Efforts like maple syrup.

While enjoying the natural beauty of Vermont this summer, I was compelled to write the following. Let's pretend this makes up for ignoring my dear blog and you, my imaginary readers.



What is the Matter with Michael Brown?



“What is the matter with Michael Brown?” my mother asked with mock curiosity.
I tell her that today in school he fell down a flight of stairs and broke his back. He’ll probably be okay, I tell her, but he’ll never walk again.
“Well, so long as it didn’t happen to you,” she says in a soft voice, making my sandwich for a snack, “I guess it really doesn’t concern me. Tough luck, though.”
Yes, mom. Tough luck, indeed.
I take my sandwich and go into the other room to watch cartoons. Today it’s the one about the man with the hat and his friend who is so very stupid. They do things I would never dream of doing in the real world, dangerous things with insignificant consequences. I laugh. It’s funny.
After I eat my sandwich and watch my show it’s nap time and I get tired. There’s three hours until dinner but I don’t want to sleep through them all, because if I do I won’t get to see Sid and Nancy at the playground.
I sleep for maybe half an hour and have dreams of stair monsters that eat little children’s legs. They eat my legs, my body, my head, and on the inside of the stair monster I see little Michael Brown in a wheelchair, paralyzed up to his neck. I am seven years old and I know what it means to be paralyzed.
After my nap I go outside without saying anything to my mother because this will get me extra dessert after dinner, because she’s so worried about me. She feeds me to kill her own sense of dread and fear at the dangers of life. This constant playing with her fears will have a very bad effect on her when I leave for college, it will throw her into a bad depression for a couple of years until she starts smoking, which will kill her before I’m thirty-five. I don’t know any of this yet and my only thought is of two scoops of chocolate instead of just one.
At the playground I find Nancy. She isn’t playing, she’s sitting, looking at her feet. I ask her where Sid is and she tells me he’s visiting with his grandfather who has no hair but a motorcycle. She takes her sandals off and looks at her feet.
I ask her if she wants to play something, knowing that she doesn’t. She only plays when Sid is around. She looks at her feet and asks me if I know where feet come from? I tell her they come from our legs and she laughs. She tells me that her father told her that feet developed from hands that monkeys have on the ends of their legs, that when our ancestors left the trees they had to make feet because hands don’t work for walking on.
This makes me sad because I don’t have a dad. So I go home.
At home my mom has just started to worry about me, but only just realized that I wasn’t in bed. I tell her I was in the lawn looking at butterflies and she smiles a big smile at her little man and I go wash my hands for dinner.
Tonight is tacos. I like tacos but my mom doesn’t because we’ve been having them for almost three straight weeks, since my dad left. I don’t know why we keep having them but I like them.
“Tomorrow Aunt Mary is coming to live with us,” she says, “to help with all the work.” That’s good, I tell her, because I like Aunt Mary. She’s married to Aunt Ross and they’re both very fun ladies. Maybe with them around my mom won’t feel like she has to make tacos all the time, though I still don’t understand this. Mary and Ross only stay for a week, but then they have to get back to their own lives.
After dinner I’m watching the cartoon about the fish that wears pants and I laugh when he sits on the stove. There is a phone call and my mother is talking to someone and she keeps saying Michael Brown. She says it over and over.
She comes in to tell me that Michael Brown died from his fall down the stairs. I am seven years old and I know what death is. I cry into my mother’s blouse and wait for her to tell me that everything is going to be okay, that everything’s going to be alright.
She never does, and I’ve never stopped being grateful for it.


Why it is that mosquitos and pine trees made me think that I don't know, but that's the kind of thing you get when you're lost.