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Artwork (Digital) / Animal related (non-anthro)
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More from LeoNoy
Commission for 
pineappleshark :3
This is Amir, being all vain and snobish <:
I hope you like it~
*commissions are currently closed
pineappleshark :3This is Amir, being all vain and snobish <:
I hope you like it~
*commissions are currently closed
Category Artwork (Digital) / Animal related (non-anthro)
Species Leopard
Size 1000 x 700px
File Size 535.7 kB
You deserve the compliment friend. I can tell much time, thought and care went into this.
And your icon pic... did you draw that yourself? It's quite the pic! Quite... well lovely should be the word I am looking for.
Tell me, are you seeking to be an artist by trade? Is that what you are going to school for?
Anthony Ficton
And your icon pic... did you draw that yourself? It's quite the pic! Quite... well lovely should be the word I am looking for.
Tell me, are you seeking to be an artist by trade? Is that what you are going to school for?
Anthony Ficton
Ah, I see. Well sorry for making assumptions. High School... Yeah, I remember that... If ever there was a world where losers ruled and were enshrined as cool people, it was my High School. I just wanted to survive and make it out alive.
But something did happen once to make the normally ignored, "not cool" people like me suddenly and obviously much more valuable than the "cool" people.
Anthony Ficton
But something did happen once to make the normally ignored, "not cool" people like me suddenly and obviously much more valuable than the "cool" people.
Anthony Ficton
The something that happen you mean? It's a long story, so brace yourself!
And I just realized. This is really creepy and macabre. You might not want to read this. It deals with death and watching a person die. It was not like in the movies where some cool thing happens to bring all the kids together in unity. Sorry for its content, but this is what happen. You are young, below the age of 18. Even if you were older, I should give you this warning. Death is not something 17 year olds should know or hear much about.
Well I was your age, actually. (I am 46 now, so a long time ago!) I was your regular quiet young man at the time, respectful, in love with girls but scared to death of them and I really was just coasting through school. Just waiting for it to end.
And the "cool" people were rather like your cat here. Wanna be gangsters, sluts that have likely died of an STD, drug heads, seriously stuck up people who constantly put the weak down and punks that picked on people who were weak. I was left alone- to a point. That was because I was over 6 feet tall in 9th grade. And big. Like grow up early, shaving at 13 kind of big. I have never lacked for testosterone, let's put it that way!
And the weak, I sometimes collected them. We would befriend each other. I knew what it was like to be picked on because you were small. My brother pretty much hated me for taking the attention away from him. If ever there was a kid who needed his dad, it was my brother! But dad had other plans.
Looking back, these A-holes were just as screwed up, maybe even more so than the people they picked on. Many of us were in bad situations. And almost all of them, all of us, were divorced kids or otherwise had seriously screwed up parents. That's the way it goes when baby boomers grow up getting everything they want. WHat matters is their needs, not their kids.
Ok, enough parental rage venting for this post! But I throw all of that in so that those of you making choices about sex and who you want to marry, know that its not about you satisfying your needs. Marriage is about satisfying the needs of another. First your mate, then your children. Marriage is mostly about sacrifice. Remember that- especially after you have kids.
Ok so I happen to know that all the "cool" people would be in jail, rehab, fat with 13 babies and no husband or dead. I knew that High School was an upside down reflection of reality- rather than the prepping school for joining reality. That's because schools then as now are about the money. Kids are dollar signs, not kids.
And I knew I was one of those "losers" that was going to make the country work once I got out of this crazy place.
So one day we are going back from school on the bus. The same lameoid, craptastic radio station we were forced to listen to every morning and every afternoon was playing the stupid, asinine music that the "cool" people wanted to listen to.
I was up front near the driver- less crap goes on up there. All the weaker kids were there too. They usually sat in front of me, because they knew I would block any of the cool people from seeing them and throwing things at them, like left over pieces of brownies from lunch. Most of the "cool" people did not want to find out if I could be pushed. They just left me alone, because I was something of a small giant. I really was thankful for my size back then.
