#antagonist coded in his first couple of scenes which deeply amuses me

[altschmerzes]

hey for something new and different im gonna do something i havent done in a very long time and share a bit of my original sports fiction project. this is from the very beginning of it, not the actual opening-opening but very shortly after it. it helps introduce and get to know our audience surrogate character, hockey player jesse marvel who’s just been drafted and is about to start training camp for the team that drafted him, the minneapolis-saint paul phoenixes.

buries my face in my hands anyways here’s this

Since he started high school, Jesse has been experiencing a recurring dream. It happens every couple of weeks or so, to the point that it’s an inside joke around his family’s home that Jesse got another video call from his alternate life whenever he has it. 

In the dream, he’s at a concert, standing off to the side of a massive stage, grandly lit with an inferno of blinding bright lights. The crowd is enormous, the kind you’d see at Madison Square Garden or Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Thousands of blurred out faces gather in an undulating mass of expectant fans, ready and waiting for the show to begin. The anticipation is so thick in the air that he can taste it, a metallic aluminum-copper, the adrenaline emitting from every person there enough to raise goosebumps on his arms. He never knows what band is supposed to take the stage, and every time he tries to read the banner hanging at the back of the platform it’s like he can’t get his eyes to focus on it. Then the crowd starts cheering, a wall of sound sweeps in a tidal wave across the stage, and someone plants a hand square in the middle of Jesse’s back. There’s the quick jerk of a nylon strap around his neck, the whack of an electric guitar into his chest, and a shove that sends him stumbling out, unable to stop until he stands, centre stage, staring out at the crowd that he now realizes has come to see him.

At this point of the dream, a few things occur to Jesse at once. He cannot play the guitar and in fact has never touched one in his life before this moment. He cannot carry a tune in a bucket. One time, he’d been singing in the car and his little sister Brigit, who’d then been ten years old, had very solemnly pulled a five dollar bill out of her backpack and handed it to him, informing him she was bribing him ‘cash money’ to stop. And finally, in just a moment, he’s going to play a chord, or open his mouth to sing a note, and irreversibly, inescapably, profoundly let every one of these thousands upon thousands of people down. 

Jesse hasn’t had the dream since before the draft. He’d walked up on the stage when his name had been called, selected third overall out of hundreds of talented young players hoping this would be their big shot to make it into the League, and accepted the jersey and hat handed to him by the Phoenixes general manager without a single slip-up. It was the exact opposite of the experience in the dream. So much so that he’d thought maybe the dream had just been him psyching himself out since he really got serious about making the League, some kind of subconscious hazing he’d been inflicting on himself. 

It’s not until after the draft, when he’s milling awkwardly around the hall in a surreal haze surrounded by families in fancy clothing and reporters with flashing cameras and little recorder microphones, that Jesse realizes he'd been premature on deciding that one. If the dream was meant to prepare him for anything, it wasn’t the draft. It was everything that followed. Every day he steps out of the hotel room he’s been calling home for the last couple weeks, Jesse feels like he does in the dream when the shove propels him forward onto the stage. It’s like even the walls in the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul have grown eyes, and every pair of them is trained on him. 

During the rookie showcase, there had been a reassuring degree of anonymity that had helped Jesse feel a little less like he was living a waking version of that dream. Every person there is in the same uniform, the Phoenixes standard gear complete with a blank practice jersey and helmet, none of which had a name or number attached. There, he’d just been another kid with skates on his feet and big dreams in his head, surrounded by fifteen or so others exactly like him. It isn’t until he’s at the first day of training camp, a freshly signed contract placing him in the slim ranks of players who were signed to teams their first year before ever playing a single minute of a game on League ice and a jersey screaming his last name in all-caps across his shoulders, that the feeling comes back. Everyone’s eyes are on him again, and this time it’s worse, because those eyes are the eyes of the Phoenixes.