“The Damn Football” Flash Fiction by Mila Nazarali ’18

by Charles Schulz

Charlie Brown and Lucy were in love.  Or rather, Charlie Brown loved Lucy, and Lucy loved herself, but Charlie Brown considered it to be the same.  We all want to be loved by our people; it’s the one concession even the most reasonable of people allow themselves, because with no one to love us who’s to say we should love ourselves?  Charlie Brown thought about this sometimes, about his deluded sense of happiness with Lucy.  But Lucy always came back, said she wouldn’t do it again, and his clear vision was soon abandoned in favor of a muddled half-truth that was much less painful.  His love for Lucy was like watching lightning from a plane.  Certainly not something you ask to happen, but when it does it is so terribly beautiful, so raw and so powerful and uncontrollable that this, this is a summation of humanity itself and you can’t stop yourself from loving it, even as it fills you with a deep, aching sense of unease that what you love will destroy you.  And Charlie Brown’s unease was well founded.  Cupid’s arrow was beating him time and time again.  So was that damn football.

“I’ll hold the ball, Charlie Brown, and you come running up and kick it,” Lucy smiled.  She was lying through her teeth, and Charlie Brown knew it.

But he was an addict; he said, “Ok,” and he took a few steps back.  He knew that he could kick it.  He could feel it deep in his bones, that this would be the time he would kick that damn football, would absolutely nail it.  Of course, he was lying to himself, just as Lucy had been.  He fell flat on his back, winded.  When he got up, Lucy was gone, and so was his car.  But not the damn football.   He clenched his teeth to choke the sobs; Lucy would call him a wimp if she were there to see them.  Charlie Brown sat up and reached over for the football when his breaths ceased to be ragged.  It was his football after all, his responsibility.  But when he grabbed it he was seized by a violent red fury, and he hurled it as far away from him as he could.  His aim sucked; he couldn’t even hit the side of Lucy’s house across the street as he intended.  Instead, the damn thing decided to take its own path and got stuck in a tree, the same kite-eating tree that had tortured him as a child.  He swore and burst into tears.  Charlie Brown was a child again, and the tree had stolen from him.  He screamed, the sound ripping through him, and pounded his fists into the earth, trying to punish it for all its crimes.

by Charles Schulz

He slammed into it again and again, but he couldn’t make a dent, couldn’t do anything except sit there in his shame because, after all, screaming and crying was “a girl thing.”  That was the issue, he thought.  It was impossible to tell anyone he was in pain simply because he wasn’t supposed to feel anything.  Guys couldn’t feel pain, couldn’t cry or scream, couldn’t ask for help with domestic abuse, which he was pretty certain he was undergoing, but he was also pretty certain that being the victim was “a girl thing.”  They were all girl things.  So Charlie Brown sat in the dirt, sobbing silently and screaming to deaf ears.  He would have to calm himself down before he could call Lucy to apologize.