Light and Shadow

Steven McCann

Description

For all people, life passes through and around us in light and shadow. We enjoy moments of joy and comfort, when no sooner we’re faced with upset, disappointment, sometimes even tragedy. The art we create, our music, literature, painting, theatre and the rest, reflects this. Think of Shakespeare, or Rembrandt, or Beethoven, or your favorite lifetime film. Can we appreciate moments of joy, without having known sadness? We see it in nature. The brilliant colors of birth, the dimmer struggles for survival, the darker shades of decay and dying. A bleak winter’s day, a rainy afternoon in March, a sunny May morning. I always attempt to capture both light and shadow when I write, in my novels, stories, plays, and in my poems. It’s an attempt to show respect, I think, for the human condition.

Sujets

• Short Stories
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781669859819
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

LIGHT AND SHADOW
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Stories by
Steven McCann
 
Copyright © 2023 by Steven McCann.
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-5982-6

eBook
978-1-6698-5981-9
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 12/15/2022
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
849587
Contents
A Troubled Teen
The Rise and Fall
City Dreams
Dave
The Last Dance
Moosehead Lake
Ten
Missed Chance
The Road to Success
Turning Forty
By a Slender Margin
A Change of Heart
The Life of a Would Be
Quiet Destiny
A Troubled Teen
There’s a reason why I feel like a hundred, instead of sixteen and a half, my real age. I’m like a political prisoner tormented by the taste of freedom, matched against the impossibility of escape. Maybe if I write it all out, it will help some other young soul caught in a similar predicament. I have to start years ago, to try to etch people out in my memory, so I won’t be unfair. Some are difficult. The first is my father.
From my earliest memories my father and mother were divorced. That left me and my mother to reside in a big four-bedroom house in Pinewoods, New Jersey, an hour’s train ride away from New York City. Our house was bordered by azalea bushes on three sides that bloomed white and orange in the spring, probably the work of my father. He came to visit me, parking his large new Buick in our driveway and bringing me presents of dolls, tea sets, and miniature cookware. He hugged and kissed me and called me sugar and darlin in his Louisiana accent, and then he drove away to Washington, D.C., or Chicago, or Los Angeles where he worked as an engineer on large buildings.
“You be good for Mommy, Sugar. Dad will come back to you soon. Okay, Sweetie?” He’d pick me up and carry me out to his shiny car, then put me down, wink, and kiss me again, and drive slowly out of the driveway, waving to me until I could see him no more. He was the handsomest man in the world, with curly brown hair, blue eyes that twinkled, and rugged tanned skin. A man’s man and an outdoor man. My mother had been a fashion model, but was no longer in her prime. I guess that’s why he left her.
The only other people who came to our house were my mother’s friends from the fashion industry. My mother had little time for me, and her friends differed only slightly. When I was playing by myself in the front room, I heard them laughing in the kitchen and my mother say in a low voice:
“I don’t know where she comes from. She has nothing of me in her. That tiny little thing, towhead, with those dark blue eyes.”
I knew she was talking about me and I knew I was nothing but a nuisance to her. It only made me withdraw from her more, to a corner of my room with my father’s presents, or somewhere in the yard, picking flowers. It was on the side lawn, near the fence, that I discovered our neighbors next door, a rambunctious family of four boys close in age that slammed their front screen door, thumped over their porch and front steps, and yelled to one another in thunderous voices. And they were always playing baseball. I could hear the bats clacking against one another, the hardball hitting the porch steps and into their baseball gloves, and their incessant shouts to determine who was on whose side. Then one day a major event took place that changed my life forever.
I was playing in our driveway on my tricycle. The band of boys next door were walking past on their way to the ball field that was only down the street and across at the intersection. Inadvertently, one of the Rooney’s—that was their family name—one of them hit the hardball and it went bouncing into our driveway, right past my tricycle. I dismounted, raced after the ball, and then ran to hand it back to them.
“Throw it, little girl.”
I ran up close, threw it, and the ball went over their heads and into the street.
“Good arm!” One of them yelled. I couldn’t let this congratulation disappear. When they continued walking down the sidewalk, I followed them.
