Escape

Escape

By Stephen Patrick

Word Count: ~ 1000 words

Something red and shiny caught Jacob's eye. It was almost hidden in the brown and gray patches of his sun-scorched Texas back yard, but the red dot glistened within the yellow and brown grass. His training was still kicking in, drawing his eye toward hidden dangers, even though his military-issue uniform had been replaced by a flannel shirt and jeans.
Using his rake to steady himself, Jacob leaned closer. Tucked within the mesh of brittle dying grass and smaller than a dried pea, a tiny lady bug was struggling up a thin blade of grass. The Army doctors had warned him about exerting himself, but he ignored them and his aching back and bent lower, both knees popping as he lowered himself to the ground. The rake shook in his quivering hands as he folded his scarred legs beneath him. He lost his balance and tottered for a moment, but braced himself with his left hand.
Brown and crimson streaks ran over his mangled hand; reminders of the roadside IED he had found outside Baghdad a year earlier. There, the blinking red dot had been hidden at the side of the road. He had seen it in the swirling sand beside his boot and felt his breath stop. He had turned to warn his friends when it exploded. Despite the doctor's best efforts, he had lost fingers on both hands and his legs had been torn to ribbons by shrapnel. Worse, there was another piece of him lost somewhere in the sand. Jacob's real scars were the ones you could not see. The ones born of lost friends and missing companions. They reminded him of hurts so deep that they emerged when he paused too long and his thoughts turned back to...
Broken blades of grass spread out beneath his palm as he leaned closer to the red dot, drawn to the memories as much as the reality as his new discovery struggled against gravity. He slowly leaned closer, afraid of scaring the creature into a rash leap for freedom. Jacob felt like a voyeur deity, watching from above with guilty glee, at the struggle of the tiny insect.
The beetle made steady progress, inching forward step by step. The blade quivered under its weight. Jacob found himself rooting the tiny creature onward, hoping for it to find freedom from the dying grass and scorching heat. The beetle crept slowly upward until he was within inches of the top. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the blade of grass bent from the beetle's weight, bowing forward until it was hidden among other blades shooting up from the ground. The beetle froze as his ramp to freedom collapsed, and dropped him back into the thick patch of dead grass.
Jacob smiled as he imagined his own plight; his struggle to recover in the dark hospital room, surrounded by other soldiers; each one as brave as he was but less fortunate in their injuries. He remembered his joy at returning home to his uncle's hardware store, only to struggle to regain his coordination with his new body. Unsteady legs kept him from stocking shelves, and his constant fumbling made it impossible for him to handle money as a cashier. Worse, the handwritten journals that had accompanied him as an adolescent writer and his two tours in the Army were inaccessible without his hand to write. Despite his best efforts, his typing was frustratingly slow compared to the flood of ideas in his mind. Rather than suffer the pain of muted creativity, he had shut himself off from his muse.
While Jacob watched, the beetle climbed off of the bent blade and journeyed up a wider, thicker blade. He slowly rose above the canopy of grass, but soon this blade bent like the others. The beetle was trapped, lost in a prison of green and brown, just as Jacob was trapped by his body and the terrible memories that flooded his most poetic thoughts. The harder they tried, the farther they moved from their goal. Stay where they were and they would never reach their goal. Climb too high and the ramp to freedom would bend beneath them again.
It was a cruel joke that Jacob shared with this tiny bug. How many times had he sat down to capture a new story from his imagination only to find it breaking beneath the weight of his ambitions? How many times had he played it safe and sat back, forgoing any new or challenging stories and sending out less mature pieces and hoping someone would save him?
Jacob slowly moved his hand closer and pressed one of the longer blades down toward the beetle. It was a gentle offering, but the movement was too quick. The beetle skittered away, back down into the brown and green maze. Jacob cursed himself and then looked upward. Was God, like Jacob, simply watching from above, afraid to get too close for fear of scaring him away? Or was he trying to tell him something, somehow trying to reach him without impeding his progress?
Jacob moved away and the beetle resumed his climb, working his way up another blade of grass. This one was wider and thicker and still stood tall above the others. He crawled along the rough blade until he was at a crossroads with another blade. Changing direction, he skittered to the other blade and moved upwards, gathering momentum as the blade fell beneath him, just and the grass threatened to drop him back to the ground, he leaped.
The lady bug's shell split apart to expose a fragile pair of wings. In a blur of flapping, they pulled the tiny beetle away from the blade. A second later, he was gone, flitting and fluttering above the other blades of grass, racing away from Jacob and toward freedom.
Jacob smiled and pulled himself up with his rake. He saw his journal laying open on the porch. The thin pages waved at him in the gentle wind, drawing him back into the plots and characters outlined within. Like the lady bug's wings, they could take him anywhere he wanted to go. One more time, changing direction and gathering momentum, he would spread his wings and leap for freedom.


~END~