later.  There are a couple of close friends of mine standing in the room.  They were visually uncomfortable at the noise from the street.

            “Fucking arrows!”  Out slip two more gumballs.  Sneaky bastards. 

Sara is upstairs standing in her dress.  She had decided to wear her prom dress.  In truth, it was the dress that would have been her prom dress if we had actually gone to the prom.  Instead of the prom, we walked down and stood by the railroad tracks, where we would sit and talk together on summer days, and together we danced to the sound of the river until midnight.  She was crying, I didn’t ask her, but I assumed it was a mixture of happiness at our moonlight bliss and sadness that we had to be such outlaws to have it.  I caught her tear on my hand and ran it into her hair as I pulled her closer and kissed her.  We made love for the first time beneath the stars in a field by the railroad tracks on our way back home.  It was incredible, it was rebellious, and it was wild.  It was perfect.  It wasn’t very far from the spot were we first kissed and admitted our love. 

It was also the spot were I asked her about today.  This spectacular day.  She said a big ‘yes’ with that same tear rolling down her face.  I always felt like my love was some sort of disease that she caught from me, and that in some ways she would have been better off without it.  I loved her though, and I knew that, all trade-offs aside, she was very happy. 

I was trying to breathe as I waited for her to emerge, just a couple minutes and we would be together for the rest of our lives. 

When you plan for days such as this one, there are certain things that you’re supposed to have to plan, like the honeymoon: I booked a flight to Paris, the flowers: daffodils, the church: this isn’t exactly a church but it used to be.  It’s my Grand Papa’s house.  It used to be a church.  He converted it for a deluxe abode when my Mama was born.  He was a widower and the two of them lived there together, a king and a princess in their castle.  Sara’s getting ready in my mother’s childhood bedroom right now.  There are other things to plan too, like the cake: Sara is allergic to chocolate so we’re having vanilla, but there are certain things you shouldn’t have to plan, like police protection.

            When I asked her to marry me, it was autumn.  I remember how nervous I was when I asked.  Not so much when I asked Sara, I was more nervous when I asked her parents.  It was so soon after the law changed.  I didn’t want us to be one of ‘those’ couples jumping all over it right away, like we just wanted to make a point.  It was just that I had been wanting it so much for so long that I couldn’t wait any longer.  I was sure that they would think that it was far too soon. 

            I drove down there early in the morning.  Sara had spent the night in my apartment after having a cook-out and campfire with some friends the night before.  I left Sara a note that there were waffles on the counter, and jam in the fridge, and that I had a couple errands to run.  I also left her an empty journal for poetry on the nightstand hoping it would inspire her to occupy her time with a pastime that always brought her so much joy, but which she found time for far too infrequently.

            It was easier than I dreamed it would be.  Alison and Jen seemed to have already known it was coming.  I think Jen must have seen me coming up the drive alone and ran to the cabinet for a shot or two of Southern Comfort, straight from the bottle and downed with a gulp to prepare herself for what was now an inevitable moment.  By the time I reached the door they were waiting.  Alison poured me a coffee and we sat on the porch.  All that I had to say was, “I really love her,” and everything else was all understood.  It was as if there was no other way.  This was just how it all was supposed to happen. 

            That night, I asked her.

            The couch in their hallway reminds me of my tenth grade English teacher.  It’s a wooden Morris frame with a firm and nasty-green cushion, just like the one in his classroom.  I despised him, Mr. Hastings.  He was the first person that I ever got mad at about his words.  Once, he told our class about an article recently published in the  Post, his favorite magazine, and described all of the ways in which it was wrong.  He handed out the article and allowed us a few moments to read it.  Then he began to fume and sputter that no journal should write such things.  He said that we were all to write a letter to the editor, as an assignment, explaining that even we, schoolchildren, could see that it was disgusting. As I read it to myself, my eyes began to well up with water that I imagined was dark red.

