FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #5

A boy with a parrot on his shoulder was walking along the railway tracks.  He carried a heavy wooden bucket in one hand that made him lean toward the rails like a root to water.  He wore a tee shirt that was once bright yellow.  Red shorts, no shoes.  Dark skin.  The boy was the one who looked like a parrot.  The bird, on the other hand, was pigeon-gray.  It angled its head into the curve of the boy’s neck like a kitten.  The woman thought it was a pretty interesting photo.

 

King Leopold – he only built railroads out – not through.  Save this one for the portfolio!  Love you –

No name on the note.  Why didn’t he put his name?  Just to see it – the angles of his “K,” the pointed “v,” the “i” with a dot that was more like a line.  She worked on it with him for months until he finally gave an adult-sounding sigh and said to her,

“Mama, I’m just going to do it how I want.”

He writes his mother short notes because he thinks the pictures give enough insight into his stat e of being.  She thinks he gives himself too much credit.

She resents all of the pictures – why never just a lopsided, self-timed shot of him leaning against a tree, or one where he holds the camera in front of his own face?   Does her boy have a beard?  Is he thin?  She worries about his sunscreen.  Does he remember to get the backs of his knees?

One of the notes accompanied a photo of a busy market.  It said,

Please don’t just tell people I’m in Africa- that’s like saying “Europe” or “Asia.”

She thought, what’s wrong with saying Europe or Asia?

As she places the latest parrot/boy/Leopold statement in the portfolio that sits on top of her bookcase, she realizes she will not go back to her work this afternoon.  Her eighth graders are in the middle of Greek mythology.  They have written one-page reactions to Daedalus and Icarus.  The papers can wait; they are the writings of children who do not yet know of Icarus’s curiosity.  They have yet to understand the reason behind his recklessness.

The words are always so strange to her.  To lean, she makes lists.  People, towns, diseases, languages, animal species.  Stuck between Bantu and Brazzaville is boy.  Between Leopoldville and Lumumba lie longing and love.  Mama, Mbuti, Mobutu, Mom.  Kin before Kinshasa.  Parents, then Parrots.  What kind of parrot is this?

She sits at the tidy desk in her kitchen.  The only noises in the room are the constant hum of the refrigerator and the neat clicking of her fingers on a computer keyboard.  She searches for gray parrots on the Internet.  The African Gray Parrot can live for over 50 years.

She wonders what savagery the bird in the picture has seen: ethnic cleansing, ethnocide, genocide, gendercide.  Massacres, murders, machetes, machine guns. 

The person she carried in her belly for almost 10 months is in the middle of it all with a pretentious-looking camera and a Swiss Army Knife. 

She often worries that he is sick – cholera, dengue, a whole host of parasites, typhoid, yellow fever.  He already had malaria – he sent her pictures of sick babies from the hospital.  He was already better and back in the jungle by the time she got them.  Swine flu.  Was there swine flu there?  She’ll have to look it up—

AIDS.  She wonders sometimes if he is with one of them, his ultimate statement piece.  But, she will not ask.  What if he says yes? 

Well, if the girl has money but no AIDS; a cinnamon skinned mine owner’s daughter, an aristocrat.  Wait, the mine owners are white, anyway.  Oh, wouldn’t that be nice?  He’d meet a little blonde with a British-sounding accent; maybe she’d look like that girl the Prince of England was dating.  Or, maybe he’d find an artist-activist type like himself.  If the girl wanted to be a good mother, she would want to have their children in the States.  She’d bring him back home.  She pictured sturdy, smiling grandchildren she would babysit every Friday night.

She overparented.  Only a half-hour of video games; an hour of TV; at least an hour reading.  Limited sugar.  They ate fast food only once or twice a month.  Organic milk, vitamins, Ritalin, reading tutors.  Took him to swimming, Little League, Tae Kwon Do.  She chaperoned his marching band trips.  She took a job at his junior high school and kept his lunches in the refrigerator in the teacher’s lounge. 

Her husband was always hard on their son:  he told him they would only go to Disney if he got straight A’s, only go to McDonald’s if he pitched a hundred pitches.  Insistent about spanking; he made him pick his own switches. 

The worst argument they ever got in was when her husband gave Topper the guinea pig away to the children of a woman he worked with.  He said that if their son couldn’t handle the responsibility of feeding Topper and cleaning the cage, he’d find someone who would.  She drove to the coworker’s home and asked for the guinea pig back.  She said it had all been a misunderstanding.  She went in the woman’s house and took the cage out in front of her crying children to stop the tears of her own.

She took care of Topper by herself for five years.

She read in Time magazine that “Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they'll fly higher.”

Something about it made sense.  She lifted his curfew.  She pretended she was asleep when she heard the rhythmic banging of her son’s thighs pushing some girlfriend’s hips into a wall.  She allowed his friends over for sleepovers that left her basement reeking of cheap liquor and marijuana smoke.  He decided that sports weren’t for him and she convinced her husband that it was fine, most boys outgrow them.  She let him quit marching band and take photography as his elective.  It all seemed to work.  His grades got higher, he got into colleges.

And then- all of a sudden, her nest was empty.  Time happened quicker.  She filled the void with food and phone calls.  He only picked up three of our times a week. 

A class happened – at first, it was just to fulfill his “Non-Western Perspectives” requirement.  When she caught up with him over lunch on Labor Day, he hated it.  He was failing.  At home Fall Break, he said it was weird, but he was starting to see the point of it.  Over a visit in October, he said he was actually liking it.  At Thanksgiving dinner, he told his grandmother it was his favorite class.  By finals, he broached the subject of changing his major. 

“What do you think about African Studies?” he asked.

She sighed and lied and said that if it was what made him happy, she was happy.  Her boy was supposed to be a medical student in Baltimore, an analyst in St. Louis, an engineer in Odessa.  With this path, she figured, he would work for a non-profit in Washington.  She would have to give him an allowance, but at least he would be doing something noble.

And now –

Her son is gone.  The boy who put snowballs in the freezer to save for the summer has flown the coop.

Each night, before sleep, she wishes for her own wings: the soft gray feathers would shield her baby from danger.

If Icarus had a mother, he never would have fallen.  She would whisper to him as the floated down away from the sun,

Dream, son.  Fly- but not too far.

back to Contest #5