The Sixth Street Crossing

The day I almost died on Sixth Street, I was twelve. It was spring in Abilene, Kansas, and the wind carried the smell of rain and dust from the plains. I was walking home from Harrison Elementary, my backpack heavy with textbooks, my mind a thousand miles away. The town was quiet, the way it always was after school let out. I cut through the parking lot behind the old mercantile, a shortcut I’d taken a hundred times. The lot was empty except for a few rusted cars and a stray dog sniffing at a dumpster. I remember the sun was low, casting long shadows across the cracked asphalt.

As I came to the alley that ran between the mercantile and the feed store, I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder. It was strong, insistent, and it spun me around so fast I nearly lost my balance. I stumbled back, expecting to see a neighbor or a truant officer, but there was no one. The alley was empty, the parking lot empty, the street beyond empty. I stood frozen, my heart hammering, searching for any sign of who had touched me. The wind picked up, and I heard the distant rumble of thunder. That’s when a delivery truck—a massive, rusted thing with a trailer—roared out of the alley where I had been about to step. It missed me by inches, the wind from its passing knocking me to the ground. The driver never even honked. I lay there, staring at the sky, and I knew that if I hadn’t stopped, I would have been flattened.

I never told anyone. How could I explain a hand that wasn’t there? For years, I rationalized it—a coincidence, a sudden muscle spasm, a gust of wind. But a part of me knew something else had been watching, something that had reached out from the invisible to yank me back. It was a comfort and a curse. I started to see the world differently, to notice the thin places where the veil between life and death wore thin. But I pushed it down, buried it under the routines of growing up, moving away, building a life.

In the autumn of 1972, I was living in Akron, Ohio, working as a mechanic at a garage on the outskirts of town. I was twenty-six, married to a good woman, and had a daughter on the way. Life was solid, predictable. One night, I worked late, replacing a transmission. The garage was quiet except for the clang of my tools and the hum of the fluorescent lights. Around 10 PM, I decided to call it quits. I wiped my hands on a rag and stepped out the back door into the employee lot. It was dark, the only light a flickering bulb above the door. I was about to unlock my truck when I felt it again—that same iron grip on my shoulder, spinning me around. I stumbled back against the wall, and the door to the garage slammed shut with a deafening clang. The entire building shook. I stood there, breathless, my heart pounding, staring at the closed door. If I had been a step further, the heavy steel door would have crushed me against the wall. That door had a faulty spring, and I knew it. But I also knew the odds of it slamming shut at that exact moment, after I’d been spun around, were impossibly small.

I searched the lot, my eyes straining in the dark. No one. Not a shadow, not a sound except the distant hum of traffic on the interstate. I called out, ‘Hello? Is someone there?’ My voice echoed off the concrete. I was alone. But I knew I wasn’t. Something had saved me again.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, while my wife slept beside me. I thought about the alley in Abilene, the hand that had stopped me, and now this. The pattern was too clear. Something had been with me my whole life, something that cared enough to intervene when death came calling. But what? And why me? I felt a cold dread creep into my bones. I had never been religious, never believed in ghosts, but I couldn’t deny what I had experienced. I started to wonder if it was my father, who had died when I was three, or maybe my grandmother, who had been the only person I’d ever known who seemed to see things others couldn’t. She’d always said, ‘The dead don’t leave us, Tommy. They just move to the other side of the glass.’ I’d laughed it off as old-woman talk.

Over the next few weeks, I became obsessed. I started visiting libraries, reading books on the paranormal, on near-death experiences, on guardian angels. I talked to mediums, to a priest, to an old woman who read tea leaves. None of them could explain what had happened. They all said the same thing: ‘Someone from beyond is watching over you.’ But I still didn’t know who or why. The fear grew with each passing day. I began to feel watched, not in a comforting way, but as though something was waiting, biding its time. The hand had saved me, but what if it had its own agenda? What if it was saving me for something worse?

One night, in a motel on the outskirts of Akron, I had a dream. I was back in Abilene, standing in the alley. The air was thick with dust, and the light was wrong—too bright, like a hospital room. A figure stood at the end of the alley, a woman in a long coat, her face hidden in shadow. She raised her hand and pointed at me. I tried to move, but my feet were glued to the ground. She spoke, and her voice was the sound of dry leaves skittering across pavement: ‘You have been granted time. Use it well.’ Then I woke up, drenched in sweat.

I never found out who she was. But I started to live differently. I quit the garage, moved back to the small town where I grew up, and became a teacher. I never had children of my own, but I made a point of watching for kids who walked home alone, who seemed lost or sad. I never touched them, never interfered, but I was always there. I know now that the hand that saved me wasn’t a guardian angel or a ghost. It was something older, something that sits at the crossroads and spins you around when you’re about to step into the path of a truck. It shows you the door, but you have to choose to walk through it.

I still don’t know who or what it was. But I owe it my life. And I’ve learned that being saved doesn’t mean you’re safe. It means you have a debt. I’ve spent my life trying to pay it back, one small act of kindness at a time. And I know that one day, when my own path reaches its end, I’ll be the hand that spins someone else around, and I’ll pull them back from the edge of the abyss. That’s the bargain. That’s the price of being alive when you shouldn’t be.