Owie here
Owie there
I see owies everywhere!
Children’s games, like drop-shadow memories of coming home from school to the desperate realization your shoes are torn, and understanding what payday means. Some recollections are not my own, but planted in the later telling,
Once, when we were shopping, you told the woman standing next to us that we couldn’t buy cereal because we were poor. You were three. You had no idea what poor meant.
* * *
She lies on her stomach, a bit of her leg peeking above the cover, the rest of her curled and hidden. Cocoon. He steps to the bedpost, a glass in each hand, towel draped around his waist. Inquisitive to her contrary. Contrast.
A butterfly?
I don’t think so. A moth, maybe. No, a cicada.
She turns onto her side, her navel peeking between a bit of sheet and pillow; emerges from the blanket and takes a glass. Wings. He slides upon his knees until her face is at rest against his chest. Kisses the top of her head, at the part, pressing his arm around her neck, and then kisses the neck. Soar.
“When my sister and I were little the one nice thing I remember about my dad was cicadas. He would catch them for us.”
He motions with his arms, tying knots around the glass, the hands now butterfly wings, impelled towards the window of the hotel room.
“He tied them to string and handed them to us.” Tethered.
He wonders if it sounds cruel.
“It was the closest we ever came to normal.”
She wraps herself around his waist. “This is why.”
“Why what?”
“So many things.”
* * *
On the way to work today, a fire engine raced by, lights flashing. I could make out the guys in back, donning their SCBAs, recalling their times from firefighting school. Silently calling out ‘PASS’ to show their personal alert safety systems were working, the sharp alarms piercing the silence when you would sit still for too long watching a family’s hopes and history burn to the ground during that time when everyone realized no fight remained.
“Surround and drown,” the saying goes, when the attack comes to its end, the victory of fire assured, and these days fire seems to defeat all, even will and morality. I watch the fire engine drive by and remember I used to help those in need, never imagining I might stand helpless beside them. Nothing parallels the beauty of a house in flames in the middle of the night, overshadowed in the contrast of those who have lost everything. An unappreciated beauty, like tethered cicadas, friends who know everything and children unaware of poverty.