Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #014

Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #014 – “The Atrium – Chapter 02 – Trisha”

As promised, I’m releasing some of my upcoming book bi-weekly as part of the Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday series here at SBS.  I don’t expect it to make sense…at least, not at the moment…but that’s okay.  Putting it out here publicly is intended to be motivation to keep me writing it, and that’s all the purpose any of it needs to serve.  Hopefully, if I get lucky, you’ll enjoy it in the process…that’s the best case scenario.  At the moment, I’d predict that things will likely change with the order I put these things out in…and what reads as “chapters” now, might end up becoming pure prologue, if it even ends up making the final cut for the whole story at all.  Regardless, if you find yourself being one of the few that wanna follow along and see where this goes, I can at least promise you that reading what is posted up here at the homepage will provide you with extra insight, details, and ideas that probably won’t even end up being in the book…so perhaps, by reading these postings at the start of each month, you might very well know more about what I’m writing than the publisher will by the time things are all finished. 

I truly hope you enjoy, and thank you for reading.

– Jer @ SBS

The Atrium – Chapter 02 – Trisha

July 30^th, 1996.

The coach of the Titans U-15 girls soccer team knelt down at the center of the field, pre-game, arriving about an hour before the rest of the team would get there.  Part superstitious ritual, part responsibility, he considered it his job to line the pitch with its chalky lime outline, in order to ensure that the match would be called as fairly and accurately as it could possibly be.  Not that he’d ever accuse a referee of being unbiased, he chuckled to himself.  Observing the grass up close, he pulled out a chunk from the roots and held its length loosely against his fingers on the opposite hand, noting that it was longer than it probably should be at about an inch to an inch & a half approximately.  For the ideal conditions and the proper freedom for the ball to move, the grass should definitely be shorter than it was currently.  He didn’t have time to mow the whole field before the match, though he did briefly think that maybe he might.  Were it not for the clouds hanging directly overhead and the continuous mist of light rain in the air, he probably would have given it a shot.  Games start late all the time when they’re not professional.  Today he would have to make do with the way it was.  He got his bag of lime, poured it into his sturdy wheelbarrow contraption that would dole it out evenly to the lawn below, and began to walk the field’s length in each direction, filling in the space carefully around the goal at the six yard line, and the larger border at the eighteen yard line.  All according to regulation, as it should be.  Coach took pride in what he accomplished, each and every weekend.  He could never predict the outcome of a game, of course, but he could control the perimeter and make sure that the rules were enforced as best as they could be.

As he made his way to the opposite side of the field, stopping at the center to refill his lime dust supply, he could see the parking lot beginning to fill up with the cars of concerned parents and the children who were part of the two teams about to play in about an hour’s time.  Soon they’d be tying up their shoes & putting on their shin-guards, taking the field to practice and warmup before the game officially began.  Coach looked at his watch to make sure he was still on schedule, and smiled a little when he realized that they were starting to show up early according to the time.  He was cruising quickly with his little wheelbarrow lime-machine, making shorter work of his task than he usually did.  His lines were looking straight as an arrow, and though the grass was not cut to its specified standards, he felt good about it.  He’d been coaching for roughly twenty years at this point now, since his own daughter Jennifer was a child long ago.  He took the job because no one else volunteered to do it, and even though she hadn’t played for about eighteen of those past two decades he’d been coaching for, he was still hooked on it.  There was something noble about leading a team into battle, weekend after weekend.  He’d get so damn excited that he’d have to remind himself constantly that winning wasn’t everything, and that the girls he coached were still less than fifteen years old and just wanted to have fun.  Secretly, deep down though, winning was everything to him, and he took a lack of effort as the ultimate sign of disrespect.  Even though he tried to hide this part of himself away from the team, everyone knew that if you ended up on Coach Marner’s squad, you better hustle your fucking buns off or you’d be running lines until the weekend after, hopefully finishing up in time to play the next game.  It took him some time like it does with anyone to establish a reputation like that, but eventually word travelled around in the social circles of middle school, and Coach became both revered and reviled for the way he encouraged his team.  If you were the serious type of player that wanted to give 110% every time you laced up, then you were in the right place to thrive, and Coach would give you every ounce of the attention he could spare to help develop your skills & make you a machine that would eat, sleep, and breathe soccer.  If you were the type of player that stayed out all night on Friday before coming to the game on Saturday morning, he knew about it – and chances are, you sat on the bench and watched the match alongside the parents.  It wasn’t personal to Coach, except for that it was – but it was business too.  He was a professional inside of a realm of amateurs, and though he knew that, it never stopped him from chasing a perfect season.

