Matthew Harkins
We hadn’t noticed the distant lightning flashes. It wasn’t dark enough at first. We concentrated on the field, our ungainly running, our awkward throws and tackles. Some of us preferred “kill the carrier” to the homophobic name, but we’d all known the rules since childhood: keep the ball for yourself, tackle whoever has it.
It was D.C., June 1989. A summer program run by a nonpartisan youth organization. Sixteen or seventeen years old, chosen by high-school guidance counselors as future politicos, we drowsed through morning classes on The Federalist Papers. In the afternoons, sweaty in neckties and summer dresses, we’d shuffle from one stifling conference room to the next—asking clumsy questions of low-level state-department officials or congressional staffers.
At night we’d debate in Georgetown’s humid, half-empty dorms. We knew little and squabbled mostly over hand-me-down opinions—only occasionally, with sheepish grins, admitting our ignorance. Those were the bright moments. When we spoke as if we were ready to trust each other, or could imagine our vulnerability as a gift, not a weakness. The training however was geared to stamp this out: assert, deflect, reframe. Escalate, if need be, like a bet in Texas Hold’em.
But that night in the field the game felt different. The fresh storm gusts reset our minds and bodies. We leaned into the unstructured moment, instinctively honoring rules we’d never made—men tackled men, women tackled everyone—wanting to grapple with, and somehow protect, each other. The running and jostling: playful, erotic, oddly innocent.
But then the training reemerged. Gravitating towards those we knew, we turned our creative chaos into a battle between tribes. The shift so quick we never caught it: now passing the ball to the like-minded, keeping it from the others.
The initial twelve or so of us soon turned to twenty-five. I’d started counting in the growing darkness and the lightning we could almost smell, running barefoot in puddles on a tree-bare hill. None of us were safe. The game wasn’t really designed for winning, but dropping out would mean you lost. Maybe the lightning, if it came, would only hit one of us. Keep running. Stay with the group. Escalate until you can’t afford to lose.
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Matthew Harkins writes and teaches in rural Minnesota. His nonfiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in Atticus Review, Pidgeonholes, Water-Stone Review, North American Review, and elsewhere.