“Breathe, Dammit! Breathe!”
Ron Harper shouted this command like it was a set of instructions, as though I had made a conscious choice to stop, or simply forgotten how.
His much younger and much larger brother, Darrell, had just hit me in the throat with a wild pitch and my 7-year-old windpipe took this as a sign to take a well-earned break. Darrell was about 5 years older than me, had gone through puberty in the womb and somewhere along the line had, apparently, misplaced his neck.
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