feel it in my bones; my forebodings

feel it in my bones

fiction
edward w pritchard

I feel it deep in my bones when some else falls or cracks their head on the pavement; maybe in a bicycle accident or a slip and fall onto the wood flooring. The sensation is brief but shocking to me. It isn't painful more a foreboding of worse calamity to follow. The feeling in my bones is of shock waves of pain the moment before the body experiences a serious injury.

The time when I was thirteen started it all. Bobbi Watkins jumped off the dugout and stoved his left ankle. Watching from third base, on the field with the rest of the starting nine of the Westover Giants, I experienced the  vibration of the pain and trauma to  Bobbi's body before the sound waves of the injury had a chance to reach me eighty feet  away. Since then dozens of times I co- encountered sudden injuries endured by others because of I chanced to be near when calamity occurred. Auto accidents are the most serious for the victim but for me a backward precarious fall produces the most trauma vicariously.

A few months ago my affliction migrated and I began to share long past psychological trauma previously experienced by someone I was meeting for the first time. I felt the familiar jarring through my spine and torso as I would for the time Bobbi Watkins jumped onto the dirt infield from the top of the dugout. However, with the psychological and emotional problems of strangers I meet I also feel their sadness and their burden of emotional scars  long past but secretly endured in solitude and silence.

I haven't completely taken to avoiding strangers to avoid my first meeting encounters but it isn't uncommon for me to dull the pain of my perceptions and forebodings with a couple of beers in social situations.