I can feel the air in the house breeze past my ears. I am running fast, faster than at any other time in my life. I go from my bedroom at the end of the hall to the living room in three seconds.
The reason I am able to run so fast is because of what is chasing me. For those three seconds, right at the back of my head, so close as to almost touch my hair and make my scalp tingle, is a sharp axe blade.
No one holds the handle to the axe. It floats in a dark vacuum of space. About a foot behind the handle, though, are two glowing red eyes. The eyes have no pupils, but they are focused on my spine and the back of my skull.
I reach base- the couch- and the axe and the eyes disappear.
This is all part of a game that I invented to motivate me to run faster. It only works for sprints, but sprints are all that I try to do as a child. I will not begin regularly running distances of more than a mile until 1990, when I am 13 years old.
Dad asks me why I run through the house like that, and I tell him the story of what is chasing me. He thinks this is amusing, and in turn tells me a story of when he was a kid. He imagined that there were little needles or pins sticking out from the heels of his shoes. The pins would pop him in the rear end as he ran, causing him to go faster, like a horse that is spurred.
***
It is Vacation Bible School week at my church, Hyde Park Baptist. I always hate these. I have just gotten out of public school for the summer, and now mom and dad are making me go to school again at the church, where we listen to Bible stories and have to make crafts out of ice cream sticks.
Late in the warm evening, while my parents socialize inside the sanctuary, I play hide and seek with the other kids of the church. Night has fallen, which of course makes it much easier to hide.
I can hear the boy who is “It” around the other side of the fellowship hall.
“Ready or not, here I come!” he shouts.
Base is on the other side of the fellowship hall, too- one of the columns on the front porch area. My plan simply is to sprint around to the front of the building, opposite the side from which the boy is coming. I need to be fast, so that if he sees me, then he will not have time to change direction, meet me at the front and tag me before I can touch base.
The axe appears behind me, along with the glowing red eyes. They fly toward me and I take off, sprinting as fast as I can through the darkness.
The axe blade can almost part the hair on the back of my head, but despite that pressing situation, I look to my left as I run, to see if there are other children hiding around the side of the building to where I am running, opposite of the boy who is “It.”
Turning my head to the side does not affect how fast I can run- or so I think.
To my shock, the red eyes catch up and karate chop me across the neck. I jerk to a sudden stop, my feet go flying up in the air in front of me. I land flat on my back, stunned, staring up at the stars.
What just happened? For a moment, I think I see the red eyes in the air a few feet above me, looking down. It was not the axe that hit me. The blow to my neck and throat did not feel like a blade. My head is still attached to my body, I think, though I lie very still for a few moments.
Finally, I sit up. No one saw me take the fall. I look around and see a steel cable, supporting a wooden power line pole for the church. The cable descends at a 45 degree angle from the top of the pole down to an anchor point on the ground. The cable is what clothes-lined me.
I rub my throat area and wow, it is sore. I immediately quit the game and go running to mom inside the church sanctuary to show her my neck.
“Nathan, what happened to you?”
I explain how I ran into the cable. One of the adults listening to the story is trying not to laugh.
“You’ve got a red mark on the back of your neck, too,” mom says. “How did you get a mark on the back of your neck?”
We come to the conclusion that I must have been running so hard that my head snapped around the cable when I flew into the air. But it all happened so fast that I cannot recall how I also got scraped on the back of the neck.
The red eyes won that round, and it turns out to be about the last time that I try to race the eyes or the axe.
