The Amputeens: Episode 1, Part 3

Roger swung open the driver's side door, letting it rest open on its hinges. He approached the scene unfolding up the road, first jogging then, as his eyes brought things into focus, accelerating to a full sprint.

As he closed the gap, everything slowed but maintained a sort of dull blur. Two cars in a twisted embrace of mangled metal and rubber, positioned as if heedless of the double yellow line bisecting Pleasant Street. An overweight man in a dirty undershirt. A snarl curled by anger, Jim Beam and likely a lifetime of blue collar servitude. A burly forearm thrusting through the open driver's side window of the car in front. A female face with the blank countenance of a woman experiencing the unlikeliest of Monday mornings.

Roger halted his gate with a sneakers-on-concrete squeak behind the man. Without hesitation, he hooked his right arm around the man's swollen, grimy neck, reaching up with his left elbow to lock him in a makeshift sleeper hold. He drove backwards with his legs, pulling the man by the throat away from the now flailing woman who was hanging out the window of her Mazda 626, half in and half out.

As the man struggled to reach behind him and address the agent of this unexpectedly uncomfortable predicament, Roger slowly lowered to his knees, bringing the man onto the seat of his navy blue Carhardt pants in the process. He maintained his hold around the man's neck, gradually loosening as the man's ability to struggle ebbed. When the man slipped out of consciousness, Roger released him. His head hit the pavement with a soft thud. Roger stood up and, seeing the small crowd that had gathered, had the familiar sensation of having gone through an entire experience without hearing a thing. The sensation, or lack thereof, was not a pleasant one and he briefly wondered why it occurred before stepping over the crumpled man and approaching the woman, still folded awkwardly out her car door.

Roger reached down and offered the woman his hand, pulling her up as she slid back into her car.

"You OK?" he asked almost indifferently.

"Um, yeah, I'm fine. Thank you. I...thank you."

But Roger was already walking back down the road to his Nissan.

The incident wouldn't make the evening news. It wouldn't even make the local paper. But one person saw the entire event unfold, from start to finish. And he would be the one who would change Roger's life.

The Amputeens: Episode 1, Part 2

Living on a main thoroughfare has its advantages:

No one has trouble finding your house.

Commerce is always a short walk or drive away.

Your address is generally a nice large number like 452 or 1681.

But backing out of your driveway into traffic at 8 AM on a Wednesday is most certainly NOT one of those advantages. After what seemed like 20 minutes but was probably less than 2, Roger gunned it in reverse, cut the wheel hard with his palm and accelerated with a slight lurch. No matter how gently he shifted into drive from reverse, the Sentra always lurched. Every time.

Easing down Pleasant Street, Roger steadied the wheel with his left elbow and reached across his body with his right hand, instinctively knowing the placement of the driver's side window button. As the window lowered with a sound that could be described as something between a buzz and a rattle, Roger thought about how odd it was that everyone still uses the term "rolling down the window." No car built in the last ten years has had manual windows. People just have a hard time letting go of what they're used to.

With the window down, Roger got a whiff of the nostalgia offered by the warm, late summer air. That smell always reminded him of playing four-square in elementary school. He wondered why that memory always popped into his head. He hated four-square and was always terrible at it. But for those few formative years, Roger played it every day during recess on the pavement court marked by aged, flecked white paint. Did you even call it a court? He didn't know. But every morning the kids would be lined up waiting for one of the lucky four sharing the court to hit the cheap red rubber ball outside the lines or to break a rule recently decreed by the current four-square king. Hey, since there was a king, it probably SHOULD be called a court. Roger made a face at himself for even thinking such a lousy joke.

Roger glanced out the passenger side window as he passed plot after plot of predictable architecture (if it even warranted the lofty term). The uneven lawns were home to an endless array of once brightly colored toys, their cheap plastic now faded after a summer of harsh sun and disuse.

"Man I hate Rhode Island," he thought.

He turned his attention back to the road and realized he was driving 15 MPH. But he wasn't the cause of the slowdown, more the result. This was strange. Pleasant is usually busy at this time, but it's never bumper to bumper. "There must be an accident," Roger surmised.

Now completely stopped, Roger leaned his head out the window to get a look past the traffic. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust down the road, but when they did, they widened in horror.

The Amputeens: Episode 1, Part 1

In one motion that was somehow awkward and effortless, Roger one-handedly whipped his messenger bag over his head and slipped it onto one shoulder. He exhaled slowly, raising his head to look at himself in the cheap frameless mirror bracketed to the inside of his bedroom door.

Hair: Stylishly messy with just the right amount of product.

Clothes: Crisp white button-down dress shirt with ragged jeans and white sneakers, a nice blend of new and worn.

Left arm: Still missing from just below the elbow.

As Roger took himself in, he thought about what his mom had been badgering him about the last few weeks. That this was a chance to start fresh. A new school. A new year. An opportunity to put everything behind him—the suppressed aggression, the violence, the incident, the trial, what began with exhilaration and ended in humiliation.

Roger thought for a moment and opened his bedroom door. He skipped down the stairs, but it wasn’t a carefree, whimsical skip. It was a hurried gate that was more out of habit than anything else. And he was determined to leave the house before his parents knew he was even awake. He didn’t want the questions. He didn’t want the encouragement. He just wanted to get this over with.

Roger slipped out the front door, careful not to make a sound. As the door softly clicked behind him, he sighed with relief at the avoidance of confrontation, no matter how well-intentioned it would have been.

It was August so the early morning air was still warning of the heat to that would come with the afternoon sun. A little more upbeat, Roger fished for his keys in his right pocket. Extracting them, he manually unlocked the door of his cherry red 1993 Nissan Sentra SE-R. He tossed his backpack onto the passenger seat, temporarily smothering a pile of fast food wrappers, ATM receipts, loose change and other useless odds and ends.

Pulling out into the road, Roger felt the familiar fluttering of butterflies. He’d spent almost an entire day at an orientation session at the school two weeks before, but he still hadn’t met anyone who didn’t fall into the “administrator” category. He wasn’t naïve enough to think that part of his past wouldn’t be waiting to greet him at the school’s entrance, but he was hoping to get through at least this first day without incident.

Unfortunately, hope is no match for destiny.