A Quiet Rainbow

By J. Scuderi

The air had a hint of sulfur when it tickled my nose. The fragrance wasn’t too strong, but wholly different from the bubblegum belch my best friend had blown my way earlier that day. I of course retaliated with one of my own and began coughing from pushing the air out of my lungs and laughing at the same time.

Our teacher however didn’t find it amusing in the least and ordered us both with a stern pointed finger and a raised disapproving eyebrow to the corner of the room. I didn’t understand how that was any kind of punishment as we both ended up finding a stashed pocket of gas in our bellies which lead to even more hysterical mischief.

The teacher of course caught on and figured the best way to solve the obnoxiously loud gas crisis was to separate us. Our bodily ammunition wasn’t strong enough to travel the length of the room, but we still had the visually stimulating power to make faces that were good enough for our entertainment.

It’s funny how you don’t realize just how loud a thing like quiet is until all the noise around it disappears. I know that doesn’t make sense and it didn’t for me at first either. That quiet was the loudest noise I ever heard. Not because it was audible, but because it was a weight on top of me that I couldn’t understand at the time.

My best friend and I had been having a wonderful day getting into silly trouble. We never attempted to disrupt the class, but we simply had a natural talent for doing so. My friend lived in a house down the block. We’d known each other since we could remember knowing anything. His parents were divorced and he would stay with us sometimes when his Mother had to work a late shift at the plant.

Our family didn’t mind. He was like my brother and my parents treated him like their own son. Our town was small and from our perspective, that’s the way things were. He never really talked about his parents being divorced, only the fact that they could never get along. If they’d been in a room together for more than ten minutes, one of them would end up walking out after some pretty harsh comments that we didn’t really understand being kids.

Those things were silent too. Things like that become heavy and when the weight is too much for your body or mind to handle, you just want to scream I guess.

My friend had spent the night after his mom called and asked my mom if it was okay. My mother obliged and said she’d take us both to school in the morning. My mother wasn’t surprised when she was asked, it happened at least twice a week.

My parents didn’t yell about things like mortgages and bills. If they were upset at all, I never knew it. Both of my parents worked what they called remote jobs. They used computers a lot and sometimes had to go on video calls. When they did, I wasn’t allowed to be in the room, which was fine with me. I hated the calls because the person on the monitor would always try to joke around with me. I would usually nod and then leave as soon as I could.

It was like that before the pandemic, so my house never really had any issues like some of the other kids who had to stay home when it hit. Their parents didn’t work on computers like my friend’s mother and some ended up moving away. Some things in our house changed like the fact that my mother forced us to wash our hands almost every time she saw us. She also told us to brush our teeth just as many times, saying that fewer cavities helped keep Covid away. I think that was a lie, but we appeased her anyways.

So my friend and I brushed our teeth and even helped my parents make dinner. My friend stirred the macaroni and cheese and I was allowed to chop some of the cabbage we used on the hotdogs. I didn’t like veggies, but they were certainly tolerable on a hotdog. My parents even let us watch a horror movie if we promised not to have nightmares. Of course, we were all smiles when it started, but the monsters chasing everyone if they made noise were pretty tough to keep out of my head I have to admit.

My friend seemed to have the same issue after we said goodnight to my parents. After they went to bed, we snuck out of our sleeping bags and played a few laps of a racing game on my tablet. We both forgot about the monster completely when we had qualified for the secret stage. My friend almost blew our cover however when he yelped from the joy of surpassing his last high record. I was happy too, but held my composure, pretending to be more professional. It was a mind game I had learned to play. My friend hated it but enjoyed playing anyways.

The smell of sulfur again touched my nostrils faintly. I’d never smelled anything like it except in our science class segment. The teacher demonstrated a chemical reaction with iron and sulfur. I remember everyone loudly whining from the smell that washed over us. My friend of course caused even more of a radius when he claimed that the teacher had passed gas and that was the real cause of the situation. The class exploded in laughter and even included the teacher who kindly offered my friend a wink and a silly flatulent noise from his tongue which caused even more hilarity. I remember everyone’s faces cracking up. My friend almost folded in half after snot flew out of his nose from laughing so hard.

Was that this morning? I can’t recall. Sometimes I forget. At least I think I forget. Maybe we were having so much fun that time slipped by like a passing bird.

It was morning. I decided to wear a black tee-shirt with a print from some band my father loved. I couldn’t understand the words when he played it for me, but I liked the picture and that seemed good enough for him. Maybe I’d try to listen when I was older. But is there enough time for that? How did they go? The words…? “I can’t remember anything. Can’t tell if this is true or a dream. Deep down inside I feel to scream. This terrible silence stifles me.

