Somewhere it was happening again in memory, and I will tell it as I remember: 

            It was being played like a phonograph recording with a scratch and the sound was old.  The years of play had left it less than original in her head but she knew she was in eighth grade, sitting in the recliner the morning after the storm had knocked out the power for an hour or two while she slept.  Her parents were away and so it had been frightening although she had not been entirely alone. 

            From the armchair, she remembered the night before in the dark, walking into the paws of a box spring and mattress, drunken into Berber on schnapps.  “You are beautiful,” he said and laughed.  “You look so little.”  He rubbed his eyes on his sleeve.  “Are you afraid?”

 
The night rained through the window; the boy slammed down the window and the shade.

      He was younger than her and should have been afraid, but her stomach began folding when he said it.  The lights were off and they had been sitting in the living room drinking from the bottle he had stolen from his parent’s black lacquered doors, in the candle light, living a moment he thought he had seen through a movie and romantic.

            And when it was time, moving down the hallway in the dark was difficult and they knocked the pictures from the walls:  pictures of her first day of class through sixth grade, a picture of her dog, Cecil, long away and foundless, pictures of great great relatives, passed and buried in cemeteries whose names she could not spell.  Before the door she stopped and turned to look down the hall, and the relatives watched her as they fell from the wall through black and white eyes. The fallen traced the path back like crumbs but there was no way back.

 
This was Cecil, the dog foundless and presumably dead.

      His navigation was perfected and they made it to the door and through where she had made her bed that morning and changed the sheets over like her mother had said to on the list; she had put a line through the word afterwards.  Through her door were four pink walls, with a border of daffodils, and a poster of Jesus over her bed.  The room was very clean and a trophy sat on the dresser. The plaque had fallen off of it years ago and despite this they had made it to the bed in the dark where Jesus was hanging above the headboard.  In the poster Jesus was playing soccer with little girls.  The girls wore jerseys numbered only three and they were smiling.  The poster said it was better if we all played on the same team and in the poster no one was trying to kick the ball past the goalie and the goalie was standing next to Jesus and did not appear worried about the goal. 

            The storm had made it through the window, and the bed was wet a spot from the rain.  Feeling the wetness, the boy swore and slammed down the window and the shade as the sky flashed.  The boy looked at the poster but he could not see it because there were no lights and he was looking down, and as the lightning flashed, she could see the poster above although she did not want to.  He did not like soccer.  He played football and would someday be quite good at it, he said, and as he said it he moved her thin body to the center of the bed.  But he had blonde hair and weighed eighty-five pounds, and he pulled her over with all his mass and propped his legs against the dresser for leverage. As he did this, the trophy shook, years sans plaque, and she fell like a rag on her pillow.  He had gotten her to the center of the bed on a schoolyard bet.  But she was there and so the path was no longer entirely important.  She would know this and tell others about it.  But this moment would be short and passing, and in the greater scheme of things, insignificant.  It would play again and again like a phonograph recording unable to go further, uttering half of the same word until the switch turned off.

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