[SP] The Name That You Gave Me shortstories

It was but single speck of grain in the hourglass, the silent space between the beats of a hummingbird's heart, a time so brief that blinking eyes failed to see it. You grew inside your mother, her womb, where you breathed through her lungs, fed from her placenta. Yes, for those nine fleeting months, you were more than just a part of her, you were her.

And then you were born into a place hazy and bright, a place cluttered with peculiar scents and obscene sounds. You had a longing to somehow be inside her again, to reclaim that spot deep within her belly, where you floated angelic. And so you cried in desperation, your wails loud and piercing; yes, you reached toward nothing and everything, your limbs tiny and flailing. How you called out until you felt the warmth of her embrace, tasted her swollen bosom, her milk, upon your tongue. In those moments, her tenderness soothed you, aligned the stars, set trumpets ablaze, and slew whichever dragon unsettled you so. Yes, in those all too short moments, you were safe and all was right again.

You were slowly weaned of this bond, left to your own defenses, and what choice did you have but to explore a world at once frightening and full of indescribable wonder. Your backyard was terra incognita, an exotic wilderness where beasts blood-thirsty and without names prowled, where the more courageous had met certain doom. You stood paralyzed at the edge of the patio, watching on as your mother tended to her flower-bed, thorns pinching and tearing at unguarded flesh, much like the talons of some rogue bird.

Your basement was a dark and cavernous mystery, where unseen terrors undoubtedly lurked between the stacks of boxes, uneven and towering, one perhaps crouching behind the rattling furnace, its face like a jack-o-lantern, a grimacing mouth full of fire. How you had lingered at the threshold, overwhelmed at your mother's bravery as she descended the steps toward the washer, the heavy thuds of her footsteps undoubtedly disturbing whatever may have been slumbering in those shadows, stirring its hunger.

And then there was that strange building, its rooms littered with wobbling chairs and marker-stained tables, with dusty chalkboards and worn toys thoughtlessly piled into bins. In the mornings, someone else's mother led the children in sing-alongs, most everyone else knowing the words, but you were not brave enough to fake it, a voice low and delayed, like the boy who always sat beside you.

At mid-day, the woman gathered the children in a single-file line, marching them through quiet halls to a much larger room, its giant lights hung between rafters, lights that tattooed orbs of yellow and purple to your sight if you stared at them for to long. It was here that the children sat upon benches connected to folding tables, their metal rods pinching and scratching careless fingers, your thoughtless knees. Yes, it was here that the children formed alliances with those who lived on the same street, who rode the same yellow bus, while eating food you dared not try. And yet your parents always dropped you off, picked you up, so you sat quietly at the end of the bench, eating what was packed into a plastic lunchbox by a mother who still loved you and yet, for some unknowable reason, exiled you to this prison.

In the afternoons, you often looked around a room darkened, at the other children as they lie upon vinyl mats, napping, their heads too large for their bodies, mouths drooling and dumbly sucking at dirty thumbs. How you studied the slow rising and falling of chests, wondered how the others could rest without the comfort of plush animals lining a bed, without a blanket beloved and frayed from unending use.

You could not imagine braving such a world alone, and so you imagined me.

In the beginning, I was a conspirator, twisting plastic heads off your sister's dolls, letting the air out of the tires of other boys' bicycles. Too lazy and careless to remove my shoes, it was I who tracked dirt across the carpet in the summer, muddy slush in the winter. With reckless abandon, it was I who threw balls and frisbee discs onto garage roods, into busy streets.

Yes, it was I who slammed the back door, shaking an expensive vase from the kitchen shelf, sending it to the linoleum floor, where it shattered into jagged little pieces of glassware and dust. It was I who swept your plate clean of vegetables with a slightly bent fork, shoveling them into the eager slobbering mouth of a dog. It was I who swam too far into the deeps ends of public pools, you heroically chasing after, your mother leaning forward from a deck chair, her lotion-covered body tense as she angrily shouted your name over the splashing of water, the laughter of children, over speakers with shorting wires, speakers that piped in music thin and punchy.

At school, it was I who mischievously blew wads of spit and paper at the girl who wore ribbons in her hair, knew everything. Instead of merely walking to the bleachers as instructed so many times before, it was I who slide across a recently-waxed gym floor in your new jeans, the friction leaving holes, dingy threads of white just below the knees.

Believing you were to blame for my misdeeds, your mother often sent you to your room, not with words angry and unrepeatable, but the silent point of a finger trembling with irritation. How you stomped all the way, your head lowered like the flag of a country at war and burying its sons; how you cursed angrily at me, awaiting that terrible moment when your father would arrive home from work, march up to your room, where he would find your sulking, seething with hatred. Yes, how you led him with an anxious hand to where I hid, beneath the bed or in the closet, and yet he refused to look or listen, keeping his stern eyes firmly fixed on you.

