322 Friends
by Niles Reddick
Al posted on
Facebook about his gruesome surgery: a gangrenous
appendix ruptured and shot infection throughout
his body, near death until the antibiotics
flushed the poison. “Worst case the
doctor’d ever seen,” he wrote. Nothing
short of a miracle, and he was appreciative,
vowed to do more for others and be a better
Christian, and offered his philosophic wisdom to
readers: Don’t take life for granted. You
just never know.
He hoped for a
hundred likes, maybe twenty comments. While
waiting on the red numbers to climb just above
the globe at the top of the page, he scrolled
past the memes, prayer chains, and onto the news
of beheadings by ISIS, more looting in Ferguson,
and opinions on gay marriage. “Crazy world,”
he mumbled. “These people ought to get jobs
and Jesus.”
A ding or two,
and Al went back to see “Thinking of you”
and “Prayers” from people he’d
known in high school in the 1960s when his hair
was long and he toked a little, when his parents
were idiots and didn’t support integration.
Al’s town had closed the local pool and
filled it in rather than follow the court order
to integrate. The answers then were blowing in
the wind, but the winds of time blew the answers
away and now Al’s circle had closed in on
itself; most of his friends were mere connections
and the rest followed him and he followed them,
further isolated from the outside world and more
trapped inside their homes with their grown-up
toys.
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