            It was an equal rights article, about the law that a few people in Colorado were trying to get passed.  It used strange words and I wasn’t quite sure exactly what it was getting at.  I decided I would need to read it again.  As I got further into the well-written article, I noticed that it sounded very compassionate and warm.  It had soft words, and there was no talk of heavy handed words from God.  It sounded intellectual and well-informed.  I kept reading.  I couldn’t be sure at the time, but it seemed very important.  It almost seemed as if the article had something to do with me, or that it should be important to me.  I wrote down the catalog info since I knew that he would take the papers back for the next class to read.  I decided I would run down to the library in town after school and find the Post and read the article again.  I kept reading.  My mind began to drift from the page and I pictured a group of nice people in Colorado, people who were more like me than people around here, I thought about them sitting around with wine and guitars changing laws like they were writing songs or poetry.  It made me feel…

            “…will burn in hell!”  He was standing right next to me now.  I could smell him, old sweat and the faint hint of whiskey.  I couldn’t stand him.  I didn’t give him much of my mental energy, but I was suddenly losing gumballs at a rapid rate.  Luckily my grades allowed me to graduate early and I went on to University.

Sara came and visited my fist weekend at College.  I had gotten a job as a typesetter at a small local paper and was able to afford a small one bedroom apartment above a record store downtown.  I budgeted a dime each week to walk down on Friday, which was payday, and buy a new release on vinyl, mostly to be neighborly and interact with people.  Sara would come up on Saturday and we would listen to whatever album I had purchased on Friday night and we would drink wine and dance all night.

            On Sundays we would lay in bed until 9:30 and then I would walk down the street to the outdoor market and purchase eggs and fruit.  I would carry them back and we would eat breakfast and talk all day.  We could talk about anything.  And we would talk about everything.  We became one mind, and one body in that bed.  They were poetic days, rife with everything important in life.

            When holidays came I would return home, and we would be ready to burst like a pop bottle for each other.  Here, we had to pretend to be friends.  We would often have dinner with our respective families, and we would go for long walks by the river to relish in our discussions and on occasion our passions. 

Once in a while, late at night, I would sneak up over the porch and into the second floor window of her bedroom and we would sleep in each other’s arms until morning.  And then I would carry my tee shirt and shoes to the window and quietly slip down the porch column and down by the river, and walk the one quarter mile to my parked car in the clearing.

            That summer went by easy until it all came down.  It was a particularly quiet summer night.  The air had cooled and some of the humidity had shaken out of the air.  The moon was as full as I have ever seen it.  I had left my shoes hanging from a tree by the river and ascended the porch into her dimly lit room.  She had snuck a glass of milk for me and was waiting in her chair.  It was far too quiet in the room.  I asked her to turn the ceiling fan on.  I kissed her and we fell asleep both topless in our jeans on top of the sheets.

It was a heart attack from the deepest dead of sleep.  I awoke to the sound of the door closing and Sara leaped from the bed to peer out the cracked door just in time to see her Mom descending the stairs her hand over her mouth and a shocked reluctance in her gait.  With the white noise from the fan, we didn’t hear her come up the stairs or crack open the door to peer inside. 

            Sara hung her head and cried silently.  I laid there in the dark with one hand on her sweaty, naked back lying on my stomach on the edge of the bed.  She was kneeling on the floor, and we held this pose like statues for several minutes, shocked still and still awake.

            Finally we had been found out.  There was nothing left to do but admit it.  We walked downstairs and told Sara’s mothers that we were in love with each other, and that we weren’t ashamed of it at all.  We explained how close we were and hoped that they would see it from our perspective.  For extra proof, it seems, I was subconsciously holding my hand on her back, now draped casually in my tee-shirt.  They took it much better than we had anticipated.  Of course, her parents were more liberal than mine. 

