This Is Only a Test by B.J. Hollars Read Free Book Online Page B

were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull,” Trelawny wrote, “but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire.”
    36.
    I wonder: At the conclusion of his experiments, what were Josef Mengele’s findings on the human heart?
    37.
    Have I told you of the time my wife, dog, and I ran into a stranger on the riverbank? How we had a nice chat as we stood there alongside the shore? How our conversation had consisted mostly of small talk, though when I casually asked if there were any updateson the drowned boy, he casually said that no, they had yet to retrieve his nephew.
    38.
    The Lungmotor pamphlet comes to the following conclusion: “Depending upon someone else to provide protection without your personal assistance will not result in action. Everyone’s responsibility is the responsibility of no one. You realize, therefore, that the responsibility rests with each individual, and when a death that could have been prevented occurs in your locality, every individual is morally guilty . . .”
    39.
    Which raises the question: When Noah set sail, were the giraffes the last creatures to drown? Did he notice their bleating black tongues as they begged for mercy amid the tides?
    40.
    We have been told the Flood was spurred by man’s wickedness, but what crime, precisely, did the giraffes commit? And why, once Noah had sailed out of sight, could a merciful God not have performed a rescue, earned himself a medal or two?
    41.
    God performed no rescue in the Gulf of Spezia, either. As Shelley sank, the atheist poet expected nothing more. Within days, the God-fearing faithful employed Shelley’s death as a repudiation of his sinful beliefs. England’s
The Courier
wrote: “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned,
now
he knows whether there is God or no.”
    42.
    When the flame failed to consume Shelley’s heart, waterlogged and broken as it was, Trelawny reached his hand into the pyre and retrieved it. Mengele would have been proud—a heart removed with no anesthetic.
    43.
    Though Emmett Till’s body was ruined, his heart remained intact. The doctors pieced him back together the best they could. As people peered inside the casket at that broken boy whose face was no longer his face, they felt everything. Someone with a camera snapped a photo, allowing us to see our own faces refracted back. That was the point. No anesthetic for any of us.
    44.
    If a river travels west at X miles per hour, and a body in that river travels at the same speed, what then were Emmett Till’s last words?
    45.
    None of the aforementioned information will assist you if you are drowning.

Buckethead
    Once a boy drowned at a summer camp. This was June of 1968. It was early evening, a dinner of fried chicken and green beans already breaking down inside the boys’ bellies, and as their counselors shouted numbers to the sky (“98 . . . 99 . . . 100!”), the campers hid, determined not to be found in the all-camp game of hide-and-seek.
    More determined than most, ten-year-old Bobby Watson slipped away from his bunkmates and wandered toward the floating docks on the shores of Blackman Lake. He blocked the sun with his hand, allowing his eyes to refocus on the best hiding spot of all. There, glistening at the edge of a dock, was a Kenmore refrigerator. It was powder blue, round-topped, complete with silver handle. Bobby—smitten perhaps by the peculiarity of a refrigerator in such a strange locale—headed toward it.
    Bobby knew as well as everyone else that the waterfront was off-limits to campers except during open swim. The head lifeguard—a broad-shouldered, sunburned man—had made this abundantly clear on the first night of camp (“You do, you die”). But it was a game of hide-and-seek, after all, and Bobby, a boy who wanted simply to hide, convinced himself to duck beneath the