So we were going down this hill that led from town where the High School was. Really steep hill, full brakes, like 20 miles per hour. Canyon on our right, small mountain on the left. I looked up and out the front window to see an odd thing. A car halfway in our lane. It was a Camaro, actually. Low to the ground, really big engine. He had somehow swung into our lane and was heading straight for the front of our bus. Now the bus had HUGE wheels, like five feet in diameter. So the whole thing is lifted off the ground enough for part of the Camaro to go right underneath the bus.
At the time, airbags were still new. California had not yet passed a seat belt law.
The Camaro was driven by a Marine Sergeant. His friend was next to him in the front seat. Nobody had a seat belt on.
So the Camaro passed under the bus and struck the left front wheel. It was already turned in that direction going down the hill. Thank god it was. Because he pinned the wheel into the left frame and turned it all the way left. Had he hit differently, we would have been turned right and gone over the canyon. So the buses left wheel went up and over the right side of the car. It then spun the car off and up the road from the bus.
Nobody was going all that fast, but when a school bus is rolling downhill, it's not exactly a prancing pony. It will keep moving regardless of what it hits!
At this point there is a lot of screaming because the bus is out of control and everybody knows it. We all know this road too and we all now the canyons on the right the mountains on the left. Plus you could feel the bus freefalling. The driver stomped the pedal like mad, but the bus would not stop. Brake lines were damaged.
But just about everyone else- they can't see what happen. All they know is the loud noises and the odd motion of a bus out of control. I still remember the driver fighting with the wheel, trying to straighten it out, trying to stop the bus from passing into the wrong lane. That was pointless, just like the brakes. Both systems were out. The steering system was broken when the tie rods that link to the steering wheel were severed by the car. Brake system was spewing air and there was not enough time for the system to recover with back brakes alone.
I remember turning my head and seeing short flashes from behind me. Nobody knew what to do, they did not even know we had just crashed. I remember screaming, deeply, from the pit of my stomach, they way I had seen my Marine Sergeant Grandfather scream at a cadet that did not salute a Lieutenant's car as it drove by. (Back then, they actually had rank stickers on cars for officers- I swear it!) He actually stopped the car with screeching tires, got out in front of god and everybody and ran up to this cadet screaming in this tone, the same tone I was using now. It was really effective at getting through to people and making them respond.
"Brace yourselves! We are going to crash!"
And I turned back up front, grabbed the bar in front of me and locked my elbows. I had the odd sensation that I was falling from the top of the bus to the ground, like Godzilla had picked us up and we were going to fall out of the front windshield of the bus. The bus was shaking too, I remember that most distinctly. That's because the tires had been jammed into the body and the left tire was not turning. It was skidding at a 40 degree angle to the direction of the bus. This was going to force us into the mountainside. In retrospect, that was a good thing, the best thing. At the time, it seemed a bad thing, because mountainsides don't give way when you hit them.
And then we hit the mountain.
I remember flying forward a bit. I remember grunting. I remember book bags and crutches and the oddest things sliding forward, effortlessly, as if gravity itself had been redirected. In truth it had. Wrecks are violent things. I remember the sound of crunching metal, I can bring that back right here, right into my ears, right as if it's happening now. It sounds very much like the sound of an aluminum can crunching to be recycled. However the sound is very much deeper and you can feel it, feel it in your stomach. And then the sickening scrape of metal twisting against stone. That's a hard one to find a comparison to. And the screaming, of course there was screaming. Lots of grunts too as we smacked into the mountain. And the shaking, yes it was odd. Like some giant child was playing with the bus, pretending to crash the bus again and again as the bus bounced along the side of the mountain.
And then we stopped.
All of that took maybe five seconds, from the time the car hit us, to the time we stopped moving. It seemed like it took much longer.
I wanted out of the bus- bad. I thought for sure it would start moving again, start slipping down the mountain side and into the canyon. I jumped up and I guess I started yelling at the kids further back to use the exits, the emergency exits. I was afraid of fire, of everybody burning. You could smell all kinds of oils too, the entire hydraulic system was leaking from damage. I don't remember telling the kids in the back to bail out the exits, but their was something in my voice or eyes that said, "Get Out!" They claimed later I had told them that and started screaming, "Move! Move! MOVE!"