My mothers were not so accepting, although sometimes they surprised me.  One time my Mama woke me up at three in the morning, exclaiming that it was chocolate chip cookie time, and proceeded to scoop me out of bed and plop me down, two floors later, on the kitchen stool so that I could watch as she cranked up the music and danced around the kitchen, singing into the wooden spoon, which was covered, like she was, in cookie batter.  My Mama was the crazy one and my Mom would just smile from wherever she was, each time remembering why she fell in love with Mama in the first place.  But as crazy as they could be, my parents were very careful to be proper in public and fit in with societies expectations.   They were not boat-rockers.  They were conformists, at least in appearance, and Mom did all she could to uphold that façade.  It worked. They were very well respected in town and people thought of them as model citizens. 

            Sara’s Mom and Mama were not so well thought of.  They were a little bit liberal for many of the townsfolk.  They listened to music that maybe they shouldn’t, and they attended those, ‘left’ poetry readings at the Sunset downtown.  People knew that they had some radical ideas, but they were still accepted.  They did subscribe, at least in their own actions, to normal things.  I had always gotten a sense though, that they weren’t ‘normal’ for political reasons.  The way that they were just happened to be the normal thing.  The fact that their preferences were normal was completely unaffected by the term.  They just were, and people sensed some rebellion in that, and had shown some disdain for them.  It was the reason that there were rumors that Sara’s Mom had had some ‘experience' with boys in college.  They always chalked it up to ‘she was confused.’  She always said that it could have been a boy in the end, except that she had fallen in love with Sara’s Mama.  She held her head very high whenever she told the stories.  They were great for Sara.  I think it was the reason that Sara had so much gracefulness about her.

            Now, standing in my wedding suit, I noticed a flash of white in the window; one of those terrible ‘marriage equals’ signs.  Just words, but, I think I heard another gumball fall.

            It was the words that got to you in the end.  They became so engrained in culture that they were casually used to express the slightest things.  Kids would ‘joke’ and call each ‘arrow’ or other such things.  To them it seems so harmless, but it isn’t.  Hate was made easy by these childish indiscretions.  It seems for some people ‘God’ makes it easy to hate too.  Other words like ‘shot’ ‘aimer’ and ‘docker’ are seemingly reserved for jokes with an undertone of implication. 

            There were worse ones.  They seemed to want to make us out to be hunt-able.  They called us ‘mals.’  It came from the idea that because we could make a child the way animals did, we were no better than animals themselves.  As if cross-gendered mating was reserved for disgusting things that dogs do in the woods.  They had all become so much more civilized since they made their made-to-order babies in test-tubes and one of them would carry the baby to term.  The bulk of society had the opinion that our casual screwing would result in a plague of unplanned children that would overpopulate the world.  People only subconsciously acknowledged the origin of these words that they used with such frequency.  It made it easy for people to not have to think, and to not have to be intelligent.  The words made it easy for them to learn how to hate.  We were straight and they made us, whoever we all were, stare it in the eye every day.  Every time one of those words is ‘casually’ used it cuts to the core and flays a soul right down to the architecture.  “Damned, straight as an arrow, aren’t they?”  I hated that one.  Words are a disease.

            Sara and I used to sit out on the roof of my garage, outside my bedroom window, at night.  We would watch for shooting stars and talk.  She would often ask me what it was exactly that made people so interested in other people’s lives, and controlling them.  I could never explain it to her.  But they were getting nastier lately.  We couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t see that it had nothing to do with them or their lives. They just seemed to want to impose rules about ‘what they wanted us to not have.’  “The large tablets giveth and the small minds taketh away,” I would say.  I never understood it.  We weren’t hurting anybody, but as today grew closer it got a little scary.  At first they were just writing letters to the paper, and telling us we should call it off.  There were marches and “Marriage = Femme + Femme or Man + Man” signs.  It all seemed harmless to us; maybe a bit of a cancer on the free-thinking world, but not dangerous at all.  Now it’s gone to far.  We were getting threats.  So were my mothers.  And hers were too.

            We talked to our mothers about it.  We had dinner and invited them all together one night and simply asked them what they thought about us calling it off.  They all agreed that we had come too far and that it wasn’t right for them to force us into changing our minds.  Surprisingly, my slightly conservative Mom even said it.  “Forget about small people,” she said.  So we did.

