The Sun and the Radio

“And then I jumped,” he chuckled, “but luckily the water wasn’t too cold.”

I shivered even though we lay on the warm, dry grass.

“Mmm, haha. Shit, it would have been freezing!” I mumbled. The water would have been colder than that early morning in June when I had slipped down by the lake.

“But you know, the thing is I don’t feel the cold really,” he said as he lay back, stretching his arms to the sun. From the angle where I sat the sun shone through his figures so it was resting in his extended hand. I wondered what would have happened if he had been there on that day in June. Instead, my dad had dragged me from the frozen water and broken ice.

The sun was sitting high in the sky and it slowly seeped all the way into my body. The warmth made me sleepy. Ever since we were young boys we had come out to the field. I stared out now at the swaying grasses.

When I woke up, he had made a small pile of yellow grass stems. I watched him for a while. He pulled one from the ground, then absentmindedly pulled downwards, splitting the blades of grass into narrow strips. He hummed the soft tune of a song that we used to listen to on his old radio. I joined in, tapping on the ground with my fingers. He began rocking his head from side to side with the beat. I found a thicker stem of grass and a twig and used them to drum the ground.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he sang. ‘OoooooOooooOOOoo!”

I drummed harder and faster and finally threw my drum sticks into the air.

The shredded grass was tossed up into the air and floated down as I waved my hand, “Thank you, thank you.”

He rolled back on his tummy, “God, that is a good song”

“Yeah, it’s a good one.”

A warm breeze filtered through the field.

“Hey, hey, want to see something?” he flicked his wrist, showing a jagged white line that traced up his inked forearm. “Wanna know how I got it? … Well, so there was this bear … and then this wolf …” He grinned, nodding his head.

“Hey, well why didn’t you invite me? I could have been, you know, your backup fighter,” I questioned in mock indignation.

“You were all bundled up then. You could’ve hit them with some bandages or something, maybe.”

“I could’ve given them some of the food and they would’ve just died from the smell of it,” I laughed.

“Hahaha! Did they not feed you well up there?”

“Nah, the food was the worst part. Yucky-yuck-yuck is what each dish should be named. I almost died just from the food.”

The sun slanted behind a soft white cloud. He rubbed his scar then the back of his neck.

“You feeling alright now though? I mean, you’re all better?”

“Mmm, mostly better. I think these things take a while to fully go.”

“Stuff always hits you hard though. Remember that time you got a bad headache? You were out for weeks. Even a bad mark from school would keep you in your room for days.”

“True,” I said quietly.

A grin broke out on his face, “Remember … haha … remember when I had to throw stuff through the window. Mars bars and stuff. Maybe a book if I thought you needed educating.”

“Yeah, haha!”

“Shit, those were great times. Nothing to do, just sit at yours all summer.”

I stared up at the sky thinking back. We would both be perched up on my window sill on hot afternoons or lounging around in the yard. I’d tell him my thoughts on a book that I’d just read and he would flip through the radio channels.

“Do you want the radio? Like, do you want to keep it?” he said.

“Oh, you won’t need it?”

“My new house comes with one built in.”

“Wow, that is very fancy,”

“Yeah, yeah, pretty posh. Claudia wanted one built in. But I was just wondering if you want the radio? I thought because you could listen to it, you know. Could give you something to wait around for, like waiting for a good song to come on.” He paused, ''You know you can call me now, when you need to, you know. And you can tell you about stuff and maybe talk to me when you get sick or something”

We looked at each other smiling.

“Yeah, I’d like the radio. And of course I’ll call you. And I’ll want the radio because the sound is really good. You’ll probably miss the sound. The new ones they make aren’t the same really.”

“Yeah, well you might be surprised. Just come down to visit soon.”

“Yeah, of course, sure. As long as the city doesn’t change you, haha.”

The sun slid down the side of the sky and created pink shadows from the swaying grasses.

He spoke again, “So you really can call me though, you know, when you need to. We don’t even have to chat about anything. Just if you need to talk to someone okay, okay? If you feel like you need to go to the lake, you can call me instead, yeah?”

He stared at me, the last rays of sun hitting his slightly sunburnt cheeks. He was able to hold the sun in his palm and find the right channel on the radio. He was never cold and he was able to jump into water and swim to safety. I went down to the lake, and I couldn’t do any of those things.

“Yeah, I’ll call you,” I promised.

We both nodded at each other.

As we both got up to leave the field, I stared at the two oval-shaped patches of flattened grass, mine now in shadow. I imagined that I was still laid out on the ground, watching us both leave the field and walk down the track. We were two men now with nothing in our hands, just a few pieces of dry grass in our hair, but I saw two tanned boys - him swinging the radio and me laughing in the sun.