The Volunteer by Salvatore Scibona

Author:Salvatore Scibona
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

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• • •

“BOY,” THE PRIEST SAID.

“Yes, Father,” the boy said.

They were passing a plastic soccer ball in the sandlot behind the fence at the St. Thérèse Home. The priest was wearing his hiking clothes because he did not play sports anymore. He was too old for games, but here he was.

The daylight waned.

“Give it your laces, now,” the priest said, demonstrating with cocked ankle, and passed. “Look,” he said, “all this has got to end.”

The boy cocked his own ankle sharply, as though his foot were clubbed, swung, caught the ball without a hint of toe, and brought it spinning as high as the eyes of the priest; whose limbic system did not inform the conscious parts of him before it responded—a complex of buried muscle memory, the unforgotten talent of a slowing body that still remembered all the brain had lost: the ball was watched in, was trapped with his chest, was dropped to the nimbly flicking thigh that sent the ball up, up. His gleaming skull waited like a globe in space. The ball fell through the purple sky. The spinning hexagons came close. His neck went back and stiffened. The ball came to his forehead like revelation ricocheting against his brains, and he headed it back to the boy.

“Your name,” the priest demanded. But that wasn’t the right question, was it?

And with great solemn gray-green eyes, the boy watched the ball at his feet: as if to say, I don’t matter, this matters; and cocked his ankle, and aimed, and swung back again, all eyes, eyes not to the ground or himself or the priest, but to the ball: as if to say, You don’t matter, this matters; and aimed again, and shot it.

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