Competition Twenty-Six Shortlisted: When Life Throws You Rugby Balls by Alison Wassell
On the day the boy is born his father buys him a rugby ball and a tiny jersey in the colours of his hometown team, and a toast is drunk to the strapping front row forward he will surely become.
Every birthday and Christmas brings another ball. By the time the boy is six he fears opening his wardrobe, lest he be buried in an avalanche of expectations. Whenever one is thrown at him he flinches. His hands are not made for catching, nor his spindly frame for contact sports. His heart is not in it. His father’s disappointment shows in a slow sigh, the trudge of heavy feet back into the house.
Studded boots, beneath the Christmas tree, when the boy asked for a sewing machine. Sunday sessions in the park with a pack of boys rustled up to show him how it’s done. He fears for his fingers, imagines them crushed, stamped on, bent back and snapped in a scrum or a tackle, retreats to the touchline as his father praises other men’s sons.
The boy rebels. He sits stitching in his room as his father trains up the team of boys turned teenagers. The balls keep coming though, gift-wrapped in resentment and reproach. They take up too much space, thinks the boy, beneath his bed now too, and in his head.
In a rage, he takes a knife to one, listens to the air sigh out, unpicks the stitches and lays the pieces flat, and suddenly sees that they are merely material, cuts shapes and stitches them together on his mother’s machine, makes eyelets, threads though the laces of the hated boots, adds chains, stands back and admires his handiwork.
“Handbags for your girlfriends,” he tells the team of teenagers.
“Cool,” they say, proffering their cash.
Alison Wassell is a short story, flash and micro fiction writer with absolutely no ambition to write a novel. Her work has been published by Fictive Dream, The Phare, Ellipsis Zine, The Disappointed Housewife, Raw Lit, Idle Ink , Bath Flash Fiction Award and Retreat West.
Tags:
What a tale this is! Not living up to a parent’s expectation but making the best of it. Well done!