PROMPT : SILVERS
“Do we have to play?” Derek toed a line in the green dirt, scowling.
His mother, Maya Tristen, thumped the drink cooler onto the wooden table beside him. “You don’t have to do anything,” she said, dryly. “I don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to play any more than I had to bring you here to play because you’ve been pestering me about it all week.”
“…That’s not fair,” Derek mumbled. He eyed the cooler. “Is that punch or lemonade?”
“Punch,” his mother smiled, faintly. “Are you afraid to lose or afraid to win?”
“The Goldies always win,” Derek helped himself to a glass of chilled fruit punch. He tried not to watch his equally depressed friends milling about a few feet away in the shade, as their visibly shaken coach pulled himself together.
Things had been going fine, until the Goldies’ boomerang had come slicing through the air and knocked the Silvers’ Coach right off of his feet, leaving him with two bruised ribs and a nasty scrape on one arm.
“It’s a dangerous game,” his mother agreed. “But the Goldies are kids. Just like you.”
“Didn’t you see what they did to Coach?”
“He should’ve kept his wits about him,” his mother said, matter-of-factly. “What kind of coach steps onto a field like this without his battle armor on?”
Derek shut his mouth at that, because there wasn’t a good rebuttal coming anytime soon. His mother had worn her own, college-days Flight protective gear just to sit in the spectactors section.
She’d also won three district championships and made it to nationals twice. The sport was natural in an athletic family like theirs.
“They’re going to kill us.” He moaned.
“They’ll win one or two,” his mother corrected. “Maybe. You all just don’t practice enough. If you practiced a bit more, your instincts would line up better.”
“I don’t have instincts. Dad didn’t have instincts!” Derek protested.
“Exactly. Which is why he married me. Now stop whining and put your headgear on. The game starts in ten and you know you want to play.”
“No I don’t!”
“So you’re drawing plays on the ground because you feel like it?”
Derek grabbed the helmet and jammed it on his head, hoping it would hide his red face. A faint ripple of pride feathered across his shoulders, making him lift his head as he strode towards the field, breaking into a trot at the assistant coach’s beckoning hand.
He would give his mother some credit, after all.
They’d probably win, thanks to that disastrous occurrence.
After all, his mother had never called a bad game in her life.
(C) S. Harricharan