The bus driver then grabbed the radio and started screaming to "base" that we had crashed. At this point you could hear the secondary accidents happening- crazy Californian's and their "inches to spare, lets draft the car in front of us" mentality. This is a seriously bad road, but that's just how people drive in California. If you leave a spot open- someone will pull into it! So everybody rides the rear of the car in front. And when an accident happens? Wham! Wham! WHAM!!! And that is what was happening right now. That noise was compelling. That's not the kind of noise you want to hear when you are trapped inside a rolling metal bread basket that's not rolling anymore. So I screamed at the bus driver to open the door- only she had the controls. She finally pulled a handle and pressed a button and the door opened up with a hissing sound. The same hissing sound it made in the mornings as a welcome to the odd world of High School. But now, now it meant freedom. It meant getting out of this death trap before it turned into a roasting pit with students as the meat.
I remember being the first one out. I was the first one up I guess. I remember running down the side of the bus, seeing the oils all over its bottom leaking out. Strangely, there was no smell of diesel fuel- something I was really thankful for. Kids saw me running past the bus and looked at me oddly. Then they saw the emergency exits and finally started bailing out.
I rounded the backside of the bus and there were some of the not so cool kids, helping the "cool" ones out of the bus. The emergency exit was still pretty high off the ground. And there in front of me was the Camaro. I ran up to it, because I knew this was where the real injury would be. The driver was still and unresponsive. The Camaro had basically been run over by the bus. It sort of squeezed the pedals up around and through the drivers feet. Metal can actually flow under pressure and flow it did- right around and through this man's feet. I had no idea though that this had happen- yet.
I reached the car and could see the guy was out cold. Maybe he was not breathing. Well I actually intended to do CPR- but I could not do that with him stuck in the car. So I opened the driver's door- and there was that sickening sound of crunching metal again. It had been damaged and took a lot of force to free it. So I cradled this man the same way I had read about in First-Aid books. Don't let the head move, pinch it between your arms and chest, pull with the victim cradled in your lap. I did it just like they said in the books- and his feet would not come loose. I looked down at the pedals and the floorboard metal had cut right through them. There was no blood, either. That was so strange. And then I looked down at the man in my arms that I was trying to help.
His pupils were dilated and then they would open all the way. They were out of sync with each other and rapidly doing this open and close motion. And I remember thinking I had never seen that before. It was so strange. And then I knew he was dead. I could feel it. His spirit was gone and there was no point in helping him further.
I can still remember the scent of Budweiser beer all over the car. Apparently they had bought a six pack and some of the cans had busted open in the crash. Or more likely, the cans were already open. Don't drink and drive, folks.
And then I looked around and saw all the "cool" people standing there, watching me try to help this man. I felt I needed to explain. "I was going to give him CPR, but the floorboard is wrapped around his feet. I can't get him out of the car."
With that, I laid him down, gently, right there in the road. He was a Sergeant in the Marine Corp as I remember, a black Sergeant. I don't know why that mattered to some people, but at the time it did. He was a man that needed help and I realized that some of the kids were amazed that I would touch him.
I then asked one of the not cool kids to run up the road about a third of the block away. There was a Forestry fire department there. They were not paramedics, but they were better than nothing. He took off and I told him to watch out for cars- You could still hear the sounds of screeching tires, horns honking and yelling. Believe it or not, some people were actually driving around the bus, picking their way through the survivors, rather than stopping. That was the craziest part of all.
I saw one of the "cool" kids standing there and I asked him to go get the fire extinguisher out of the bus- you could really smell the gas now. And that's when I heard to groan. I looked up from where I had been watching this dead man's pupils alternate from wide open to totally dilated. It is to this day the oddest thing I have ever seen a body do. I had to shoot a dog once, that was odd too. If you place the shot correctly and kill the dog instantly, his tail will wag. It's absolutely horrid. I have had to do it twice now. Once to coyote pup that my dogs used as a chew toy and once to a stray- that my dogs used as a slinky. What on Gods green earth makes a small dog or a coyote pup want to squeeze through a hole in a fence and come onto a property with three large dogs barking and snarling at it is beyond me!
