A/N: Not quite sure where this one came from, I just know I had to write something short for a Creative Writing class I was taking and suddenly this popped in my head. It remains my shortest work to date and the favorite of my short story collection (a whopping 2 in total :)

And The Time Came
by JD Allen

“You got the boat, Kitch?”

“Yeah,” I grunted, wishing I didn’t have it. I wished I would’ve left it at home or nuked it, claimed I lost it, whatever, anything. I just didn’t want to be at that stream with that boat at that time with Gordo.

“Well then get to it, let it go,” Gordo said, pointing at the little ribbon of water in front of our feet.

“I don’t want to.”

Gordo sighed very loudly. He was the master of heavy sighing, very easily irritated this guy. He rolled his head back then turned it at me, so he kind of looked like a standing dead guy glaring at me. This was his way of looking really pissed, but it barely affected me anymore.

“You gotta,” he said, “you gotta do it for Nicky.”

My hand went tighter on the boat, my thumb became a steel clamp and my knuckles were white from the pressure. I didn’t want to let that boat go. I looked down at it. It was ugly as hell. Crudely cut out of some scrap wood we found in the dump with a rag for a sail, it was the saddest excuse for a boat I had ever seen. Nicky was proud of it though. He loved that piece of crap.

“You gotta do it for Nicky,” Gordo repeated, getting more pissed off. “Look, we said we were gonna do this when it was time and it’s time, so let it go Kitch.”

Gordo had called me Kitch since the third grade when calling your best guy friend by his last name started to be cool, though he still claimed it was the dumbest last name in the world. About the same time Nicky started calling me “Kitchen,” believing he was the cleverest kid alive. He wasn’t the cleverest kid alive, in fact it was amazing he had survived as long as he did with that head of his, but he meant well.

“It’s been eight months, Kitch,” Gordo said, “eight months. Nicky would’ve wanted you to let the boat go.”

“No he wouldn’t’ve,” I said, almost laughing. “He would’ve said, ‘move over, I’m the captain,’ and sailed it himself.”

Gordo nodded because he knew I was right. Nicky had been obsessed with sailing boats since he dropped an empty Coke bottle in the stream and it zoomed across the water like Jesus water-skiing. He was fascinated with whole concept of floating objects or something, I don’t know. Gordo and I never really got it. It wasn’t cool to sail little toy boats, especially ones you made yourself, but Nicky made it into some sort of worship.

“It possessed him,” Gordo and I used to say, it was constantly running through his head. He drew pictures about it, wrote stories about it, made up songs about it, dreamed about it, fantasized about it, and - more annoying to Gordo and me - he talked about it. I have to admit it got a little old having to hear about every little detail of every little part of those stupid boats every single damn day.

And the songs, oh God the songs!

Having to hear the same lame song about sixty times over could really drive a guy to consider murder. It was amazing Gordo and I were still sane after it all and that Nicky’s face was still in one piece.

Nicky’s parents, on the other hand, were thrilled it was a hobby that didn’t involve a bunch of slimy creatures being dissected on the kitchen counter (something Nicky had made a habit of before the sailing obsession) and bought him a load of toy boat-making kits. They wanted to encourage “this healthy new discovery,” as they called it, while at the same time try to take away his need to dig through the dump for supplies. This big “encouraging” attempt proved to be a wrong move. I think Nicky considered himself to be a real artist, driven to create by completely original hits of inspiration, where none of his creations looked like the others and they were so different and fresh that the most genius of imaginations couldn’t ever think them up.

Those boat-making kits all came with a house-shaped chunk of wood, a long peg and a plastic triangle for the sail. The only creative thing you could do with those was paint them different colors. I think Nicky thought they were the Anti-Christ or something and just like da Vinci wouldn’t go near a paint-by-number, Nicky wouldn’t come within a hundred yards of those kits. They ended up under his bed, way in the back so his parents wouldn’t see. He didn’t want to hurt their feelings.

Once he had created one of his weekly masterpieces, he would plan the launch for the upcoming Saturday. Without fail, through rain, snow, sleet and atomic blasts, Nicky sailed his boats every Saturday morning. For two years, up until the day he died, Nicky would drag me and Gordo out of bed on launch days, push us through the woods until we got to the dinky little stream that he loved and there he would unveil his newest creation to us.

He would make it out to be an event, like a car show or an air show, complete with trumpet noises and his one-man cheering audience. Then, while Gordo and I rubbed the sleep out of our eyes with loud yawns, he’d sail the boat. He always made us salute it, like it was a naval ship or something. He even tried to make us sing the Star Spangled Banner one time, but then we reminded him we were not at a football game so it wasn’t necessary (and really, even if we were at a football game Gordo and I wouldn’t be caught dead singing the national anthem.) Nicky would still hum it though, unable to hold it in. Gordo and I would be tempted to roll our eyes but we wouldn’t, because you didn’t do that to Nicky.

A little ways down, a certain log had fallen over the stream creating a convenient bridge for small animals such as squirrels and chipmunks but to Nicky, when the boat hit that log, it had reached the finish line. He’d time the boats on his cheap plastic wristwatch he got in a Burger King kids meal and record the times in a little notebook. Then it was homeward bound to retire the boat of the week to a shelf in his room and spend the rest of the day staring at his nautical shrine, dreaming of what next week would add to it.

“Why did we ever come with him?” I said, still staring at the atrocity in my hand.

