This was one of his first memories: begging to join the older boys playing baseball. He was five years old. They finally relented, gave him an old glove that hung almost to his knees when he put it on, and to keep him out of the way, placed him in the “outfield” beyond some cedar trees.
From this position, the little boy couldn’t see any of the other players. Nevertheless, he faithfully kept gazing up into the evening sky above the little cedars. Waiting, waiting, day after day.
Then late one afternoon it happened. He saw a dark point in the sky. It grew swiftly bigger and bigger until it hit him in the face, knocking him down and bloodying his nose.
This was a mystical experience, and he never forgot the lesson, which is that some things grow bigger and bigger, and then there is this brief blunt spasm of darkness, after which they are gone and you find yourself lying on the ground, looking up at the sky.
Matt Hughes is a pseudonym for Ohio author Jack Matthews, who died in 2013 after publishing more than twenty books of fiction, essays, and poetry. He taught creative writing at Ohio University in Athens and, for the last decade of his life, lived with his wife in the wooded Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio, collecting rare books, yard saleing, and writing. An ebook of his short fiction from AGNI and elsewhere, Abruptions: 5 Minute Tales to Awaken the Mind, will appear in 2014. His website is www.ghostlypopulations.com.