But I digress.
I looked up and saw a passenger in the Camaro. His face was smashed, but he was alive.
Just before I could get to him, the Fire department came. So I left him to them and pulled everybody behind the bus- we were still afraid of getting hit. We all huddled up and I asked if everybody was out. Then I asked if anybody was on this bus that should not be. Several hands went up. Kids use to sneak on so they could get free rides to their friends house- that's how everybody new how to use the emergency exits so well!
Well they put us on another bus and got us home that day, those they did not take to the hospital. A lot of the kids, the "cool" ones, they broke down. They were in shock. That seemed odd to me. But that's me. The accident happen on October 30th Everybody was back in school the next day. It was October 31st- and none of us wore spooky costumes. Lots of the girls were angels or other cute things. But hockey masks and rubber knives were gone.
I can't tell you what it did for my reputation at school. Apparently I was some sort of hero. I had one girl come up and straight up apologize for being such a bitch to me. I can't tell you how surprised I was. She was dressed as an angel too and I gave her a hug. I really wanted to ask her to dinner, lol. But I did not have a car anyway. Hard to date without wheels.
I did not really do anything, except maybe I showed I cared about people? That I was not their enemy and that drawing a line in the sand and respecting your fellow man were good things? Those were natural things to me.
If anything good came of the Sergeant's death, it was this. A bunch of goofy kids realized that the earth was not made for them, that they easily could have been killed and that some of us "loser" kids were better people than they were.
I know there is a lot of judgements presented there, but that's the way it happen, leastways as I remember it.
I just realized that it was nearly 30 years ago that this happen, almost to the day, how funny.
Life is fragile my 17 year old friend. It ends quickly, with flashing pupils and the smell of Budweiser and gasoline to mark your passing. At least it can. That 26 year old Sergeant sure did not expect it to end that day. I do wonder if he was right with God...
Not to sound like a preacher, but it is something you need to think about. I know that modern schools teach there is no God, that we are all accidents. Well I know better. I felt a man die, felt his soul waiting for something, someone. He was still in there and oddly present, but dead anyway. And those eyes, I can still see the pupils oscillating.
The fire department put a sheet over him and moved on to the injured passenger and a few of the more torqued up kids. And I remember thinking how unfair it was that they just covered him with a sheet. Did he want to be covered like that? Get yourself right with God before you move forward, for you don't know when your car will hit a bus or another disaster will strike- and not give you time to think about it. Get things squared away before its your pupils doing their last dance, trying to connect with your soul as you check out.
Anyway, yeah. Death has a way of changing people, sometimes for the better. True story, I swear it. Happen to me when I was in Fallbrook High School in Fallbrook California. I do wonder what happen to that Sergeant sometimes. Where did he go? I suppose I will know soon enough.
Anthony Ficton
And I just realized. This is really creepy and macabre. You might not want to read this. It deals with death and watching a person die. It was not like in the movies where some cool thing happens to bring all the kids together in unity. Sorry for its content, but this is what happen. You are young, below the age of 18. Even if you were older, I should give you this warning. Death is not something 17 year olds should know or hear much about.
Well I was your age, actually. (I am 46 now, so a long time ago!) I was your regular quiet young man at the time, respectful, in love with girls but scared to death of them and I really was just coasting through school. Just waiting for it to end.
And the "cool" people were rather like your cat here. Wanna be gangsters, sluts that have likely died of an STD, drug heads, seriously stuck up people who constantly put the weak down and punks that picked on people who were weak. I was left alone- to a point. That was because I was over 6 feet tall in 9th grade. And big. Like grow up early, shaving at 13 kind of big. I have never lacked for testosterone, let's put it that way!
And the weak, I sometimes collected them. We would befriend each other. I knew what it was like to be picked on because you were small. My brother pretty much hated me for taking the attention away from him. If ever there was a kid who needed his dad, it was my brother! But dad had other plans.
Looking back, these A-holes were just as screwed up, maybe even more so than the people they picked on. Many of us were in bad situations. And almost all of them, all of us, were divorced kids or otherwise had seriously screwed up parents. That's the way it goes when baby boomers grow up getting everything they want. WHat matters is their needs, not their kids.
