Charged

Charged Zach Rohrbough

The waves were bigger on the West Coast. I slipped beneath an oncoming one and crested the next before it crashed. Too lazy to paddle and too inexperienced to find myself in a barrel quite yet, I was content to drift and survive.

I spent every day beneath overpasses and between dry grasses where abandoned shopping carts and cars with dead batteries served as villages. A colony of cigarette butts a thousand strong had collected beneath a bridge over railroad tracks. I lived in a hammock behind the skate shop, in an alley where two hundred years ago wild horses abandoned by the Spanish used to roam.

On Sundays, I skated to the old church house and sang and held hands with people I recognized but could not name. I worked two jobs when there was enough work to go around. During the week, I rebuilt and pressure tested old fire extinguishers. On Saturdays, I gave surfing lessons to kids. I, too, was a novice surfer who wished to slash through waves between the beach’s dock pylons.

It was a terrifying and enchanting thing to watch. With my own eyes, I’d seen surfers fail to break the sea’s thrashing broncos and land flailing against the oysters, little immobile devils clinging to the concrete pylons—the stuff of nightmares.

And yet, at Hailey’s Market, I’d traded my soft-top for a beaten six-foot surfboard. Something in me felt ready. Charged. I felt necessary to the movement of the planet.

Destiny is such a rare experience for homeless youth. Each afternoon, save Sunday, I practiced skating in the empty ditch five miles south of the strip. There, along the manmade curvature of an empty river, I attempted flight. I mimicked the pumping motion of surfing, emulated each gifted Icarus I had witnessed pass close enough to the teethed pillars for a thrill, yet somehow buoyant as they edged the jagged reach of oysters.

It was finally my turn in the ocean when I leapt on the board to ride a swift seven-footer. Only one thought consumed me: You have done and seen this. A thousand times.

My heartbeat was visible in each of my veins. Water pelted me, deflected like bullets from the first pylon.

A swift moment later, I nimbly slid into the barrel; I felt the rain from the wave’s roof and the droplets of sea water from the bottom of the dock. Someone screamed with joy and rage and passion and it sounded like me. One moment, I felt every fiber of my body tight in motion; the next, I stood slack on my board as though I were a new baby, held on my two feet clumsily by a smiling mother.

Another broken wave came thundering and tossed me from my board. Some broncos could still throw a rider even after they broke. And as I fell beneath the surface and my board flipped through the air, I didn’t feel a thing.

Elation, maybe, even as I was under the hooves, the undercurrent and the spin, the punch in my diaphragm as water filled my lungs.

On the beach I rose, choking, holding my board by its leash. I tore it from my ankle and fell to my knees. I clasped my hands together and yanked them into my gut, rolling in the sand. And as I retched up sea water with every rasping breath, I foggily detected the strangest prayer I have ever worded.

You have done and seen me do this. A thousand times. Flash Fiction

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