Back Flip Bounce...A Short Story

 

 Time again for a Weekly Writing Prompt!

Again, here's the rules: 500 word maximum, must be posted to THIS website, the story must be posted before next Wednesday, and the story must include these five words:

Skyscraper

Bet

Reform

Balcony

Surface

Enjoy!
(Enjoy is not one of the required words...)

Back Flip Bounce

In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the smartest thing Tim Larson ever did, but the social pressure of a bet cannot be discounted, especially to an active 13-year old and the open invitation of a trampoline.

            It began as Tim walked across his back yard. “I’ll bet you can’t do a back flip off our balcony,” Johnny Butters sneered to his next-door neighbor who was trying his best to remain unnoticed. The plan didn’t work.

“I bet I can,” Tim responded. He did it all the time at the swimming pool. How hard could it be to do one on a trampoline? Tim really didn’t like Jimmy too much. The best way to define their relationship was mutual toleration and had remained so ever since the Butters family moved into the neighborhood a month before. Tim was sure Johnny had at one time escaped any number of reform schools. “Then prove it,” Johnny said.

Without a word Tim walked passed Johnny and continued up the wood stairs that led to the deck. Tim took off his Tevas and carefully climbed atop the wood railing that surrounded the deck. The peeling paint on the surface of the wood crunched under the boy’s weight.

Slowly Tim stood and surveyed the land below him. Even though the deck was only 10 feet off the ground, Tim felt as if he were standing on the roof of a skyscraper as the trampoline below seemed to grow smaller and smaller.

“Come on!” Johnny yelled. “You scared?”

“I’m going,” Tim said with only the slightest hint of fear in his voice.

Tim jumped, hit the surface and flew through the air until he came to rest on the deep grass of the Butters’s ignored backyard. He looked up and saw his house beyond a yellow foxtail lily that grew in the Butters’s yard and he hoped for two things. One, that nothing was broken and two, that his mom didn’t see what just happened.

In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the smartest thing Tim Larson ever did.