Ok, enough parental rage venting for this post! But I throw all of that in so that those of you making choices about sex and who you want to marry, know that its not about you satisfying your needs. Marriage is about satisfying the needs of another. First your mate, then your children. Marriage is mostly about sacrifice. Remember that- especially after you have kids.
Ok so I happen to know that all the "cool" people would be in jail, rehab, fat with 13 babies and no husband or dead. I knew that High School was an upside down reflection of reality- rather than the prepping school for joining reality. That's because schools then as now are about the money. Kids are dollar signs, not kids.
And I knew I was one of those "losers" that was going to make the country work once I got out of this crazy place.
So one day we are going back from school on the bus. The same lameoid, craptastic radio station we were forced to listen to every morning and every afternoon was playing the stupid, asinine music that the "cool" people wanted to listen to.
I was up front near the driver- less crap goes on up there. All the weaker kids were there too. They usually sat in front of me, because they knew I would block any of the cool people from seeing them and throwing things at them, like left over pieces of brownies from lunch. Most of the "cool" people did not want to find out if I could be pushed. They just left me alone, because I was something of a small giant. I really was thankful for my size back then.
So we were going down this hill that led from town where the High School was. Really steep hill, full brakes, like 20 miles per hour. Canyon on our right, small mountain on the left. I looked up and out the front window to see an odd thing. A car halfway in our lane. It was a Camaro, actually. Low to the ground, really big engine. He had somehow swung into our lane and was heading straight for the front of our bus. Now the bus had HUGE wheels, like five feet in diameter. So the whole thing is lifted off the ground enough for part of the Camaro to go right underneath the bus.
At the time, airbags were still new. California had not yet passed a seat belt law.
The Camaro was driven by a Marine Sergeant. His friend was next to him in the front seat. Nobody had a seat belt on.
So the Camaro passed under the bus and struck the left front wheel. It was already turned in that direction going down the hill. Thank god it was. Because he pinned the wheel into the left frame and turned it all the way left. Had he hit differently, we would have been turned right and gone over the canyon. So the buses left wheel went up and over the right side of the car. It then spun the car off and up the road from the bus.
Nobody was going all that fast, but when a school bus is rolling downhill, it's not exactly a prancing pony. It will keep moving regardless of what it hits!
At this point there is a lot of screaming because the bus is out of control and everybody knows it. We all know this road too and we all now the canyons on the right the mountains on the left. Plus you could feel the bus freefalling. The driver stomped the pedal like mad, but the bus would not stop. Brake lines were damaged.
But just about everyone else- they can't see what happen. All they know is the loud noises and the odd motion of a bus out of control. I still remember the driver fighting with the wheel, trying to straighten it out, trying to stop the bus from passing into the wrong lane. That was pointless, just like the brakes. Both systems were out. The steering system was broken when the tie rods that link to the steering wheel were severed by the car. Brake system was spewing air and there was not enough time for the system to recover with back brakes alone.
I remember turning my head and seeing short flashes from behind me. Nobody knew what to do, they did not even know we had just crashed. I remember screaming, deeply, from the pit of my stomach, they way I had seen my Marine Sergeant Grandfather scream at a cadet that did not salute a Lieutenant's car as it drove by. (Back then, they actually had rank stickers on cars for officers- I swear it!) He actually stopped the car with screeching tires, got out in front of god and everybody and ran up to this cadet screaming in this tone, the same tone I was using now. It was really effective at getting through to people and making them respond.
"Brace yourselves! We are going to crash!"
And I turned back up front, grabbed the bar in front of me and locked my elbows. I had the odd sensation that I was falling from the top of the bus to the ground, like Godzilla had picked us up and we were going to fall out of the front windshield of the bus. The bus was shaking too, I remember that most distinctly. That's because the tires had been jammed into the body and the left tire was not turning. It was skidding at a 40 degree angle to the direction of the bus. This was going to force us into the mountainside. In retrospect, that was a good thing, the best thing. At the time, it seemed a bad thing, because mountainsides don't give way when you hit them.
And then we hit the mountain.
