"The coffee's cold now."
"I know. You shouldn't have left it out for so long."
"I know."
David and Peter looked at each other from across their mugs.
"Andrew died a few days ago. Drunk driver."
There were tears in Peter's eyes.
"I know."
David looked outside.
"He always did like this yard. Remember, when we were twelve, and all of us would hang around outside and..."
Peter suddenly jumped up, rose to his feet, and began talking fast in a clear, calm tone.
"Who the hell says the those days are gone? We're still alive. You breathe. I breathe. Our legs and arms and feet and hands still work, right? Our hearts still pump, don't they?" He threw his fist down on the table, Ker-smack, hammer-hard.
"Who the hell says those days are gone?"
David looked up at Peter and smiled.
They all lived around the same place, still. Mostly. Regardless, it'd been a minor miracle that they all made it. Peter and David had called everyone, forced their ears to listen and their minds to feel. And they did not let up until the answer was yes.
Peter looked them all over, up and down.
"Guys, I called you here to play a game of tag."
Some murmurs of dissent, cries of irritation, of Meetings and Deadlines.
Peter held his hands up.
"Silence!," and it was so.
"As you should all know by now, Andrew is dead. He's gone from us now. This is the first hard death that's touched us all and I know that you feel like I do. Like a piece of your heart is twisted and balled up and smashed."
Peter paused, his eyes drilling through them.
"But it doesn't have to be this way. We can't let death and the world and problems and money and all that shit take from us the very core of who we were. Who we should still be."
He paused again. His childhood friends of every race, religion, gender and creed looked back at him. Feeling his words rush through them and spark emotions they'd buried down and deep.
"Andrew was the purest one, the most light-hearted and life-loving of us all. It is in his name, his undying memory, that I carry through in what I am about to do."
Peter rushed over to Joelle and tapped her on the shoulder.
"You're it!"
And suddenly he was off, they were all off, and they were free and pure and whole again, reborn into bodies of spirit that soared through the silken air. And they laughed and cried and hugged and danced and ran, and ran, and ran. And eventually some children saw them while walking by, and their parents looked on in confusion and shock, wondering what has become of our neighborhood, what chaos has been let loose in our town?
And the children looked at each other and smiled. For they knew why those grown-ups played a game of tag. Oh, they knew.
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