The Worst Way to Wake up Your Mother

by

Sam VanGeison

As my mom and I pulled into our garage, I snatched a glimpse of a smashed pumpkin in the frostbitten garden. The clock on the console stated it was midnight. Wasn’t it just two hours ago when my cousin, Brian, and I were in my room playing video games? A life in the country is a dull life, especially for a kid, but I found some entertaining activities whenever I kept an eye for one.
We hunted each other down in the mean streets of some spaghetti western ghost town, all of this epic gunfight played out on my television screen. Brian quickly grew tired of playing, not because he was losing. Oh no, that was surely not the reason. He suggested a venture to the great outdoors of my backyard, which had been freshly coated with a six inch layer of snow. I hinted that we have a snowball fight as I threw a recently made slush ball at his face. We chased each other through my backyard. I ran towards to my mother’s garden where I stumbled onto an idea. When I say ‘stumble’, I actually mean trip. When I say a ‘idea’, I mean a pumpkin.
My cousin rounded the corner of the garage with a snowball in each hand. He attempted to throw both of them at the same time. The snowballs landed softly twenty feet away from where I sat. Needless, my cousin is not the most athletic bound person in my family. He spotted the pumpkin and a flash of insight ripped across his face.

“I got an idea,” he said excitedly. The idea was pretty straightforward as are all ideas when you’re just a kid, so straightforward that I already knew what it was. We were going to smash the pumpkin to miniscule bits. Brian ran into my garage. A moment later, he came out with two baseball bats, one in each hand. Perhaps it is just pure boyish quality to destroy objects. I have often heard of boys walking miles upon miles to an abandoned house simply to bust out the windows. We each took our weapons of miniature destruction and approached our prey, sitting peacefully in the frozen grass and weeds of the garden.

Brian took the first swing. The bat swept right through the plant, rotten all the way to the center. I grand slammed my Louisville Slugger deep into the center of the pumpkin. The pumpkin was rapidly becoming just fragments of what it had been, pieces to a jigsaw puzzle that could never be put back together again. Brian winded his bat back high above his shoulder. What I left out of this equation was the fact my cousin is left-handed and I was standing to the right of him. I hadn’t taken these facts into consideration at the time and before I could step back, Brian took a huge golf swing through the pumpkin. The pumpkin was so rotten and smashed that it didn’t slowdown the bat, let alone stop it. The only object that slowed the bat down was the right side of my face.

Blood ran down my face, and I ran towards my house. I think the adrenaline was the only thing keeping me conscious. All the while, my cousin was standing in the garden, shocked. Blood dripped from my face onto the concrete, the bricks, and the wood as I raced inside. I cleaned all of the blood off my face and looked at the deep cut that was on the edge of my eye socket. I realized that this was the kind of injury that ended people up in the hospital. I wrapped gauze around my head multiple times. I went my mom’s bedroom and shook her awake. We jumped into the car and drove to the emergency room at the Saint Vincent’s memorial hospital. A splitting headache and eight stitches later, I arrived home with my mom. I decided that I wouldn’t charge my cousin with battery as I had considered before.