I remember flying forward a bit. I remember grunting. I remember book bags and crutches and the oddest things sliding forward, effortlessly, as if gravity itself had been redirected. In truth it had. Wrecks are violent things. I remember the sound of crunching metal, I can bring that back right here, right into my ears, right as if it's happening now. It sounds very much like the sound of an aluminum can crunching to be recycled. However the sound is very much deeper and you can feel it, feel it in your stomach. And then the sickening scrape of metal twisting against stone. That's a hard one to find a comparison to. And the screaming, of course there was screaming. Lots of grunts too as we smacked into the mountain. And the shaking, yes it was odd. Like some giant child was playing with the bus, pretending to crash the bus again and again as the bus bounced along the side of the mountain.
And then we stopped.
All of that took maybe five seconds, from the time the car hit us, to the time we stopped moving. It seemed like it took much longer.
I wanted out of the bus- bad. I thought for sure it would start moving again, start slipping down the mountain side and into the canyon. I jumped up and I guess I started yelling at the kids further back to use the exits, the emergency exits. I was afraid of fire, of everybody burning. You could smell all kinds of oils too, the entire hydraulic system was leaking from damage. I don't remember telling the kids in the back to bail out the exits, but their was something in my voice or eyes that said, "Get Out!" They claimed later I had told them that and started screaming, "Move! Move! MOVE!"
The bus driver then grabbed the radio and started screaming to "base" that we had crashed. At this point you could hear the secondary accidents happening- crazy Californian's and their "inches to spare, lets draft the car in front of us" mentality. This is a seriously bad road, but that's just how people drive in California. If you leave a spot open- someone will pull into it! So everybody rides the rear of the car in front. And when an accident happens? Wham! Wham! WHAM!!! And that is what was happening right now. That noise was compelling. That's not the kind of noise you want to hear when you are trapped inside a rolling metal bread basket that's not rolling anymore. So I screamed at the bus driver to open the door- only she had the controls. She finally pulled a handle and pressed a button and the door opened up with a hissing sound. The same hissing sound it made in the mornings as a welcome to the odd world of High School. But now, now it meant freedom. It meant getting out of this death trap before it turned into a roasting pit with students as the meat.
I remember being the first one out. I was the first one up I guess. I remember running down the side of the bus, seeing the oils all over its bottom leaking out. Strangely, there was no smell of diesel fuel- something I was really thankful for. Kids saw me running past the bus and looked at me oddly. Then they saw the emergency exits and finally started bailing out.
I rounded the backside of the bus and there were some of the not so cool kids, helping the "cool" ones out of the bus. The emergency exit was still pretty high off the ground. And there in front of me was the Camaro. I ran up to it, because I knew this was where the real injury would be. The driver was still and unresponsive. The Camaro had basically been run over by the bus. It sort of squeezed the pedals up around and through the drivers feet. Metal can actually flow under pressure and flow it did- right around and through this man's feet. I had no idea though that this had happen- yet.
I reached the car and could see the guy was out cold. Maybe he was not breathing. Well I actually intended to do CPR- but I could not do that with him stuck in the car. So I opened the driver's door- and there was that sickening sound of crunching metal again. It had been damaged and took a lot of force to free it. So I cradled this man the same way I had read about in First-Aid books. Don't let the head move, pinch it between your arms and chest, pull with the victim cradled in your lap. I did it just like they said in the books- and his feet would not come loose. I looked down at the pedals and the floorboard metal had cut right through them. There was no blood, either. That was so strange. And then I looked down at the man in my arms that I was trying to help.
His pupils were dilated and then they would open all the way. They were out of sync with each other and rapidly doing this open and close motion. And I remember thinking I had never seen that before. It was so strange. And then I knew he was dead. I could feel it. His spirit was gone and there was no point in helping him further.
I can still remember the scent of Budweiser beer all over the car. Apparently they had bought a six pack and some of the cans had busted open in the crash. Or more likely, the cans were already open. Don't drink and drive, folks.
And then I looked around and saw all the "cool" people standing there, watching me try to help this man. I felt I needed to explain. "I was going to give him CPR, but the floorboard is wrapped around his feet. I can't get him out of the car."
