by Jennifer Robinson
Jackie pens his name in the team playbook, careful to dot his i. At night he lies in the top bunk, twelve players running, catching, blocking, sprinting in his mind. Open-eyed in the darkness, he dreams of new ways to edge the ball downfield, arranging and re-arranging imaginary formations, slipping through the maze of defenders. He quarterbacks his first game on a muddy spring morning and calls a “Farmer in the Dell” play, having teammates link arms and dance in a circle, distracting the defense while he carries the ball in for a touchdown. His coach takes him aside afterwards, breath coming in cloudy bursts through the cold air: “That was very clever,” he says. “Don’t do it again.” Jackie’s blue eyes sparkle. He loves this game, doesn’t think about how win or lose, it eventually ends.
Now a suburban father, Jack signs up to play baseball with his work mates, scribbling his name on the roster in the cafeteria. He brings his young daughter along on warm, summer days and she carries bats from the trunk of the car, kicking up hot dust from the gravel road along the way. At the plate he cracks the ball, runs the baseline but veers off, careening as if to fall, his steps strange and angled, drunken. Voices from the sidelines are quiet and serious. He sits on the sidelines the rest of the game, half-listening as his daughter asks what’s wrong, half-listening as she says, you’ll play again tomorrow, right? He hugs her around the shoulders, silent.
After the tumor, the surgery, the stroke, the recovery, he learns to write again. He writes painstaking “thank-you” notes to everyone who visited him in the hospital, including his daughter, a year older now. His hand is slow and shaky, his letters dissolve like little ghosts on the page. Snow dusts the leaves on the lawn but it’s come too soon, he hasn’t raked, his paralysis means he never will. One ashen winter morning his daughter descends the staircase he can no longer climb and returns with a crinkled scrapbook. She turns a brittle page to see faded boys in football pads as they run and kick and dive for the ball, bodies young and fluid and agile. Who are they? she asks and through the layer of dust, he sees them there, vivid and clear, his dreams.
Jennifer Robinson lives on Treaty 1 land, the territory of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene and Metis nations. She is an emerging writer whose creative nonfiction has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, Existere Magazine, Reckon Review and Prairie Fire Magazine (forthcoming). Her essays have been nominated for Biblioasis Best Canadian Essays and the Ellipsis Zine award. She can often be found on the couch squished in between her husband and dog.
Emerge Literary Journal 