Stories

An early afternoon rain had cooled the evening, as my sister Elli came down the street with the red wagon in tow. She was flushed with excitement and triumph, the hair at her temples damp.

"Look!" she exclaimed "A Cannonball!"

My sister Elli was eight years older than I, and a pirate at heart; always burying treasure and running around with swords and long knives. Of course she had a flag. Plus numerous hideouts. The sheer implications of owning a cannonball fired her imagination beyond the thrall.

The ball was so heavy that we had to tip the wagon over to get it out. And there it stood in the grass near our house; five inches in diameter and unmovable. Rough, slightly rusty, and full of mystery.

"We have to hide it so that it doesn't get stolen!" and so we rolled it into the rosebushes for the night. Exalted, Elli ate her whole dinner, checked the cannonball before bed, and went to sleep content.

If only someone would steal it. The Cannonball was a draw bigger than oil and barbed wire for every boy within miles. It was so deceptively heavy that when picked up, it would slip through the fingers and smash a few toes or even a whole foot.

"Get rid of that thing!" our Dad shouted within two weeks of its' arrival.

Crestfallen, Elli resolved to give the cannonball into the care of a trusted friend; least it fall into enemy hands. And so it was hauled up the street again in the red wagon to be deposited in the yard of Elli's classmate Marc. Marc was outside of the pirate class, and so no one would suspect him.

Marc's father, Peter, at that time was contemplating a problem; the house which they lived in was heated by coal stoves. The house was a three story Victorian with pipes snaking through it from basement to roof, and it was time to clean the stovepipes. There wasn't any easy way to do it, and Peter had been putting off the job. When Peter saw the cannonball he had an idea; the pipes were six inches in diameter and the ball was five inches across. What if he rolled the ball down the pipes like a marble rolling down a track? It would clean all the pipes in no time.

So Peter took the cannonball up to the roof and dropped it down the stovepipe The ball disappeared from sight like light into a black hole. It hit falling velocity in three seconds and at the first curve in the pipe blew through sixteen inches of brick and mortar in the front parlor, vaporizing coal dust as it went. When Peter scampered down the ladder to see what happened; his stomach sinking in dread, he opened the front door to find that the entire house was black. Sofas, wallpaper, artwork, the cat. All black.

We never saw the Cannonball after that and Marc told us his father had buried it, cursing, in the yard. Forever after that my mind had an association of the black pirate's flag with that black house.