The World's Largest Rubber Band Ball
2024/05/14

There's this giant rubber band ball at the end of my street. Literally, it's 50 feet tall. Some time in the like the 70's or something it was officially recognized as the world's largest rubber band ball, but then the next year some flyover state ended up building one that's like, I don't know, 70 feet tall or something. So our ball got moved into an empty lot that the city owned. They turned the lot it into a little park with a placard describing the giant ball and the short-lived world record.

And there it sat to slowly get baked and faded by the unrelenting sun year after year.

Some kids in the early 2000's lit the ball on fire. I think they doused it in gasoline or kerosene or whatever flammable shit they could find. It released all sorts of nasty fumes in thick, big billows of charcoal-black smoke. The ball burned for a few hours but most of it was still intact. The fire melted a lot of the old rubber together into some kind of gluey concoction and somehow the ball became stronger than it ever had been before.

Apparently the kids took turns huffing the smoke to try to get high and one of them went to the ER. I think he's still alive, somewhere.

So anyway that's the ball at the end of my street. I've tried to climb it before but it's too hard to get any hand holds on the thing and I always slip off it when I'm only a few feet up. I usually just sit next to it and listen to music, imagining all the people that have come down my little street to check out this once great ball that's now just a weird little footnote about my town.

I know one day the ball will become unseated from its posts and start rolling. Rolling back down from what should've been its final resting place. And I know it will find me and roll over me, splattering my blood and guts and bones into a sloshy mess and parts of my inner goop will coat the outer layer of the ball and we will become one, rolling down the streets of this sleepy town, terrorizing everyone in our path.

One day.