“To where?”

“To here, to this, to watch some stupid piece of trash float? I lost a lot of precious hours of sleep, you know. And on Saturdays of all days! I mean, what kid in his right mind lets some idiot with a toy boat drag him out of bed every Saturday morning, huh? Why didn’t we just tell him to fuck off?” I shouted.

Gordo continued his dead guy stare and said without tone, “Because it was Nicky and it was important to him.”

And with that, Gordo pulled a lighter out of his pocket and waved it in the air.

“Well? Are you gonna put it in or what? Important parts of me are shrinking in this cold, let’s go Kitch.”

For eight months we had been saying we were gonna do this. We were gonna do it for Nicky, one last hurrah for our boy, and then go on with life. Not forget him - you couldn’t forget Nicky, even if you wanted to - but finally bury him. Get him out of our constant thoughts, wave way the stupid Nicky cloud that had been hovering over us those last few months.

And as I looked at the boat and looked at the stream, I thought of Nicky…and I didn’t want to bury him. After months of being driven insane by his memory, here I was, still clinging to the bastard.

“Remember when Joey Dargas used to ask why we were friends with a retard?” I asked.

“Joey Dargas is an asshole.”

“No disputing that, but remember what we used to say?”

Gordo finally grinned. It was a rarity to see Gordo really smile and when he did it was a little surprising. He had a very obtrusive smile. Lots of teeth, long teeth, set in a big mouth. He kind of looked like a vampire when he smiled.

“We’d say, ‘Joe, maybe it’s Nicky who’s the normal one and the rest of us are retards,’ that’s what we’d say to that prick,” Gordo smirked.

Though his IQ and his grades didn’t deserve it, the teachers at our schools stopped holding Nicky back after elementary school. We were pretty sure it was because they felt so bad for him, being held back three times just in second grade alone, and they probably figured it wouldn’t hurt to just keep passing him. It wasn’t as if he was going to go to college or get a job, so why crap on the guy’s dream of staying in the same grade as his friends? So after his second stint in the third grade, when they noticed that Gordo and I for some odd reason played with the “slow” kid, they let him go on. He was eleven when Gordo and I reached the third grade. Only now in my older years do I realize how depressing that is and I don’t blame the teachers for giving him grades he didn’t earn.

“And then Nicky would cheer,” I continued, remembering our dealings with that douche bag Joey Dargas. “Remember that smile of his?”

“Scarier’n mine,” Gordo said, remembering Nicky’s horribly crooked and rectangular teeth.

“And that laugh?”

“Sounded like a damn donkey.”

I thought for a minute.

“Remember when we made this boat?”

“It was two days before he died,” said Gordo, thinking out loud and staring at a tree on the other side of the stream. “May 12th, I remember because it was three days before prom.”

Nicky had somehow gotten us to help him build this one. He was a master craftsman by then and he wanted to teach his art to his best friends, so we dug through the dump and brought the supplies back to his garage. Under his careful supervision, Gordo and I built the boat and Nicky laughed like a donkey at it.

The mast was crooked, the sail’s shape was wrong, the wood was rotten and a little too heavy. He giggled and giggled about it. Then he said it was his favorite boat of all. Nicky was like that. Anything anybody did was his favorite thing in the world. He wrote on his calendar we would sail it on the following Saturday and it would break all the records because we built it.

That Friday his heart stopped; something it had been itching to do for years. Gordo and I weren’t shocked, not even surprised, more like mildly startled. Nicky’s fate was like waiting for a bad grade report in the mail, it sucked but we knew it was coming. When he survived twelve years doctors called it “remarkable.” Reaching graduation they said would be “a miracle.”

Nicky fell short a year of a miracle.

A week later was his funeral and that night we found the boat in his garage and we vowed to sail it when the time came. When we thought that “time” would be was a mystery. When having two instead of three in our group didn’t feel weird? When people stopped giving us sympathetic looks? When we walked by Nicky’s house and didn’t feel like shit? To that very day when Gordo and I stood by Nicky’s creek with that ugly boat I didn’t know what “time” it was but, apparently, it had come because there we were, at his stream with his boat.

“We gotta let it go, Kitch,” Gordo said. “We gotta let him go.”

My iron grip was released. I held the boat up to my eye level. I straightened the misshapen sail and the crooked mast. I looked at Gordo and he gave me a nod of approval. He clicked his lighter and put the flame to the sail. It caught it slowly, but was soon being devoured by it. I knelt down and put the boat in the stream, still holding onto it. I stared at it, its poor construction, its sloppy materials, its ragged meaning. I felt as if I was clinging to the last bit of Nicky there was.

“I can hear him laughing now,” said Gordo, “you know he’s just pissin’ his pants right now.”

He was right, I heard the laughing too. I let go and stood up. Like a tiny Viking burial ship, the boat trailed down the stream with a strong wobble and orange flames feasting on the sail. We watched as it tipped around stones and long grass, as it danced with the unstable current, as it remained afloat, even with a crooked mast and misshapen sail. Gordo and I straightened up and saluted the SS Nicky and its departure. As if we were surfing the same brainwave, Gordo and I looked over at each other and, with little grins, we began to softly hum the Star Spangled Banner.

The laughter got louder. The boat turned around a corner and was gone.

“That one definitely broke a record,” said Gordo and I smiled, feeling warm amidst the January chill.