of little plastic army men.
“Hey, Willy!” his voice was eager with adventure.
“Hi Rich!”
I was happy to see him and charged out to greet him.
We walked the short length of the yard and started playing back in one of the corners. Our cove was a shadowy setting beneath the dark purple sky surrounded by trees that looked like dangling skeletons in a dark closet. That sounds frightening, but I didn’t pay any attention to that fact- it was too much fun! We snuggled back into a recess among the bushes and trees then squatted down on the dry leaves. They crunched under us.
Rich dumped the Army soldiers out of the bucket and we started setting troops up all around us, poised in the leaves and behind the sticks.
“The bad guys are coming, Willy! I need back up!”
“I’m coming Rich!” I shouted and started making my little soldiers advance in the leaves. War was declared in our nest as soldiers were running about ambushing each other and radioing in for backup.
We were busy making little machine gun noises and explosions.
It was getting dark fast and hard to see. I looked back toward our house and saw the kitchen was now lit up and the porch light above the deck was on casting off a white circle of light.
The color was draining from the leaves around us until they blended with the shadows and the evening sky. Rich stood up, pulled a red box out from under his shirt, and dropped it in the leaves.
It was a box of wooden matches.
I remember looking down at the small rectangular box and marveling. “Cool!” I quipped with excitement. My superego didn’t start screaming warnings that matches were dangerous or that I should flee; nothing like that at all happened. I was six after all.
We both plopped down in the leaves again around the box like we had just unearthed a treasure chest that we were about to open.
“Let’s try one!” Rich whispered.
Rich slid open the box and pulled out a match. He struck it across the flint. The alcove we were playing in exploded with light and the smell of sulfur was strong. My eyes squinted and when I looked again my friend was holding a wooden match with a brilliant orange ballerina dancing atop the stick.
He was giggling and waving it around.
“Incoming!” he yelled and pretended the match was a missile. He made a huge arc with his arm. It looked like a rocket ship blasting off into the sky, the way he made it soar up.
“You will never get me!” I started making a few of my soldiers retreat. Then he swung his arm back down and the flame was a falling star, bearing down on one of my plastic army guys but it went out.
I started making my machine guns noises again; spit was flying everywhere.
Rich pulled out another match and lit it.
He held the new match against the barrel of a machine gun until it twisted and shriveled into a stinky black stump. It reminded me of the way the wicked witch’s legs curled up when Dorothy’s house fell on her in the Wizard of Oz.
I was smiling in awe. Then the flame went out and it was dark again.
“Lemme do one!” I grabbed the box of matches out of the pile of leaves and yanked the small stick across the side of the box.
“Ahhh” Rich cried as I burned the barrel of a bazooka that one of his soldiers was carrying.
It was so much fun.
Not to be outdone, Rich slid open the little Matchbox and pulled out two of the wooden sticks and he smiled. Rich held the bundle of matches between his thumb and forefinger then grinded the matches across the flint. It was a huge burst of light and it startled us both!
Rich dropped the box.
The small redheaded sticks fell all over our legs and the leaves around us. Many of the matches seemed to vanish right away into the leaves. There must have been hundreds of matches in one of those little red boxes. The scene reminded me of a game we loved called pick-up sticks.
This was no game and those matches looked like a logjam in a leafy river.
We were in that river.
Matches were everywhere.
From what I remember, I watched Rich holding a match that was burning down toward his fingers. The black burnt part twisted like a witch’s finger. We were both still laughing as his tiny fingers that were pinching the flaming torch just stopped squeezing. Maybe it started to burn his fingers, maybe his eyes shifted to marvel at the match mess before us, or maybe he just forgot the match was in his hand. No way of knowing what happened, but time seemed to freeze when that match fell.
Most times a dropped match extinguishes itself on the way to the ground, but not that night.
At first, a single leaf next to his bare foot curled and turned black; smoke rolled out from under it. Then there was a sharp hiss as a new match ignited.
Then orange flames danced through several leaves.
After that, flames spread very quickly. Fire seemed at once to explode all around us as if the scene were a coordinate performance on a stage. The only thing I could think was that an angry dragon, swooping down from the sky, was spraying its fiery breath down on us. Huge balls of fire ignited in the piles of leaves and in the trees.
We were screaming.
I tried to stand but I put my knee on a half melted radioman and it burned so bad I fell over. The plastic soldier was stuck to my knee. It stuck to my hand too when I tried to brush it off, leaving sinews of green plastic going between my hand and knee.
I looked over at Rich through the smoke and growing blaze. For an instant I wasn’t sure what I was seeing: I watched Rich’s bare foot turn orange and seem to dance.
It was like an optical illusion.
The area around us became so hot and so bright I could no longer see Rich but I could still hear him screaming. Screaming seemed to be coming from everywhere. I could hear the terrifying roar of what I was certain was a dragon high above us. I started screaming, I could feel my skin getting hot, and I was sweating all over.
I couldn’t tell which direction I could escape to, I could only see fire.
I craned my neck back and looked up through the bony tree branches into the sky. The night was black. I was trying to see if a dragon was really flying through the sky but I couldn’t find it. I heard it roar several times and saw the arcs of fire so I knew the dragon was still there.
Then through my burning eyes, I saw it for the first time. A huge black dragon with giant pointy wings spread wide, flying overhead. I glimpsed the beast between billows of smoke.
Everything screamed at once: the fire, the trees, the bushes. Everything was bellowing out in protest and pain. I don’t know how many times the dragon attacked us and breathed its horrible fire down on us that night.
I don’t know why the dragon attacked us.
I didn’t know what to do. I was coughing and choking. I could smell leaves and other horrible things burning. I don’t know how long I thrashed in the fire but I was yanked out of the flame-ridden cave and my mom on top of me.
She rolled over me and began slapping me all over my body. It was hard to breathe.
I was screaming and crying. She was screaming and crying too.
I lay in the grass coughing next to my mom. The rest of the world seemed so dark next to the burning corner of our backyard. I looked up at cords of flames curling and climbing up the leafless branches.
I searched the sky for the dragon as I lay on my back but all I saw were the stars and the half moon.
I heard sirens and they were getting louder.
My dad was there as well. He seized my little arm with one of his huge hands, grabbed my mom’s ankle with his other hand, and heaved us free from the hot flames.
People were running everywhere.
That ended the horrible evening of October sixth.
That was my earliest childhood memory.
Somehow I managed to escape any serious burns or injury. Mom said I lost most of my ha
ir. I always pictured my hair looking like one of those horrible, patchy self-haircuts some little kid gave himself while experimenting with scissors for the first time. My mom said she had to give me a buzz.
Rich wasn’t so lucky. He vanished after that night and the Cooper family moved away within the month. My mom explained that Rich was very sick and that they had to move to be closer to the hospital where he was staying since they needed to be there so much. During the first several months, I often asked about what happened to my mischievous little friend that fiery night. My mom just kept saying he was trying to get better.
Our happy little home across from the big blue water tower became a sad little home. We ended up moving just before the Fourth of July that following summer because my dad found a job in Delaware. After we moved, my parents lost touch with the Coopers and I spent the rest of my childhood not knowing what happened to my friend.
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