Eye Didn’t See It Coming
Kelsie Teves
TR 9:00-10:15am RING! RING! Ringing from my blaring alarm clock instantly woke me up from my precious and deprived beauty sleep. I slowly rolled myself out of my tornado wrecked and dirty clothes filled bed and dragged my feet to turn off the ear wrenching reminder that wakes me up every beautiful morning. “Boy, I sure love waking up bright and early at seven o’ clock on a Saturday morning,” I thought to myself sarcastically as I sluggishly walked around my room to get ready for the routine five hour Saturday marching band practices. As a graduate, I was so eager to head back to my alma mater to become a color guard advisor for the program that built me to what I am today. It was my home away from home, but that all changed very quickly on Saturday mornings.
Instantly, as I got out of my car, I could feel the blazing heat rise from the faded asphalt that came from the beaming down sun rays that shined from the sky above. I was already dreading the temperature that would soon only rise as I stepped foot onto the plastic and rubber artificially made turf. “I knew I should’ve slept in,” I scolded myself. As I entered into the renovated football stadium, where practice is held, the first thing I saw made me cringe. The band and the color guard were doing simple technique drills that they’ve been practicing the past three months, and it was as tragic as when the final sight of the front bow of the Titanic sunk under. I stopped to analyze the weaknesses and mistakes of each member. Many of the 32 girls in the color guard were being lazy with their posture and were not standing up straight with their chests slightly extended out, their knees were not in plié for them to be able to properly push off when they did jazz runs, and their arms were swinging like trees in a hurricane when they were supposed to be down, still at their sides. Also, as they did jazz runs, their feet were not in time with the beat of the metronome and they were falling out of line as they ran side by side down the field. I noted the most repeated issues so we could work on those later. Our director called for a quick water break and for them to head into section warm ups. After giving the girls a few minutes to rehydrate their bodies and rub sunscreen into their sun kissed skin, I yelled at my section to form a block of four rows of eight on the red, rubber track surrounding the football field.
Once they were all set, I shouted out, “Fifty counts of right hand drop spins!”
I started clapping my hands for a beat for them to follow. Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap!
“Five. Six. Five. Six. Seven. Eight,” they sounded off drowsily as they initiated their flags to move. Within seconds, their flags were a blur of mass chaos. Some flags were going up while some flags were going down, some girls were spinning at NASCAR speed while some were spinning slower than a snail.
“Stop!” I screamed.
It took a few seconds for every pole to stop spinning as the girls who weren’t paying attention were clearing out of the fog of their daydreams.
“Do it again CORRECTLY! And don’t be lazy,” I warned them as they set into their starting positions of feet shoulder with apart and hands at the middle and the bottom of the poles, expecting they would fix themselves and put in more effort, but I was wrong. For the next two hours of practice, the girl’s attitudes and technique only became worse and worse.
“It’s so HOOOOT!” whined almost every girl as the heat began to rise to scorching temperatures.
“I hate Saturday practices. They are too early. All I want to do is sleep,” pouted one of the rookie freshman girls who had yet to hit puberty and looked like a nine year old.
“You’re not the only one kid,” I thought to myself as I suffered listening and watching these prissy little girls moan and groan. Even though we all hated Saturday practices, when I was a student in the color guard, there was no way any of us would complain about it out loud. We felt it was disrespectful to our directors and advisors who put in hundreds of hours to make us successful, the least we could do was give up a few hours of our Saturday morning and put out our best. But to these girls, their best was dragging their feet and just going through the motions. They weren’t even able to execute correctly and toss out together as a group a basic toss they’ve been rehearsing since the beginning of the summer. Almost at my wits end, I decided to demonstrate how that part of their flag work they were struggling with should look like. I tossed my flag into the air hoping I could show them the proper way to release it. As I watched my flag float up, it seemed as if time stood still as the mint green silk spun, spun, spun to form into a graceful, flowing waterfall. Just as the flag began to come down, I knew I did a perfect toss and looked away to see if they were watching. That’s when I felt it. The gust of wind that blew my flag farther, farther away from me. But also, the feeling I get whenever I realize when something awful is about to happen. I should have known an accident would occur. My peaceful waterfall soon became a nightmare dreamt hurricane. Spinning at lightning speed in gravity defying directions, I watched as it struck the brand new, bouncy turf. And before I could even process to deflect it, I saw the blunt, white end of the pole shooting back right towards me. SMACK! The world fell silent as I felt myself dropping further, further and finally, tumbling onto my back. Instantly when I hit the ground, gut-wrenching pain flew into my eye. I grasped my eye tightly with both of my hands, praying that by doing so, the hammer that was continuously pounding into it would stop. But it didn’t. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! I slowly began pushing myself off the ground in attempt to stand. But just as I stood up, my legs began to wobble and they buckled right under me. Instead of wasting my time knowing I wouldn’t be able to walk, I hoisted myself onto all fours and began to crawl. Having no idea where I was going, I gradually dragged myself in a shaky fashion trying to buzz my way over to the front of the field. I don’t know how long I spent doing that until I finally realized what was going on around my surroundings, but what snapped me out of my trance was the horrifying, blood curdling screams of my name.
“Kelsie!” shrieked the high-pitched voices of the girls.
“Omigosh, someone quickly get help!” screeched a voice I couldn’t distinguish from the commotion of panic going on within the color guard and the bases banging as hard as they could on their drums. I looked up, and in a blurred vision, I could see several people running hurriedly in my direction to help carry me to the bathroom, that’s when I realized the sweat running down my face from the sweltering, summer sun wasn’t really sweat. It finally clicked as I lifted my unsteady hands away from my eye and watched in shock as the thick, red, oozing blood came pouring down from my blood bathed face. While being rushed to the bathroom that seemed like forever and eternity, I waited for the drip, drip, dripping of the blood to go away along with the regret of never trusting my gut to sleep in that morning.