“Good morning Coach,” said the first arrival, as she yawned her tiredness away and laced up her boots.

“Mornin’ Chelsea,” he said back to her.  “You rested up and ready for the game today?”

She looked up at him with slightly puffy eyes that suggested she’d stayed up later than she probably should have, but Coach knew he could rely on Chelsea to put in a solid ninety-minute’s worth of effort.  “Yessir,” she said, trying to hide a second yawn.  “I’m always ready to play, every weekend Coach.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said.  Cars continued to pull into the parking lot adjacent to the field.  Parents were in and out of the backs of their vehicles, getting lawn chairs, blankets, and their daughter’s bags of equipment for the game ahead.  Coach noted that the opposing team seemed to be arriving quicker than his own was this weekend, which irked him a little, but not enough to turn his face three shades of red like it would go when a referee made a bad call.  Ideally, he’d have his whole squad out on the field and practicing an hour before the game even started in a show of unified solidarity and teamwork, but as he continually reminded himself, they were still just kids.  Most of them would play for a year or two, just like his own daughter did.  It was never about them though – it was all about finding that one true diamond in the rough – the mythical unicorn player that would go on to one day play in the pro league.

Looking up at the clouds starting to conglomerate and thicken in their darkness above, Coach couldn’t help but feel like they looked a little on the sinister side.  Were he the kind of man to be superstitious, he’d surely have looked at their gathering overhead as some sort of bad omen, but Coach didn’t believe in shit like that.  You make your own luck in this world, he reckoned, and that’s all there was to it.  Any outside forces didn’t affect what he and his team would be able to personally accomplish; it wasn’t like he was going to yell at a raincloud to run laps after a loss – a loss would still be on him & his team alone.  Still, he did quietly acknowledge to himself that more than a little bit of rain and clouds could certainly get a game cancelled right quick.  The dampness was clinging to the grass on the field, and what had once been only a light mist was now determined to turn into a sprinkle.  Real downpours threaten the game, but anything other than that, his warrior tribe of Titans were ready to play through everything else.  It was as natural a part of the game as the very grass on the field, and it was expected that anyone playing the game of soccer would be willing to take on a little water from the weather.  Heck, thought Coach, they should be excited by it.  Playing in the rain made the game more intense and unpredictable.  As he stared at the field below his feet, he started to notice how the puddles were forming between the blades.  The Titans were trained to not be wary of anything; not their opponents, and not the weather.

Coach almost turned right into Trisha as she made her way onto the field.  He was just about to go grab the sack of balls from his minivan so that those on his team that showed up early would be able to get a few kicks in and get warmed up, and he stopped just shy of his midriff connecting with Trisha’s bright young smile.  “I’m here Coach,” she said, officially announcing her arrival.  Had it been Kelsey or Julie, Krista, or even Chelsea, Marner probably wouldn’t need a personal greeting so much.  When it came to Trisha, that was a totally different story.  She was that unicorn that coaches search far and wide for, hoping they’ll be able to have on their team someday.  You never get to keep someone as good as Trisha was for very long, because they’ll eventually go on to do big things whether it’s with the game or something otherwise, so you savor every ticking second you get to spend with such extraordinary talent.  To say that she was ahead of the rest of the team in terms of her skills would be a massive insult; Trisha was pretty much ready to go professional by the age of fourteen already.  Ridiculous in the best of ways, she’d be able to give players ten years older than she was the business, and leave them in her rearview.  So yes, to know that Trisha had arrived was always a great thing – it meant there was an opportunity to win.  Without her, at best the odds would be iffy to grim, if not completely stacked against the Titans.