You eventually learned to assume fault, that the spankings and groundings would be less severe if you did so; this you did partly out of pity, partly out of guilt. You were responsible for me, knew that I knew nothing of gentleness because I had never felt the soothing sway of a cradle rocked, had never heard the sweet hum of a lullaby half-remembered. And so you took it upon yourself to tame me, to refine my rugged tendencies.

You began by giving me a name.

That evening, we lied on our bellies in the living room, on a rug large and fuzzy, your legs bent upward at the knee, crossing at the ankles, mine sprawling across the floor. A coloring book spread flat between us, I gripped a crayon in my clinched fist, haphazardly scribbling with broad sweeps, my entire body rocking with each movement. How you had politely pulled the crayon from my hand, and then lightly held it between two fingers, coloring with the grace of a concert pianist, the precision of a surgeon. How I had admired the way you boldly outlined with dark colors, filling the space between with lighter shades.

At night, you would slide out of bed, creep across the room with steps soft and deliberate. How I watched one as you cautiously peered through cracked door, shifting eyes about the hall, its darkness signaling your parents fast asleep. How we then huddled beneath the cover, a plastic flashlight illuminating the books you had snuck home from school. Their words you read aloud to me, carefully sounding out the one did not know; afterward, we invented absurd little stories, often based on the pictures, sometimes of our own accord.

Soon I became your confidant; candidly you spoke of the embarrassment of being picked up from school by your father, his work clothes dirty and fading, how he tracked muddy boot prints through the lobby and halls. You spoke of how attentive he was of his car, of how he saved what little energy he had left in the evenings for its constant washing and waxing. You spoke of how your mother yelled when you flopped on the new furniture, you body oily from the afternoon's play, of how you felt like you lived in a museum.

One afternoon, you returned home with news that had shaken me more than it did you, about a classmate who had argued with his mother about something trivial, something since forgotten. You repeated the story of how he had stormed out of their front door, the screen crashing behind him, of how he hopped onto a worn bicycle, peddled hastily out of the driveway and into the path of a car.

That evening, we gathered in the parking lot of a funeral home, an autumn wind ruffling the women's dresses. How the men spoke in voice soft and unfamiliar, gently placing hands on one another's shoulders, nodding at words only partially heard. Your classmate argued with siblings, worried about dinner as the two of us sat contently on the curb, waiting for the adults to finish. And just then, a reluctant wail rising from where the men congregated, a new and alien sounds, immediately recognized as the distinct restrained sobbing of a grown man. How the men pulled tighter, their outstretched arms becoming embraces, heads resting on shoulders, eyes watering. Tides shifted, moths revealed themselves as angels, and wizards stepped out from behind curtains; yes, this was the first time you saw your father cry.

The next day, tiny bellies full and recess in session, your teacher awkwardly approached you on the baseball diamond, a cardigan sweater hanging loosely from her frail body, a winkled hand blocking the sun. She asked if your father was a coach or a troop leader, if he somehow knew the deceased, and you shook your head silently, averting your eyes, focusing on pennants hanging from a broken scoreboard and flapping in a breeze you did not feel.

Later you sat with hunch body on the wooden porch-swing, rocking it lightly with the soft kicks of a single foot, as I crouched on the steps, carefully ripping a single blade of grass down its middle. A setting sun painted us a mellowing orange, and we debated if your father's tears were for the child in the casket, if they were for you, if he had imaged losing you, if he imagined that he somehow already had. A slight frown finding its way to your face, you stood, then entered the house without inviting me. I waited patiently, thinking that you would return after retrieving some toy, maybe a game of chance for us to play, distracting myself by watching as solitary ant scurried about the porch, carrying a speck of dirt in its jaws. Sometime later, the crickets began to sing as the streetlights faintly hummed against a darkening sky.

Something changed.

You spent your afternoons not in the yard where we once played, but studying your father's actions in the garage, sitting quietly on a worn leather stool, an intent state at a pair of thick legs protruding from beneath a car, its front end jacked. Your father soon began asking for your help with small easy tasks, and so you steadied lights, passed wrenches and spark plugs. Then came a promotion as you fitted your hands into crevice too small for his, soiling and sometimes scraping them. You discovered a simple poetry in the smell of oil, the clanking of tools, the pride of a job done well. As your father no longer seemed to notice me, I had not the faintest clue of how to involve myself; you ignored me as well, only acknowledging my presence in the beginning, shooting annoyed glances in my direction if I were to fumble with the mower, explore his workbench. I resigned myself to the edge of the garage, hands tucked in the pockets of my jeans.