With that, I laid him down, gently, right there in the road. He was a Sergeant in the Marine Corp as I remember, a black Sergeant. I don't know why that mattered to some people, but at the time it did. He was a man that needed help and I realized that some of the kids were amazed that I would touch him.
I then asked one of the not cool kids to run up the road about a third of the block away. There was a Forestry fire department there. They were not paramedics, but they were better than nothing. He took off and I told him to watch out for cars- You could still hear the sounds of screeching tires, horns honking and yelling. Believe it or not, some people were actually driving around the bus, picking their way through the survivors, rather than stopping. That was the craziest part of all.
I saw one of the "cool" kids standing there and I asked him to go get the fire extinguisher out of the bus- you could really smell the gas now. And that's when I heard to groan. I looked up from where I had been watching this dead man's pupils alternate from wide open to totally dilated. It is to this day the oddest thing I have ever seen a body do. I had to shoot a dog once, that was odd too. If you place the shot correctly and kill the dog instantly, his tail will wag. It's absolutely horrid. I have had to do it twice now. Once to coyote pup that my dogs used as a chew toy and once to a stray- that my dogs used as a slinky. What on Gods green earth makes a small dog or a coyote pup want to squeeze through a hole in a fence and come onto a property with three large dogs barking and snarling at it is beyond me!
But I digress.
I looked up and saw a passenger in the Camaro. His face was smashed, but he was alive.
Just before I could get to him, the Fire department came. So I left him to them and pulled everybody behind the bus- we were still afraid of getting hit. We all huddled up and I asked if everybody was out. Then I asked if anybody was on this bus that should not be. Several hands went up. Kids use to sneak on so they could get free rides to their friends house- that's how everybody new how to use the emergency exits so well!
Well they put us on another bus and got us home that day, those they did not take to the hospital. A lot of the kids, the "cool" ones, they broke down. They were in shock. That seemed odd to me. But that's me. The accident happen on October 30th Everybody was back in school the next day. It was October 31st- and none of us wore spooky costumes. Lots of the girls were angels or other cute things. But hockey masks and rubber knives were gone.
I can't tell you what it did for my reputation at school. Apparently I was some sort of hero. I had one girl come up and straight up apologize for being such a bitch to me. I can't tell you how surprised I was. She was dressed as an angel too and I gave her a hug. I really wanted to ask her to dinner, lol. But I did not have a car anyway. Hard to date without wheels.
I did not really do anything, except maybe I showed I cared about people? That I was not their enemy and that drawing a line in the sand and respecting your fellow man were good things? Those were natural things to me.
If anything good came of the Sergeant's death, it was this. A bunch of goofy kids realized that the earth was not made for them, that they easily could have been killed and that some of us "loser" kids were better people than they were.
I know there is a lot of judgements presented there, but that's the way it happen, leastways as I remember it.
I just realized that it was nearly 30 years ago that this happen, almost to the day, how funny.
Life is fragile my 17 year old friend. It ends quickly, with flashing pupils and the smell of Budweiser and gasoline to mark your passing. At least it can. That 26 year old Sergeant sure did not expect it to end that day. I do wonder if he was right with God...
Not to sound like a preacher, but it is something you need to think about. I know that modern schools teach there is no God, that we are all accidents. Well I know better. I felt a man die, felt his soul waiting for something, someone. He was still in there and oddly present, but dead anyway. And those eyes, I can still see the pupils oscillating.
The fire department put a sheet over him and moved on to the injured passenger and a few of the more torqued up kids. And I remember thinking how unfair it was that they just covered him with a sheet. Did he want to be covered like that? Get yourself right with God before you move forward, for you don't know when your car will hit a bus or another disaster will strike- and not give you time to think about it. Get things squared away before its your pupils doing their last dance, trying to connect with your soul as you check out.
Anyway, yeah. Death has a way of changing people, sometimes for the better. True story, I swear it. Happen to me when I was in Fallbrook High School in Fallbrook California. I do wonder what happen to that Sergeant sometimes. Where did he go? I suppose I will know soon enough.
Anthony Ficton
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