The Ballast Boy

But Sam had not been there.

He had plunged too deep. Adam had been injured, it's true, playing with his classmates in the ravine. But the story that had just unfolded in his mind was mostly a fabrication, with details filled in by his imagination which, he noted, had spun up in its capabilities from a quieted temperance to the roar of a lion. His head hurt. Remember the difference between what's real and what's my imagination, he instructed himself.

The bulk of his construction was true. The majority of the material - at least the skeleton of the matter - was sourced from the story he had been told the next day.

Samuel hesitated. He had been told that story by Joel – who himself had not been there at the event, and was probably making up some details in the interest of good storytelling.

Samuel couldn't be sure how much was invented content, so he fact-checked his notes from what he himself knew: Joel's oldest brother Michael was a student in the older class whose students had been those playing hide and seek.

Sam also did himself remember that previous day's amount of rain had been the most he had ever seen before. That weather, it had definitely stuck in his memory.

But he had been too young to remember the whole story of how Adam had been hurt really badly to begin with. He just remembered Joel telling him about his brother visiting the injured boy in the hospital. Neither he nor Joel had experienced the sudden recovery of the older boy by military hand at the time. So they hadn't known about the mystery of it. Just that Adam had been in the hospital and wouldn't be back to school for a long time, if ever.