The boy who waited three minutes
Fiction by Stuart Ross
Photography by Joanek
Bobby Rottenhead knew that in three minutes everything would be different. Just like his name was different than when his parents had arrived in this country. If they’d kept their original name, he’d now be Bobby Weinberg, but the guy in Immigration had asked Bobby’s dad who he was, and Bobby’s dad had thought he’d asked how he was, and he replied that he had “rottenhead,” which in his village back home meant he had a bit of a headache, nothing serious, just a bit of pressure in his temples. So the Immigration guy recorded their names as Irwin and Frieda Rottenhead, and the bureaucracy involved was too daunting to ever change it back.
But in three minutes everything would be different. Bobby Rottenhead was certain of that, though he didn’t know what exactly was going to change. Maybe he’d have a third elbow, poking right out the top of his head, or maybe Scotland would turn into an asparagus spear, or maybe the sky and the ocean would switch places. Bobby’d been waiting all his life for these three minutes to pass. Sitting here, in the middle of the football field at Dufferin Heights Junior High School, a cool breeze rustling his curly brown hair, an ant crawling up his left ankle.
He’d been waiting 14 years for these three minutes to tick by, this seemingly endless one-hundred-and-eighty seconds. In fact, during his bar mitzvah, he’d actually looked at his watch, just to see where the three minutes stood, and that had been a year ago. Soon Bobby would graduate from school, and then he’d go to university, and then he’d be a chartered accountant, or a guy who drew charcoal sketches, and he’d have a wife, or maybe a husband, and a few kids, or maybe none, and soon he’d have to retire, just to make room for younger people, and then he’d be the oldest person on Earth to climb a four-metre pyramid of canned niblets at the local SuperFreshMart.
Bobby Rottenhead was pretty excited about that whole niblets thing. But it wasn’t going to happen if these three minutes didn’t get the hell out of the way. He tapped his foot impatiently and continued to stare at his watch, a watch whose second hand sped recklessly ahead, out of breath, screaming toward a finish line drawn on a gravel road with invisible chalk.