            And here we were, listening to heckling from outside.  I don’t know how they found out about the time or place.  I think it was one of my cousins.  We didn’t invite any of them, but I’m sure that they had heard about it.

            I read an article in the local paper recently.  It was a letter to the editor.  The ignorance that people possess and proudly exhibit blows my mind sometimes.  It was full of the usual things like, ‘It’s immoral,’ and phrases like, ‘…behind closed doors, but I don’t want to hear about it.’    I try not to blame ignorant people because their god tells them that these things are wrong, but there is no truth in preaching.  Someday the world will learn this.  There is too much self-interest for God to get his message across.  It’s the most fucked up game of telephone that there ever was.

            Suddenly I saw a phrase that I had not yet seen and could not believe.  The article was the usual slurry of hatred and bigotry, dressed up to appear politically correct and potentially well-thought, until it crawled into the darkest of statements: “They try to say it’s natural.  If they want to go to hell that’s their problem, they aren’t taking a word that God gave us with them.  Say we do relent and allow them to be ‘married.’  What’s next after a man and a woman?  A man and a little girl?  A woman and a little boy.  A sheep?  How far will this thing go.  It isn’t natural!”

            I was infuriated, gumdrops pouring from my pockets.  I am in no way a pedophile because I am in love with a woman.  And what about the sheep?  What is that?  These people are ridiculous.  I didn’t know what to say.  I just sank into the corner and cried.  Like their precious 'Mother Mary' I cried and cried.  I cried for all of the people who could not see love.  Who could not see the damage that they do in the name of their ‘God.’  No matter what you believe, we all answer to the same thing, whatever it is.  And I can’t believe in a god that cares for these religious-types, and who hates so callously.

That day, it was my Mom that found me and held me as a cried.  I was eighteen and sobbing in the arms of my mother.  She was providing me with comfort, she didn’t’ realize that it was the world that I was crying for.

It was time, now, for the toast.  My mom had decided that she wanted to make it.  She walked over and cracked the window.  Then she walked back, champagne in hand, and bowed to us.  She then turned around to toast the open window. 

“God is lost on you, and so is love.  So here is a toast to arrows just like my son and his beautiful Sara across the world.  They will be heard.  They will have all of the rights afforded to man couples.  And femme couples.  It will take time and love, it will take work.  I believe in a world where we are all on the same plane.  When ‘natural’ children won’t be made fun of at school and when they won’t hear about ‘hell’ and rumors about their mom and dad on the playground.  We’ll chip away at it.  A revolution of love is slow work.  This toast is to the bigots of the world.  May love surround you and force you to surrender.  And for God’s sake, may you learn to shut your fucking mouths.”

We all sat in shock.  I didn’t even think my Mom was totally cool with our relationship, and none of us had ever heard a word like that pass over her lips.  She let out a whoop and a tear and then turned around.  She was smiling and crying and so was Sara. 

Then she proceeded, “and to the beautiful couple.  Your love is pure, may you always have it.  It is greater than anything that there is.”

I guess people are always afraid of what is different.  The only thing about it is, Sara and I weren’t that different.  They just can’t see it.  I wondered, as I watched my mom toasting the window, if Colorado had actually made things better for us.  Maybe we would have been content to live beneath the radar without it.  And then, suddenly, the thought vanished for good.  It was chased away by the last person whom I thought loved me with any small exception, my Mom.  It was at that moment that I realized that there is no such thing.

            The yelling outside grew louder.  It had become impossible to ignore the commotion out on the street.  I could see my guests becoming slightly nervous.  To make them more comfortable I jumped up from my seat and exclaimed, “let’s dance,” and as the window shattered and the fire exploded inside of the room my pocket ripped out and the rest of my gumballs fell to the ground, rolling into the street and gutter.  This time I didn’t’ hear them.  I didn’t notice.  I was finally at peace and meeting Sara for a movie.