Shortcuts
Brooke Kyle
As Christopher lay on that pile of towels his fantasies turned to reminiscence, and he
dreamt of the time when he and his mother lived in a two-bedroom townhouse on the south side
of Bryan, Texas. The elementary school was only a block away, and every day he walked there,
starting from the time he was in kindergarten. The route his mother showed him, the one he was
supposed to take—nothing but sidewalks, crosswalks and ninety-degree angles—was boring and
unnecessarily long compared to the shortcuts he found. His thoughts carried him down the trails
he had followed years before.
One path took him to the end of his own street where a cul-de-sac led to an unfenced
backyard and his doctor’s office on the other side. The lucky coincidence of this location led
Christopher to discover this first shortcut. Once—when he had an ear infection and a
dangerously high fever—his mother ran through this shortcut with Christopher in her arms. That
was the first time he saw the dog. It had curly, golden hair, overgrown to the point it was
impossible to see its eyes. In Christopher’s fevered mind the dog really had no eyes, and yet it
turned its head to follow him as if it could see. The first time Christopher used the shortcut to get
to school, the dog sat and watched, rotating its head in Christopher’s direction, no matter which
way he walked. Christopher, in turn, did not take his eyes off the dog until he was safely in the
parking lot of his doctor’s office, walking backwards into a tree.
Regardless of how frightening he found the dog, Christopher continued to follow his
shortcut. He preferred adventure, however scary, to the long walk around the route his mother
prescribed for him. He only wished he could cut down time at the crosswalk. When he arrived at
the intersection near his school he had to walk both north and west to get to his destination. The
first time he was presented with this obstacle, Christopher walked diagonally across both streets
at the same time. This led the crossing guard to yell at the boy until he cried. Thinking back on
that morning, Christopher was ashamed to have cried, but he comforted himself with the thought
that was only five-years-old at the time. That morning it was explained to him that not only did
he have to cross each of the streets individually, he first had to wait until the crossing guard did
so too, so the old man could escort the boy across. Christopher felt this arrangement insulted his
intelligence. Despite the fact that he had just attempted to cross the street incorrectly, he was not
stupid, and he knew how to cross a street. He had only wanted to be more efficient. This original
incident, along with one occasion when he stopped traffic for several minutes to pet a stray dog,
which caused the old man to yell at him again, led Christopher to formulate his goal to minimize
the time he spent with the crossing guard.
His desire to find another path was accelerated one morning, when he came upon the
owner of the fenceless yard with the eyeless dog, in a t-shirt and boxer shorts watering his
garden. “What are you doing here Christopher?” the man asked.
It was Dr. Newman. It had never occurred to Christopher that his doctor would own the
house behind his own office, and while he should have felt comforted by the familiarity,
something about seeing his pediatrician in his underwear was so terrifying—even more terrifying
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