Jason and the Magic Basketball
Jason had a magical basketball. Or at least, that’s what he claimed. Most of us never believed him, especially since every time we asked him to explain what was so magical about it, or prove its magical powers through a real-life demonstration, he refused.
But then we discovered that he had been telling the truth all along.
No wonder he never let us use it for our basketball games. We never understood that part. Ok, so even if it was magical, why not at least take advantage of that and get some amazing 3-pointers swishing through the net because of it? Let’s harness its powers to impress the competition.
But that wasn’t the kind of magic that it had. Jason’s basketball had the kind of magic where every time the ball bounced, a random person somewhere on the planet was brought back to life. Make that a random dead person, I guess; it wouldn’t make much sense for still-living random people to be resurrected.
I think there were special basketballesque rules that dictated who was eligible for resurrection, because all of the basketball zombies that we saw seemed to be in a similar state of decomposition. People who had died more recently should have looked better than that, and people who had died longer ago should have looked worse, or at least more skeletal. No, this was probably a fairly narrow range of a few days within which the basketball chose to resurrect people from the dead.
Of course, we didn’t find out about its powers until after our marathon string of games using the ball we stole from Jason’s house when he was away at camp. We all started to think that maybe the basketball did have some special powers, because all our shots seemed a little more accurate, our dribbling a little faster, and our passes were pretty much all spot-on. Later we realized that was just some kind of placebo effect where our brains either stepped things up to magical basketball levels, or we just thought things we going better.
It wasn’t until later in the day when we realized what we had actually done. We saw a few zombies on our way back home, but assumed they were just early trick or treaters who didn’t know when Halloween was. And then we saw the news and discovered what horrors we had unleashed on the world.
Even Old Man McGrady had come back to life. All the neighborhood kids were so thrilled when he finally died. He creeped us out, always walking around with that tattered old baseball cap and the string hanging out of his mouth. Was there anything on the other end of the string, or did he just enjoy keeping a string in his mouth? And if something was on the other end, what could it be? It was just an unsettling sight to see him sitting on his porch, string in mouth, watching us go to school.
And then our relief at his death last month was completely washed away by seeing him back on his porch the day after our fateful basketball game, still with the string in his mouth, but now with more decomposed flesh than before. And that look in his eyes that said that he knew something we didn’t.
They all had that look, but none of them would tell us anything. We bribed them with cheap beer and catnip, but couldn’t get them to talk. Or maybe it was just that their vocal chords had deteriorated to the point that they were mute. That didn’t match up with any of the zombie movies we’d seen before we resurrected them, but then we did have some growing up to do. Movies didn’t always tell you the truth about zombies.
We still didn’t realize that it was our fault until Jason came back from camp. He came home two weeks early because most of the counselors had been eaten by our zombies. As soon as he showed up he barged in on our game of zombie hide and seek, shouting and carrying on and being a big baby. How dare we steal his basketball and use it to raise the dead, and how would we like it if he took something of ours and used it to turn people into vampires. You know how kids can get, they overreact to every little thing.
And that’s what I did on my summer vacation. I raised the dead. Sorry about that. I know it’s been a little inconvenient, what with all the brain eating that seems to be going on lately.
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