He smiled warmly, which was a side of Coach Marner that almost no one else got to see.  “Well hello there Trisha,” he said with an extra layer of genuine kindness, “are you ready for the big game today?”

“You bet Coach,” she said, with a twinkle of mischief in her eye.  “I brought a special new pair of ass-kickers today just to make sure there’s no chance of us losing.”  She pointed to her feet, showing off a shiny pair of cleats that had never even touched grass before she’d stepped on the field this morning.

“You better take this team of yours for a run and get those ass-kickers broken in before kickoff today,” he said.  “Titans,” he yelled to the unorganized group of players on the field behind her, “fall in behind Trisha and get some quick laps in, we’ve got a game to play – and WIN – in about a half hour or less.”

Off they ran, collectively falling into a straight line soon enough, bolting from one corner of the field to the other.  Coach took a look at the opposing side of the field and saw that the team was still putting on their shin-guards and cleats, with about half of them still yet to even show up.  Amateurs.  He wasn’t a betting man of course, but if he would have been, he’d have put up the deed to his house on the Titans winning today.  Everything about the visitor’s team seemed like they weren’t taking anything seriously.  While that irked him even further, and would always prefer to play any team out there at their absolute best so that he could take precise stock of how good his own team truly was, a win was still a win and he’d be the last person to tell any of his players anything otherwise.  For a team that wasn’t completely at the field yet with less than a half hour before kickoff however, the margin of victory better not be a mere couple of goals.  This had better be the shellacking of the season this disrespect should deserve.

The coin toss went in favor of the Titans, and they chose to have the ball first.  In one of those strange visitor-like decisions, the opposing team, the Tigers, chose to switch sides of the field.  It’s never one of those moves that’ll dictate the outcome of the game, but it can be effective in causing a team to have a slower start.  Most teams didn’t have a Trisha though, and she made the Tigers pay by flying down the right side of the field on her own on a breakaway pass from Chelsea, and buried the ball into the back of their net less than two minutes into the first half.  Her natural talent to score was practically unheard of at such a young age, and unparalleled by anyone on either side of the field that day.  Within another ten minutes, she managed to kick the ball hard enough to bank it off the opposing team’s defender into the goal.  The Titans were quickly up 2-0, and there was still about another thirty minutes to go in the opening half.  As most fans of soccer are well aware, two to nothing could easily be the final score of any given game, with the exception of the Titans, who had a unicorn player than was leading the league in goals by a country mile.  This was their seventeenth game of the season, and she had already amassed an astounding thirty-eight goals, on pace to score an average of more than two goals per match.  Keeping up such a rate would be practically superhuman, and Coach Marner did his best to remind himself not to expect too much from her, but by the same token, Trisha showed absolutely no signs of slowing down.  If anything, she was continuing to pick up speed as they neared towards the middle of the season, and clearly the shiny new ass-kickers on her feet were living up to the name she gave them today.  If she already had two goals inside of twelve minutes or so, she could go on to get four or five by the time the final whistle would be blown, and was likely already plotting the next goal she’d be scoring.

From the sidelines, Marner could visibly see that this match between the Tigers & the Titans was uneven to say the very least.  The ball scarcely went past the centerline into the Titans’ side of the field, and his team spent the majority of the time putting an enormous amount of pressure on the opposing team.  To their credit, two to nothing was starting to seem like something of a miracle when you considered how much opportunity the Titans had.  As he jogged back and forth in line with his team as they continued to kick the ball mercilessly at the Tigers’ goalkeeper, he couldn’t help but notice how the grass was getting more slippery underneath his runners as the game carried on.  It’s one thing to be out there in cleats that meshed solidly with the surface, but it was another thing to pretend you could run just as efficiently in normal shoes.  Coach almost bailed a couple times from stopping and starting his run so abruptly, which would cause one of the kids on the field to look at him steady his balance with his arms flapping wildly, and giggle at the sight.  The parents on the sidelines did too; they were just better at hiding it.