“Holly! Come back here!” My mother yelled from our porch where she was talking to an old model friend.
“That’s okay, Misses Duhart. We’ll take care of her.”
“Where are you boys going?”
“Just down the corner to the town field. We’ll bring her right back.”
“Well, okay. But make sure she watches from a safe place.”
“We will, Misses Duhart. Come on, Holly,” they said and I walked after them.
They had decided I could be of use to them. They positioned me behind the backstop and told me to retrieve foul tips and other balls that went awry. I ran back breathlessly for each one, then ran up to the side of the backstop, throwing each ball into play again. I did this dutifully for a whole season, until one day about a year later, they were practicing infield hits with a runner trying to beat the throw to first base. Watching me run up to the backstop and throw the ball into play again, Bill, the oldest, had an idea.
“Let’s try something. Holly, move up to the batter’s box opposite the hitter. When he hits it, run to first base.”
I took orders perfectly and raced to first base when the ball was hit, and suddenly, I became an integral part of their teamwork. Then they tried having me run to second base on fly balls. When the ball was hit, I raced to first, rounded the bag, sped to second as fast as my legs could carry me and slid into the base, beating the throw. I had seen one of them slide and copied it perfectly. They looked at each other in amazement. Then Bill said:
“Give her a glove. See if she can play second base.”
From that point on I became one of them. Fielding, running, sliding, and hitting, for it was then that they taught me to hit. We played against other bands of kids, the diamond filling up with boys and with one girl, me. Bill was the biggest kid there and always chose me onto his side and no one questioned him. I learned to step on the bag and make the double play throw to first. I learned to cover the hole and backhand ground balls to my right, and spin and make the throw to first. I learned to do everything Derek Jeter of the Yankees could do.
Once, when a pop fly ball was hit over my head, I raced into the outfield, caught the ball running, and collided with a boy twice my size. I lay on the ground unconscious for a moment, until I heard Bill’s voice:
“Don’t touch her!” He picked me up, carried me to the sidelines and laid me down under a tree.
“Don’t go near her! She needs to rest awhile.” I finally woke up and took my position again.
All of my life became the Rooney’s. I remained quiet and rarely said a word and followed Bill Rooney’s directives implicitly. I was rarely, if ever, stuck in the house, listening to my mother and her friends. I got away from them as soon as I got home from school, said little at dinner table, except to be polite, and was out of the house again afterwards.
In the fall we played touch football. Bill turned sixteen and bought this old Ford with its flooring rusted through in places so you could actually see the road passing underneath. On Saturdays we played on our field, or drove to other towns to play. We played in the rain, sleet, and the mud. The opposing players looked me over when I got out of the car.
“Is she playing?”
“Damn straight,” Bill said. “You’ll see.”
I could run and feint and turn directions quicker than them, because of my size. I remember those games like they were yesterday, and Bill’s excited shouts:
“Go, Holly! Go! Go!” And scampering through the wet grass and mud, farther, farther into the lead, all the way across the field, ahead of everyone.
I began to go with them everywhere during those Saturday afternoons, sitting in the back seat of Bill’s car, scrunched up against the window with a piece of plywood over the hole in the floor. We went for hamburgers, or hot chocolates, or sometimes to watch high school games. I was quietly passing through the lower grades at school, a good student, but always eager to be next door with the Rooney’s, or down on the playing field.
Somewhere around this time, my seventh or eighth grade, the Rooney’s began to play chess. The games were usually held on a table on their front porch where I could sit on the side on a torn old sofa and quietly watch the four of them play each other. As usual, it was Bill who got me directly involved, insisting one day that I be included and play Marvin, the youngest, before the others. I beat him in four moves. Next, I played Denis, who I beat in seven moves. Stuie and Bill took eight or nine moves. From that point on I had top billing, and always played whoever won in the other games.
I was up in my room reading one day when Bill came to our door, asking to talk to me. I ran down, dropping whatever else I was doing, prepared to play any sport he might be up to.
“Would you play in a contest, Holly?” Bill asked me.
“What kind?”
“There’s a kid in our school who likes to play chess. I told him you might play him.”
“Sure, Bill. Now?”
“Yeah. He b