"Boom the Ball": Short story excerpt

Monday 11/24/25

A couple months ago there was an entry in this record of a pick-up soccer game I chanced upon. A most ordinary event. Which no one would really notice, or certainly make anything of.

But I don't know what will compel with the full depth and range of the soul or inspire me. Sometimes the latter happens with myself. I do or make something without thinking anything of it as being anything beyond whatever that was, but I also have a way of getting at myself, of reaching myself in these ways that are beyond myself, I suppose you could say. I will see and be made to see what I need to. And I know this will always happen. It can't not happen, because I am me.

From out of those two experiences--seeing what I saw, and then the documentation of it here--arose something far beyond both of those things: A sui generis story that ultimately has nothing to do with the everyday event I alone observed as others free to do so doubtless passed by unawares. A thing which wouldn't have been thought of as anything noteworthy by anyone else who had noticed or watched. What no one talks about with art and writing--because there are so few true artists and writers--is that a lot of it has to do with how you see the world. You could be standing somewhere looking at the same thing millions of other people standing there with you were looking at it. But none of them would see what you see.

This story become a meditation on loss, pain, how life works, what life is, acceptance. All from a pick-up soccer game, and the observation thereof. More work by me on that story today, which is getting close to done. It's called "Boom the Ball." This is from it.

They were serious about their game, which wasn't a game in the consistent, "these are the rules" sense, but a series of undertakings that someone watching would never quite be able to understand like those doing the playing.

Eventually, they finished and went off to the distant portion of the field, joining their parents—or someone’s parents—in the game going on there, but without any discernible moment, discussion, decision, marking the ending of this and the beginning of that. They were simply in a new contest now.

The girl who was the best player among the three kids instantly became the best player again. She made dad’s ankles buckle and mom look like the high school star she had been thanks to a plethora of backdoor set-ups for easy tap-ins and her own understanding that the largest share of the glory belongs to the scorer of the goal. At least insofar as most people are concerned, but I couldn’t help thinking that anything most people think is unlikely to be true.

She put balls between legs without it ever seeming like she was toying with anyone. Made long passes through seams, placing the ball in the space where the receiver of the pass was about to be, but as though they had no idea of that themselves until they arrived and discovered that a pass had been made to them.

She ran without the ball, also through gaps and the sutures of the design unbeknownst to anyone else, putting herself in position to receive a misstruck ball or double deflection as if it were a brilliantly designed pass and she’d gotten what she’d come for and could now be on the move again.

And sometimes, in rarer instances that I think she must have felt warranted it, and thus qualified as a special occasion, she let the ball get a few more feet in front of her before making a rapid, stutter-step advance which nonetheless resonated as elegant, a dance both compact and personal and wide and open, drawing back her kicking foot, and then sending the ball booming between bodies or over heads or both across the various stages of its trajectory, as though she were keeping everyone honest, and perhaps something about the world, too.

I had stopped looking for myself against that high fence as if I might have caught his eye, my own eye, such that we’d each then walk to the middle of the field to meet, where I’d pass on some words of…what, exactly? What is there to say? What isn’t there to say? What is the difference?

Instead I watched the girl without shoes and socks as she ran, flowed, sped up, stopped on the spot, thinking to myself, “Boom that ball!”, after it’d been a while between rockets, and being especially pleased when she did just that in the seconds thereafter.

This is a ninety-four word sentence:

And sometimes, in rarer instances that I think she must have felt warranted it, and thus qualified as a special occasion, she let the ball get a few more feet in front of her before making a rapid, stutter-step advance which nonetheless resonated as elegant, a dance both compact and personal and wide and open, drawing back her kicking foot, and then sending the ball booming between bodies or over heads or both across the various stages of its trajectory, as though she were keeping everyone honest, and perhaps something about the world, too.

The combined output of all of these talentless frauds and imposters who are the darlings of publishing--your Tommy Oranges, your Laura Van Den Bergs, your George Saunders, your Joshua Cohens, your Lydia Davises--does not come close to approaching the amount of meaning, value, beauty, truth, and genius of that single sentence by this one person. One sentence to beat them all. There is no one else who could write that sentence. Just one person in the world, be that in the past, now, or going forward. One person.