All it takes is a moment in time where there’s a lucky bounce, or the focus of a team drifts away for a second or two – and that’s exactly what happened to the Titans before the first half was over.  Some kid named Jessica on the Tigers managed to squeeze through the pack and belt a solid goal past Kimberly of the Titans, who was in the right position but not quite quick enough to react in time.  With about thirty seconds left on the clock, the rest of the half ticked by and the whistle was blown for the mid-game break.  Both teams huddled in their respective spots on the sidelines, munching down slices of oranges and draining bottles of water.  Most of the kids were soaked to the bone at this point.  Even though the rain never fell at a rate beyond a slight drizzle, it had certainly taken its toll over the course of the game so far.  It had drenched uniforms and hairdos, and the field itself was getting slicker and slicker.  Coach took it upon himself to point all this out, and reminded his team of warriors to never underestimate their opponents.  “That’s the only reason this game is even close girls, I’m telling you.  If we remember who we are and we play for each other, we’ll show this team of Tigers they’re just a bunch of…”  Marner stopped short, remembering he was speaking to girls of less than fourteen.  “Just a bunch of kittens,” he rebounded.  “They’ve got no bite even at their best, and when we’re at our most focused, we’ll never lose.  So go out there for the second half and teach them a lesson that they’ll never forget now will ya?”

With a resounding “YES COACH” booming from their huddle, and a “GO TITANS” right afterwards on three, the under-fifteen girls squad marched back onto the field, ready to handle their business.  The visitors seemed to be fired up as well, with a “GO TIGERS” roar that sounded as menacing and ferocious as it was surely intended to be, sending them running out onto the pitch like they somehow already knew the outcome would deem them victorious.  The Titans had sat atop of the league throughout the entire season so far, switching back and forth between first and second place with a team called the Pirates.  As for the Tigers, they’d never ventured beyond halfway down the standings, and really had no business at all making the Titans put in the extra effort required to polish them off in this game.  The whistle blew, and with the Tigers having possession of the ball to start the second half, they immediately flew straight down the center to the goal, and put another past Kimberly who seemed shocked that they had reached her so quickly.  Within mere seconds of the whistle, it was now all tied up and anyone’s game.  As the Titans dared to push the ball past the centerline when the play resumed, the Tigers came at them in a wave of girls less than fifteen years old, stealing possession right out from underneath them.  Were it not for Kimberly being in the right place at the right time, one of the Tigers would have likely scored another goal after kicking the ball straight on net from about thirty yards away.  Kimberly grasped the ball in mid-air, pulled it into her chest, and took a moment to breathe and survey the field.

The competition was undoubtedly heating up, and the Titans found themselves in a trickier situation than they were supposed to be in based on the standings & how each team had performed throughout the year.  Chelsea found herself fortunate enough to be on a breakaway and punted the ball right over the net from what had to be only twelve yards out.  Julie sent a ball hurtling towards the Tigers’ net, but it was easily handled by the goalkeeper, who punched it out of bounds to the side.  After a throw-in, they nearly made it to the middle of the field for another shot, but their keeper came out to challenge the play aggressively once again, grabbing the ball in a dive before kicking it down the field as far as she could send it to clear it out.  The Tigers went on a run from there with a series of chances that had Coach Marner screaming like a madman from the sidelines for his team to get back into position, but to no avail.  With a cross from the corner into the middle and a mighty lucky bounce, the ball ended up right on the foot of their center forward, who in turn booted it right behind Kimberly as the Tigers took the lead for the first time.  The Titans hadn’t felt pressure like this in some time.  There was only about fifteen more minutes left in the game, and if they didn’t do something quickly, they were going to lose.

