CURSED 1

LAST WISH

I got home and took a long hot bath. Ironically, the only thing that hurt was

my back. I swear it still hurt from that a-hole hitting me with a baseball bat a

A few weeks ago.

After my bath, I put on a pair of sweats and laid on the couch and waited for

Tommy. I thought about the fight. I couldn’t believe I’d lost. Honestly. I have

I only lost two fights in my entire life. I lost my very first boxing match when I

I was a kid, and I lost today. I wished my dad wish Tommy and me.

tonight. He would have been proud of both of us.

I closed my eyes and took a moment and thought about my parents, especially

my dad. My dad was a lucid dreamer and loved to tell me his dreams. The last

Nothing he had ever said to me was on the morning of their accident. I had just

I got up from school, and as I went into the kitchen, my dad was sitting there,

staring off into oblivion.

“Hey, Dad, what’s up?” I asked, still bleary-eyed from sleep.

He looked over at me. “Oh, I just had the most amazing dream, son.”

This wasn’t the first time my dad had told me about an extraordinary dream.

he had, but whatever this dream had been, well, it was obviously giving him

some serious food for thought.

“What was it about?” I asked, opening the kitchen door and grabbing the

milk. If my father had been there, I would have downed the milk straight from the

carton. As it was, I found a box of cereal and started making breakfast.

“It was about you, son.”

“Me?”

“It was about us. We were camping up in Big Bear. You were a lot younger,

maybe around seven years old. I had lost you and went looking for you in the

woods. I couldn’t find you anywhere, and I began to panic. I sensed you were in

danger. Considerable danger. I ran and ran looking for you, until I reached an

enormous cliff.”

“A cliff in the woods?” I said, confused.

“Hey, Josiah, it’s a dream. A big, pink Easter bunny could show up, and there

would there be no rhyme or reason for it, all right?”

He was so cranky in the morning. “Sorry, Dad. Go on.”

“Anyway, I walked to the edge of the cliff and I looked down, and about 300

feet below, I could see you. You were calling out for me. I yelled down to you

that I wanted you to wait there, that I would be coming down for you. But then

Something horrible started to happen.”

I was about to shovel in my first spoonful of Cap Crunch. I waited,

genuinely intrigued.

He went on. “About twenty hyenas surrounded you. They were growling and

hissing at you. And as they started closing in, all I could do was watch from

above, feeling totally helpless. I was going to have to watch all these those

tear you apart, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. So without

Thinking, I jumped. It was more like a dive. It was instinct, you know? I had to

protect you. And as I fell, something miraculous happened. My arms began

turning into wings. My entire body had changed into a beautiful white bird. I

swooped in and grabbed you just in the nick of time.”

Now the first spoonful found my mouth. “Wow. That’s pretty crazy,” I said,

talking with food in my mouth, which immediately irritated my dad.

He frowned at me. “Anyway, it was so real. Josiah, I can still feel the air

beneath me.”

I looked at my dad, and he had this amazingly peaceful expression on his

face. Far-off and dreamy. A tranquility I had never seen in him before. The irony

was, of course, that he would die eight hours later. He would never be able to

save me from the hyenas.

As I lay there on the couch, remembering my last conversation with my dad,

with tears filling my eyes, I turned on the TV. I put on some Jimmy Kimmel

since it was 12:30 in the morning. So, where was Tommy?

I didn’t know, and soon I dozed off.

TO BE CONTINUED.....