I Can't Hang

It was a hot as hell day in May when St. James, Brady, and I jumped down from Heaven to go to Manhattan again.

I almost didn’t want to go. I was scared, honestly. I didn’t know what to expect. As we stood at the edge of paradise, our hands lying plainly at our sides, I was at a loss for words. My throat was too dry and my tongue felt like sandpaper scraping at the sensitive roof of my mouth.

Brady ruffled my hair and said, “Relax. It’s okay.”

Then we jumped.

I wasn’t totally in control of my wings yet, but I was a hell of a lot better at flying than I was before. I didn’t wobble nearly as much and I didn’t crash into whoever was flying next to me.

We flew slowly down to earth. There wasn’t a point in moving fast. It was one of those slow days where you just felt sluggish through the whole time and you didn’t have the passion to move real fast. As we drifted above the heat-stained buildings of New York, I was biting my lip and parachuting my wings outward to slow the fall, camouflaged by the natural abilities I was granted after my probation period was done. I almost turned back and shot up to Heaven again, but when I saw James and Brady surrounding me, looking nearly as solemn as I was, I kept on going.

We landed on the outskirts and immediately retracted our wings back. My head throbbed. Since it was summer and we weren’t bundled up in the same clothes we wore before, I wasn’t worried about being recognized, even if we were visible to everyone else. I had other fish to fry; my mind was a frying pan and grease splattered from it, burning all things in sight.

“You ready?” Brady ushered, furrowing his brow at me.

I looked down. My feet were firmly planted on the ground, the cement walkway behind a local bakery, and the two of them were already walking away.

My words choked me and all I could do was shake my head.

James shoved his hands in his pockets and exchanged a look of confusion with Brady. The older one walked over to me and put his hands on my shoulders.

“Look,” he said, “you told us you wanted to visit at least once. If you’re not ready now, then we can turn around and go back and come again some other time.”

“No,” I spoke, my voice low and raspy. “I wanna go today. Now. But…”

“It’s hard. I know.”

“Nobody wants to see their own,” James added. “But it’s closure. It’s something.”

I sighed, clearing the lump out of my throat the best I could. “Okay. Let’s go.”

And we strolled along the Manhattan sidewalks like we did before, not a care in the world this time. We weren’t staking out. We weren’t avoiding pedestrians. This was the city I knew. Nobody gave us a second look. Nobody questioned why there was a grown man with a teenager and a kid walking in the summer sun, and I was happy with that. I felt normal for once – nobody was looking at me, this time because I was literally invisible.

But as we neared closer to our destination, I walked slower. The pit of my stomach was heavy with doubt, and sweat beads rolled down my back freely without the sun’s help. Second thoughts kept coming to me, but I carried on anyway, albeit sluggishly.

I looked down at Brady and spied a bright arrangement of flowers in his right hand. He carried them gently so they wouldn’t break, tilting them upwards so that none of the bulbs would pop off and hit the ground.

And we scuffed ahead. Down past the hotel we hid in, down past the familiar apartment building I’d resided in for fourteen years.

Down to the graveyard.

The gates were worn and rusty and black, creaking whenever you opened it. It wasn’t a real big place and it was actually sort of ghetto compared to other cemeteries out there; some of the tombs had graffiti on ‘em, even. It was a shitty little mausoleum. When I was little the older kids in my school used to tell me the place was haunted.

I’d never gone in there before that day.

We wandered around the gathering of dead bodies aimlessly, just looking for a certain tombstone, looking like ghosts coming to haunt somebody, the way we moved. It even creeped me out.

I stood there in the middle of the graveyard with my hands in my hair, trying to piece together all of the puzzle pieces thrown into my life that came to this. It hurt, being among all of the other bodies of Manhattan who’d lost their lives. And it hurt knowing that they could’a died ten times more valiantly than getting hit by a car.

I paused. I didn’t wanna be there, I didn’t wanna see all of those dead souls.

But I opened my eyes. Brady stood in front of me, looking right at me over his shoulder blankly. When he caught me looking back he sorta smiled and nodded his head further up in front of us. So I followed him back further into the lost cemetery, not knowing where we were headed.

In the distance I saw James sitting down and staring at a stone in the ground.

We ventured closer to him and Brady knelt down beside me, prompting me to take a knee.

KYLE GABRIEL STRICKLAND
FEBRUARY 5 1996 – FEBRUARY 6 2010

The words on the stone made me want to throw up. It wasn’t so much that there were so few of them but the fact that they gleamed brighter than anything else in that city at that moment. All of the other tombstones were covered in dirt and long forgotten by whoever put them there, but mine was free of debris and looked brand new.

“Someone’s been here,” James spoke softly.

And next to my grave was a vase full of flowers – brilliant colors ranging from red to blue and orange and back, popping out from the lifeless hole beneath it.

Brady untied the rubber band holding the flowers he brought together and reached over, putting them in with the other ones. He laughed quietly. “Don’t act surprised,” he told me.

I didn’t know how to reply.

So we sat there. Just gathered around my grave with a pile of corny flowers in front of us and the lone tree shading us from being sunburned. I leaned back on my hands and felt the dry grass crunch in between my fingers; Brady sighed next to me and stared off into the distance; James was biting his lip and twiddling his thumbs.

The breeze, a thick and dry wind, picked up and rustled the leaves above us, blowing through our hair and bringing the sweet smell of peace to my mind.

“So I guess this is it,” I mumbled.

James shook his head, smiling a little bit.

Brady grinned real big and swung his arm around my shoulder. “You got a whole afterlife to spend with the two of us, kid. We’re not going anywhere. You’re stuck with us.”

“I can’t contain my excitement,” I said, trying to eliminate any hint of joking in my voice. But when I glanced at my only two friends in this, something sorta swept over me and I was compelled to smile like I meant it. And I did. I meant it more than I ever did.