Two Suns. By Jerry Villhotti. What the two suns would do in Johnny's ethereal dream, while on the operating table, was to first twang into a frown and then twang back through circles into a smile. Johnny was eight years old and inside the dream adjacent to the two suns was the woods where fifteen year old Grady, with the mind of a seven year old boy, had walked and Johnny along with several other young boys had stumbled in trying to get away from the helpless looking boy the older boys, who in a couple of years would be fighting in a war to preserve the "American Way of Life", were using to scare the younger ones by having Grady flashlight his pockmarked face to dangle bright in midair inside the darkness of a summer night. These same woods where Johnny had to prove he was a "tough kid" from The Bronx, soon after moving into the Little Dublin neighborhood of Burywater, by having to fight the toughest kid who just happened to be two years older than he. Johnny used two punches to beat the bully, a wearer of a frightening face, with a right-left combination to his head that had the boy collapsing into a heap screaming to know if he were going to die. Watching him, as the bigger guys did their awkward nervous Burywater laugh, made Johnny regret even more that he was forced to leave his old East Bronx neighborhood where everyone attempted to be direct with one another; trusting to turn their backs on one another respectfully. Johnny had walked on the same cobblestone streets "everybody dies" John Garfield had before going to make the movie: "Body and Soul". What the sun would do was first go into halves and then spring back whole with full face then spring back with a vibrating twang sound as if the movement was completed but then suddenly the face would catapult into a half again becoming a frown .... Johnny's mind reasoned the night before while lying in the semi-dark ward full of wounded children where he would meet the boy called Arnold "the kike", as the nurse called him, who had been burned by Burywater friends who thought all "un-American people" had no business being residents in their country - that only true Mayflower Americans like themselves descendants from the five million that had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean on that one large ship who had left a land of religious persecution. "Tomorrow this time the operation will be over and my leg will no more have water inside it." Over and over Johnny repeated this until sleep overtook him and then he was in the dream of the two suns. END
Links to other sites on the Web
Copyright of Story: Jerry Vilhotti.
