“Oh no! I hit him! He came out of nowhere, like a bat out of—”
Something was buzzing around his head—swarming, backing off, then buzzing again, the sound intense like a thousand bees inundating his ears and driving him crazy. Words were there somewhere, but distant, like the speaker was a block down the road.
Luke put all his effort into prying his eyes open. They seemed to act of their own accord, and carrying out the message sent by his brain was the last thing they wanted. After much toil, he opened them enough to squint at his surroundings.
A strange man’s panicked face hovered just inches from his, and although he wanted to ask what was going on, sunlight attacked his retinas, and they slammed shut again. Plunged back into darkness. Why couldn’t he hear right? He couldn’t control the random volume changes. Loud—so loud he wanted to throw his hands over his ears. Then soft. Like someone was messing around with the volume dial on a boom box.
His head pounded a rhythmic pulse. Blood catapulted through his veins just under the surface, and he pressed his hand against his forehead in a desperate attempt to calm its deluge. His palm ached with scraped tenderness. He wrestled his eyes open and in the split second before he shut them again, he saw his chafed and bloody palms, bits of gravel and glass embedded in the skin. He sighed, and wondered if this was only a dream—a nightmare in which he was the main character.
Then he remembered—he’d flown over the hood of a car, hit his head and landed on the street. He wouldn’t be waking up from this one. Wow, he’d really screwed up this time.
He needed to take an inventory of his injuries. He began to bend his arms, legs, ankles, knees, elbows. He was relieved to find that no intense, shooting pain accompanied the moves. No broken bones. Thank God.
He brought his hands up in front of his face, shielding his eyes from the sure attack of direct sunlight. The frantic guy was talking a mile a minute, a cell phone connected to his ear, held in place by a shoulder, but he’d noticed Luke’s movements and seemed a little heartened by them.
“You okay, buddy? You gonna be all right?”
Luke started to nod, and then decided he’d be better able to answer the guy’s questions if he could pull himself together—maybe even get up on his feet. Cold seeped through his jacket, infiltrating his bones—it was frigid lying there on the street, he was starting to shiver—and he needed to move to get his circulation going again.
But all attempts at movement halted when he heard an unmistakable voice, “Luke?” Then pounding footsteps, and again, louder, more demanding, “Luke! Holy freaking crap! What happened to you?”
His dad’s frenzied face came into view. His eyes bulged as he kneeled down beside Luke, his frantic words washed over him, accompanied by an unfortunate amount of uncontrolled spittle. He wanted to reassure his dad, he wanted to calm him down, tell him to relax, but the bees were back. They swarmed in his ears again, and soon the sound was so overwhelming that he closed his eyes tight, and that was the last he remembered.