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Heartbeats

Jack Harrison


��Four children scamper around in the twilight, shouting and squealing, grabbing at fireflies in the air. The few that are caught are deposited in a quart glass jar with a screw-on metal lid. The halfdozen small holes in the lid were produced by an ice pick wielded by an obliging mother.
��A Golden Retriever, tired os scurrying to and fro, sprawls on the grass. A grey cat peeks from under a bush at the corner of the house. The dog is looking the other way, so the at darts across the corner of the yard and through a small gap in a hedge that maks the boundary of the neighboring yard.
��The remnants of a Kool-Aid stand - a card table, two folding chairs, some paper cups, and a plastic pitcher - rest abandoned on the sidewalk near the street. Tossed aside on the grass near the hedge are a plastic bat and ball and two small ballgloves of imitation leather.
��An elderly man and woman strolling by stop and speak to the children, who greet them quickly, then dash off. Locusts buzz in the oak trees. Occasionally a car rumbles slowly down the brick street. Lights blink on in two nearby houses. Three teenagers on bicycles whiz by.
��Moths flutter silently around the porch light. Buzzing June bugs careen through the air and bump noiseily against the screen door. A man walks out of the house, takes several envelopes out of the mailbox on the porch, sits down in a lawn chair and puts his feet up on the porch railing.
��One of the children shouts to the man and runs up onto the porch to display the jar of tiny, blinking lights. As the child returns to the yard, the man smiles and leans back in his chair. He shuffles through the mail in his hand, tears open one envelope and reads the letter inside, with some difficulty because of the dim light.
��“I thought you’d like to know,” his sister has written, “that Jim Blaylock passed away yesterday. He had a heart attack while he was mowing the yard. He was just forty-two. A year older than you, I guess.”
��The man drops the letter in his lap and stares out across the yard, across the street - to another yard in another time. He remembers Jimmy, the skinny, always grinning, red-headed neighbor kid, often eager to catch lightning bugs and look for locust shells and play ball in the front yard on warm June evenings. The man shivers, as if a chill has passed through his body.
��“Come on, you kids,” he calls out. “It’s gettin’ dark. Time to go in and start taking your baths.” After some protesting, two of the chidren trudge up onto the porch and the other two head down the street. The man helps one child untie a knot in a shoelace, then suddenly hugs the child tightly.
��The man can feel the quick, steady beat of the small heart in the child’s body, and senses that it is somehow in sync with the slower beat of his own. He fights off a feeling of panic and vows silently that he will not lie awake at night wondering how strong or how fragile both those hearts might be.



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