No longer invited inside, I slept in the tree-house your father had hobbled together with his father the summer before, spending my days flipping through the crumbled notebooks in which he had written coded messages, occasionally spying on the neighbors' dogs with the binoculars we hung from a rusted nail. Some afternoons, I caught glimpses of other make-believe children, forgotten by rapidly growing boys and girls. How I tried to signal to them from my post with a broken hand-mirror, found while scavenging through the trash tote your mother wheeled out one a week, angling the glass just so, reflecting what I hoped to be brazen flashes of sunlight. They barely squinted their eyes.

How I considered climbing the fence, venturing into the other yards, yet never having been outside this patch of land without you, I could not muster the courage. I spent month, maybe even years, trying to conjure up a friend of my own, but never once had you shared your secret with me, never once had I even asked.

When your father grew too old, too weak to tend to the yard, you kept up with the mowing and trimming, raked the fallen leaves into piles I so desperate craved jumping into with you.

Sometimes you snuck sips of beer with other young men on the back porch, talking in matter-of-fact tones about the developing bodies of young women, about the hassle of part-time jobs, sporadically peeking around the house, listening for the rumble of your parent's car. On weekends, larger groups gathered around the yard as you labored over a grill, flipping burgers and hotdogs with tongs stained with grease, setting them upon paper plates, always a playful wink, a devilish grin when you handed the plates to the young woman who dispensed them, who poured cola into the plastic cups set upon the patio table.

And then one night, you brought out the aging dog, allowing it to relieve itself, our eyes meeting, and yet not even a hint of recognition on your lightly-stubled face. How you stared through me; you who were so tall, so muscular, and me forever a child.

I made my exodus that night.

I found my way to day-cares, where children greeted me with wide eyes and missing-tooth smiles, where we played games of pretend and our days were full of laughter, save the occasional tantrum.

Despite the joy of feeling useful again, of having purpose, an aching still remained, for these new friendships lacked the intimacy we once shared, and I came to realize that these children were somehow the make-believe friends, not me. One by one, I slipped out of each center, saying not a single farewell, never to return again.

I began lingering around fairgrounds and campsites, where children in tan scout uniforms watched me from a distance as they built fires at night, cast fishing lines into shimmering ponds and shallow rivers. They refrained from speaking to me, feared teases harsh and cruel from on-looking peers; yes, there were supposed to be big boys, big girls.

On rainy nights, I slept in unlocked cars and storage sheds, and in the winter, I waited patiently for the unassuming to come out of their houses, to warm their cars or check their mail, and with great stealth I snuck into their homes, hiding in their attics among forgotten furniture and empty bird cages, among luggage missing their keys and boxes of old clothing. Yes, I hid in basements, where children caught fleeting glimpses of me, believing they had seen a ghost or some other ghastly horror, and I thought of how frightened you were of your own basement, wondered how many of the abandoned sought shelter there throughout the years.

Recalling the nights spent reading story books, I searched for a library, where I roamed the isles of shelves, tracing the worn spines of hardbacks and paperbacks alike with my finger. Yes, I read of velveteen rabbits and marionette boys, of objects that longed to be real, to be loved. I read the genesis stories of just about every culture, every religion, and I learned to despise children like you as gods who had forsaken their people, their own creations.

I remembered the first time we saw your father cry, how you had not, and wondered if you had not understood the finality of death, if you simply had not cared.

Then one day, a phantom appeared before the circulation desk, a small boy, his resemblance to you uncanny. I studied his speech, his gestures, as he spoke to the librarian. Approaching the pair undetected I stared into his eyes, finding something familiar, something warm. Following the boy, I mimicked the carefree stride of his steps to a parked car, one of its hubcaps missing, where you leaned against the driver's side door watching traffic with a distant look in your eyes. As your son scaled a backseat faded by sunlight, by the years, I quickly leaped in before you shut the door behind us.

Your studio apartment was dim, a tiny cot set flushed against the foot of a twin bed. One the nightstand, a framed picture of your son and you, but not mother. Photographs of your parents hung above a worn sofa that faced a small television, rabbit ears betraying its age.

As I explored your dwelling, I wondered what happened, what circumstances led to such a humbled life, if you had not cried for that childhood friend because you somehow already knew, that if it was not that car, it would have been an absent mother and wife, a stack of bills pilling on top of a refrigerator, leaking and with a burned-out bulb, that something else would have killed that boy just the same.

That night, you reclined in the bed, your son finding his way into the nook of your arm, and you balanced a book on your bare stomach, reading its words softly to the child, him turning the pages, your voice deeper, somewhat sad. Sitting on the edge of the cot as not to wrinkle its sheets, I wondered if you ever remembered our nights spent like this, if you ever thought of me. Later, you kneeled beside the cot, kissing your son on his forehead, whispering his name.

It was the name that you gave me.

Submitted October 05, 2016 at 11:12AM by SherlockVonEinstein http://ift.tt/2dIOt8W shortstories