It was unbelievable really.  This team hardly ever lost, let alone to a squad that was so far down in the standings.  If this was the pro-league, the Titans would have been in line for promotion and moving up the ranks at the end of the year, but not if they were capable of losing to such an inferior team.  They reset the ball at the centerline after the last goal from the Tigers, and Trisha went straight to work.  She managed to singlehandedly bring it right from the middle of the field to within five yards of the goal before the ball got away from her feet at the last second and their goalkeeper moved right in to snag it.  Marner’s unicorn had shifted herself into overdrive, sensing that there was about to be an inescapable loss if somebody didn’t steady the ship, and Trisha was in fact, the captain.  By the time their goalie had put boot to ball and kicked it hard towards the sun, she was already nearly at center field again, and somehow in the perfect position to get the ball as it landed back on Earth.  Settling the bounce with a level of professional control unheard of at only fourteen years of age, Trisha steamrolled forward to the opposite end of the field once again, put up a powerful shot that rang right off the side bar of the goal, straight onto her teammate Julie’s boot, who popped it right into the net.  Tie game.  Coach Marner was practically standing beside himself at this point, a mixture of pure joy and fire that was like a genuine out of body experience.  Sweating a ton from running up and down the sidelines along with the play, screaming an octave higher than usual as a result of the tight game, the Titans had a responsibility to win, and it all came down to executing perfectly in this final ten minutes of the game.  If they didn’t, they’d be forced into a short overtime, and if they didn’t settle it in that, it’d be even worse – they’d have to go to penalty kicks to finish the game, which always resulted in the least satisfying wins of all.  Losses were never an option, not really, not for Coach Marner; and they were certainly not an option today either.  The Tigers reset the ball on the centerline once again after the goal, and both teams began to work their way towards what was shaping up to be one seriously explosive finale to end the game.

Back and forth they went as time ticked by.  At first it looked like the Tigers might wrap it up quickly, but Kimberly came through with a killer save that sent the ball off the crossbar and out of bounds.  Then the Titans had their own chance, with Ruth getting a head on the ball from a corner kick, but nothing so remarkable that it would fool the goaltender.  The Tigers ran the ball deep into the Titans defensive end, and pounded relentlessly at the door while they brought themselves together as a team to stop them.  After what seemed like an eternity but probably a lot closer to three minutes of nonstop grinding, the ball finally squeezed loose to Julie in the midfield, who returned the favor back to Trisha with a crisp pass as she made her way up the right side of the field towards center at her top speed.  Trisha’s eyes sharpened and she could virtually see two steps ahead of herself.  This was it – she was about to score the winning goal and there was nothing anyone would be able to do to stop her.  She put her head down and immediately went into battle mode, surging forward past the defenders running their hardest to catch up as Trisha went streaking down the right side.  Gradually starting her move towards the middle like she was the pilot of a plane negotiating the landing space on the runway, she could see one last defender on the left side who might have a chance of stopping her if she went too far.  Careful to stick more towards the right side of the goal ahead of her, everything in front of her seemed so wide open.  The proverbial cards had lined up.  The seas had parted.  She was about to end the game once & for all.

And then something happened.

As just about everyone that has ever watched a match knows, either by accident, or on purpose in a dirty play, soccer players tend to get tripped.  Trisha was so preoccupied with the girl to the left of her closing in, that she didn’t even hear the one that had run up right behind her.  Without any regard for making a legitimate play for the ball in the slightest, the girl from the Tigers swept out a leg, connected with Trisha’s foot, and sent her flying the air for what seemed like forever.  There was so much noise from the sidelines as she’d been running down the field, but as soon as those two feet collided and Trisha began defying gravity, the entire pitch went silent.  A gasp or two from the players on the field perhaps, but even the parents cheering from the side looked on in abject horror.  Trisha herself, was basically surging forward through the air as fast as she’d been running, with enough time to realize just how high up she was off the ground and how long it seemed like she was staying up there.  In that same moment, she recognized that she’d need to quickly figure out how to land as safely as possible, but despite everything seeming like it was in slow motion to her, Trisha was moving at warp speed through the air.  On her way down to the ground, she was essentially parallel to the pitch and completely horizontal.  She put her right arm out to brace herself upon landing, and as she reconnected with the field below her, the snap of her bones could have been heard from a mile away.  Trisha landed with a hollow thud on the grass, all four limbs basically at the same time, and stomach first.  As her right arm landed down on the field, it hit hard, and snapped directly in the middle, creating an L shape between her wrist and her elbow.  With the grass as wet as it was, she continued to skid forward on her stomach, and had no way to stop the momentum with her strong arm busted into pieces.  Everyone that was on the sidelines watching immediately ran onto the field, knowing that what they had just witnessed was beyond the pale of a normal foul, and that Trisha might actually be in serious jeopardy.  As the crowd gathered around her, she was just in the process of understanding what had happened to her and slowly coming to grips with her injury.  Both her radius and ulna had broken together, and one of them had actually pierced through her skin.  The blood began to seep out of the new hole in her arm, and the very sight of it sent Trisha into a whole other level of shock.  She started to roll around on the ground back and forth, back and forth, screaming the entire time.  The shock was universal, and equally took hold of the crowd surrounding her; it was as if no one knew what else to do other than simply observe her pain.

