Suspension

The day I found an elephant in the room, I knew it needed to be addressed. It was about time. I could no longer ignore it. We all sat in disbelief, nervous, no one anxious to speak up. Yet there it was. My elephant. And all of their elephants.

One man's elephant is another's ex-lover. One woman's unrequited love is another's elephant. Or 800-pound gorilla.

We were a group of close friends, cloistered together since childhood. The lone grade-plus-high school, in any small town, tends to promote each sequential grade en masse. From childhood to adulthood, the phases ensued.

By first grade, we knew who we all were. By third grade, we knew each other's mothers and some fathers, too. By fourth grade, we knew all the others' favorite colors. By seventh grade, we knew who were the secretly abused.

Puberty brought changes that had preferences for others shift and shimmy, sometimes resulting in broken hearts. Selectivity reared its ugly head, looking to accrue a body count But here, the wounded just couldn't lick their wounds and go their own ways. They had to sit there, day after day, trying to pay attention to things like the Peloponnesian Wars and the Continental Congress and pi.

By sophomore year of high school, we all knew who the beautiful people were, the popular kids, and the losers. We all knew who didn't have fathers anymore. We all knew who didn't have faith anymore. In anything. By junior year, the Goths had separated out from the frats, and the jocks from those accused of being gay. By then we knew who the virgins among us were. And we all knew how that demographic would change by senior year.

The body count rose.

Adulthood brought the skewed drives and ambitions among us, some falling far behind those who lurched far ahead. The Gaussian center of the bell curve remained humped with those remaining average. As the outliers on the curve changed places, the body count rose further.

It was an ugly curve. Unsmooth. With spikes and drops and interruptions. For some, being below that curve meant being six-feet under, for all practical purposes.

After graduation, for those who remained in this small town, the bounty was good in the way of jobs, but limited. Some would luck out; others would be scooped up; some would miss out. Some would move on because they wanted to; some would move on because they had to; others, yet, would stay and languish.

Some were shrewder than others, engaging in skullduggery to fix the outcomes. The grownup outcomes. Some tried to navigate the grownup outcomes with grade school sensibilities; these were eaten alive by those who discarded the naïvité of kindness and loyalty and conscience. Just like babies, the conscience begins dying right after it's born. And those who wrong others forget whom they wronged, while the wronged never forget who had wronged them.

It's a truism as relevant in the working world—the real world—as it was on the playground.

Here we alumni all sat together once again. Although incomplete, still it represented a microcosm—a representative symbol—of the unified whole who had graduated together. Who had grown up together. Who had grown apart, together.

My elephant sat in the back. I could feel her eye-darts in the back of my head. In front of her sat the alumna who had, in turn, broken my heart. It was only fair, wasn't it? The energy along this circuit seemed to neutralize arithmetically, but sublimate exponentially. There was a bitter frenzy of emotion charging the invisible wiring connecting us. There were grievances and unrealized acts of revenge completing the circuit.

Behind the ex-lover who had broken my heart, in front of my ex-lover whose heart I had broken, were the crossing of several other arcs of energy. The amps amped and the Joules jeweled. Something was gonna give! All it would take is one short. Who would short out first?

All of the elephants stewed in discordancy. The view of another's fortune is jaded by myopic jealousy. No lens can correct that.

The tangled web of unrequited loves, the petty score-keeping of our social and financial positions, and the energy nodes that were the varied heads in this room offered a fuse, a kindling temperature on the verge of immolation.

It was a blood bath.

The body count was impressive. The slaughter was obscene. And, as expected, there were no solutions to anyone's grievances.

There were twenty-two deaths that day in the homecoming alumni room. Fourteen others were severely injured, two of whom being brain dead. Who knew how many knives were carried by people; or concealed guns; or how much brain damage a student desk could wreak? Who could have known how many people would behave so, suddenly acting on their murderous impulses?

But this story has a happy ending: the body count, the carnage, the ferocious destruction so levied by—and on—this tightly-knitted group of former schoolmates took place before even the first speaker arrived at the dais to address them. It all happened very quickly and in only their minds. No one there could suspend their disbelief.

No one had dared address the elephant in the room.

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NOTE: This began as my entry into LAST's challenge, (Strange Suspense). Alas, it grew to way longer than 65 words. No alumni were hurt in the writing of this content.