Phantasmagoria: Childhood Encounter

I barely hear the brittle grass crunch under my feet as I cut across my front yard, but I’m fully aware of the panic that climbs my throat.

While I ride the Yellow Whale home from Davy Crockett Middle School, the other kids shout at each other and bounce on the yuck-brown, vinyl-covered seats, freed at last from another year’s worth of the mind-numbing boredom of school.

I don’t yell and I don’t bounce.

At each stop, students depart and the noise level drops. When the bus lets Donna Culpepper off at her house, I sink lower in my seat.

The next stop is mine.

When I get off, backpack thumping the steps behind me, the afternoon pales and everything slows. Rust flakes spray the pavement as the bus shimmies away, billows of white smoke rising into the hot summer air.

I barely hear the brittle grass crunch under my feet as I cut across my front yard, but I’m fully aware of the panic that climbs my throat. I’m sure that, if suddenly required to speak, my voice would unleash the monstrous stutters that have taken two years of speech therapy to constrain.

Still twenty yards from the bottom step, I hear the lazy drone and stare up at the yellow…