My friend punched me in the shoulder. It hurt, but I wasn’t mad. I’d save my revenge until lunchtime when he tried to speak to the girl in the second row. He always made fun of her ever since she moved to the neighborhood. The first day she came to class, she had a rainbow and a bird painted on either cheek. The teacher had told her to introduce herself and all we could do was stare. Her family had moved from California and she said a lot of the kids painted their cheeks like that for fun. My friend immediately made a joke about it causing the class to break out into laughter. She was embarrassed, but it sort of didn’t seem to phase her that much.

Later that night when my friend stayed over, I had just finished getting ready for bed and caught him drawing a rainbow in his notebook. I prodded him about it and after a bit of wrestling, he gave in and admitted that she was kind of cute. For the next two months, he attempted to make it up to her by making fun of her less and less. Eventually, he had gained the right to sit next to her after a few notes were passed between them. They were a check-box style cross-examination of his commitment to stop making fun of her and admit he liked her. He acted slightly reluctantly to her harsh demand that the check be made in pen and not pencil, but my friend did and I was actually proud of his small gesture of maturity.

There is a pounding somewhere near. Some kind of thumping like a heartbeat. Was I thinking of my friend’s puppy love or maybe it's just some kind of machine? The rainbow and the bird come together in my mind suddenly, yet slowly. I’ve only seen one real rainbow after it rained for three days. We were stuck in the house and were sick of everything. We had played all the games and read all the comic books and watched some of our favorite movies until our stomachs felt like we ate too many sweets. And then the sun burned the clouds to the east and when we walked outside to smell the moisture receding like a long great dream, there was a rainbow arched over the whole town.

My father was in an early meeting with an international client. He took a moment however to give my friend and me high-fives as we left with my mother to go to school. It had been a couple of months already since they allowed us back into the classrooms. We all hated and adored going back. It was a bittersweet moment when the news broke that we had to. I think my parents were somewhat relieved, but my mother still cried when she dropped us off the first day back. She started laughing at herself almost immediately thinking she was a fool, but my friend and I understood her perspective and she of course felt ours.

The days were still cut short simply because the virus was still a threat. The adults could never decide how much of a threat though. There were many nights when we didn’t know if we had to go the next day or not. When it was finally decided, my parents invited my friend and his mother over for dinner and we watched old videos of us when we were really kids. My friend and I of course thought it was silly and somewhat embarrassing, but our parents were having a good time and that meant we could have a little fun eating extra slices of pizza and drinking more soda than we were allowed.

The days melted into one another as the consistency of the class schedule became normal. My friend and I had almost as much fun as we did when we had to stay home, so all in all it wasn’t that bad. We had to wear masks for a while, but the adults decided that it wasn’t necessary. They went back and forth on that decision a few times but ended up stopping it. We had to sit faster away from one another as well, but that was okay, the extra space gave us more room to run around in class. We had been told the air was poisoned, but to us, it felt more fresh and free.

The thumping was louder now. And the smell is thicker. Sharper. I can feel it in my eyes. does anyone else feel that?

My friend was signaling to me from the seat where the teacher made him sit after our gaseous comedy escapade. I thought he was joking and so I began to make funny hand gestures myself. He was right to the entrance, a thick wooden door with a thinly long vertical window running from the midpoint almost to the top. Next to the door was a glass window adjacent to the metal frame with a light curtain covering the view. My friend however could see through the frilly open fabric on the side of the curtain. His gestures because sporadic and I began to think he was going to end up in the principles office if he kept up the charade.

What was that sound? Is that what he was trying to tell me about? Look at the class. They are all getting up now. The teacher is going toward him now. My friend must be in real trouble. The teacher grabbed his arm and pulled him towards her. The door behind her opened. That thumping sound became my heartbeat about to rip through the screen-printed skull on my tee-shirt.

She turned around and her face had changed. It wasn’t her anymore. It was like one of the photos in a history book. Pale and ghostly. The thumping was louder still. My friend’s face changed. No longer smiling. No longer human. The pieces of his skull didn’t look like the drawing. They were a color I’d never seen before. The gelled red liquid that encapsulated some of the pieces glistened in the fluorescent light above. My friend fell over and appeared to sleep with his eyes open.

Thumping. Thumping. Thumping.

Some of the other kids too. They joined him. Crashing stupidly to the thin rough industrial carpet.

Thumping. Thumping. Thumping.

The man at the door wasn’t a teacher. He was nothing but a flickering shadow behind bursts of fire.

He was the drummer and the cause of this heavy silence. The silence that came after the thumping. The heavy silence you can’t hear until you’re lying on your back amongst your classmates and your friend and a girl with a rainbow painted on her cheek.

The thumping fades away and we all sleep for the last time.

I remember now.

Will you?