Scene Setting

Anytime that anyone could see into that room, the air was moving. Not due to fans though, there were no fans there, only people. The people became the machine to move the air, running circles and circles and circles running grooves into the mats. All of the mats were red; they were the right color and they hadn‘t changed in years. With red mats you couldn’t really see when blood fell onto them and had to be cleaned off. It was always cleaned off of course, but with red mats, at least there was never any visible evidence. On one of the four walls, above the pull-up bars, there was a list of names, followed by a list of years. Sometimes a new kid, probably from the eight grade would stand below this list to read it and to marvel at it. He might sit there and think to himself, maybe my name will be up there once, maybe twice, maybe four times like Kurt and Steven’s. I myself knew I would not be a state champion that year; I didn’t really bother too much with the list anymore. I just had to stay focused and do what I could do to move the air. On the red mats there were nine white hollow circles, one for each pair to go to work. Circles that were meant to be filled with colliding bodies. They felt empty when filled with anything else. Sometimes a football team would put rows of white folding plastic chairs onto our mats so they could watch some tape in the room. They had no idea how invasive there presence was to those nine white circles. I wished they would have at least taken of there cleats. The mats can’t take sharp things, at least nothing sharper than elbows and knees and the occasional nose. The tile floor that lay beneath the red Styrofoam and white circles was blue, a fact that any new kid probably had no idea about. It was only once a year that the tile saw any light. It never saw real sunlight; in that room there were no windows. The only light that the tile floor or those mats or the machine of the team really saw was a mix of fluorescent cool blue and the filtered white coming from heavily frosted skylights. One man was a fixture under those lights, he was the coach. Though his name had changed, he had been the same man for over fifty years. He was gruff and used short phrases like “sprints. 20 of them.” The machine could be willed by his words and nothing more. If we had all our parts in order there would have been fourteen of us to respond to his every demand. Fourteen of us to be constantly glancing over our shoulders and hoping not to hit the walls, which were covered with red pads, but these did little. They were no friend like the mat on the floor, which would welcome us all at the end of the day, supine and suffocating with no air moving. We might get a rest, allow ourselves to halt the grind for a few moments then again maybe not. More likely we all would be lucky enough to hear the coach’s favorite phrase. It went like this “get tough”.