It was finally Ruth that spoke.  “Maybe you shouldn’t do that Trisha.  I think you should just hold still.”

From somewhere in the distance of the fog of her mind, Trisha heard Ruth’s voice, and understood how much sense she was making.  Rolling around on her broken arm over and over and over definitely couldn’t be helping the situation, right?  She managed to reason with herself just enough to stop moving, but that also caused her to focus in that much more on the pain.  Trisha began to get lightheaded and felt like she was going to pass out, right as Coach Marner had finally reached her after running full steam to the other side of the field.  He looked down at his star player, mortified at the awful condition of her arm and mystified by how bent out of shape it was, and knelt down beside her.

“You’re going to have to go to the hospital,” he said, grimacing as he surveyed her frightened eyes.  “I’m going to pick you up and carry you across the field so that we can get you into a car and take you there – is that okay?”  Trisha felt the warm rush of euphoria and relief in the haze of her shock, but was able to realize she was going to be taken care of.  Coach had nothing but concern in his eyes, but such a steady vibe of unbreakable leadership when it mattered most, always.  She felt much safer than she probably was under the circumstances, with spurts of blood leaving her body at an alarming rate.  Trisha nodded her approval to Marner, and he gathered her up in his arms.  Walking as quickly as he could, carefully as not to drop her, he made it all the way back across the field to his minivan, and laid her down on the inside across the backseat.  He grabbed a towel and gently placed it under her broken arm, in turn placing the arm close to her chest, loosely wrapping it around the base of the jagged hole where the blood continued to run from, which was quickly soaking the cloth.  With his mixed look of concern and understanding that he had to take charge, his eyes locked with Trisha’s once again.  “I’m going to drive you to the hospital as quickly as I can now.  I know it hurts, and I’ll get us there as soon as I can.  Do your best to hold that towel to the…umm…to the spot where the blood is coming from so that it slows down.  We’ll be at the hospital in no time.  You just hang in there champion.”  Trisha looked so very, very pale.

“Did we win the game?” she asked with a smile, clearly starting to fade out into oblivion from the loss of blood and the sheer shock of the situation.

Marner was never one to lie, not even now.  “No,” he said, “we didn’t, but that’s okay.”

That was the moment that Trisha really understood that something was wrong.  Losing was never okay to Coach Marner, so this had to be much worse than she had thought that it was.  Tears began to fall from the corner of both eyes as he closed the door and got into the front to drive her to the hospital.  She was frightened, she was scared, she was in a phenomenal amount of pain that her brain couldn’t even process, and it felt like it was just like energy being stored for an excruciating moment later on.

As Coach settled into the driver’s seat and started the engine of the minivan, Trisha felt the lightheaded haze returning again, and knew that she was only seconds away from passing out.  She looked down at the blood soaked towel and adjusted it so that it was a bit tighter to her body, hopefully stopping the flow or at least slowing it down.  Right before she lost consciousness, she gazed at the bone protruding from the hole, and with her final thoughts, she pondered the small wire she saw on the inside of her radius, poking out just a tiny bit above the break.  Well that’s not supposed to be there, she thought, and smiled because she realized she was probably altogether delusional and hallucinating at this point.

She made a concentrated effort to tell herself to remember what she just saw, and tell the doctor when she got to the hospital, and then Trisha promptly passed right out into the sweet abyss of oblivion in the backseat of Coach Marner’s minivan for the rest of the ride as he sped, cautiously, towards the hospital.