My son’s flesh is warm and soft beneath my clenched hands as we stare across the lake. Of their own accord, my hands pull him closer, trying to squeeze out all the air between us. To leave no room for the sky. I feel his heartbeat thrum where his back presses against my chest. Was it this fast yesterday? Already this morning his eyes were different. Darker – murky, unfamiliar waters, with a sheen I did not recognize. For so long every element of his being seemed carved from my own self – extracted pieces of me, formed into a creature simultaneously other and yet so intrinsically of.
Where has this contamination come from? What outside substance did he take in?
Wisps at his nape flutter in the light breeze, more like downy feathers than human hair. The wind carries the gossipy, raucous chatter of a flock of ducks that floats nearby, and I wait to see if my son will turn his attention to the chaotic vermin. He remains perfectly still in my arms, perched atop the wooden rail of the lake overlook: a precious parcel of bird-bones in repose against me.
His eyes betray the illusion – the action beneath the surface. Just like the ducks, floating on glass with yellow, webbed feet kicking furiously, invisibly beneath them. How deceptive they are in their laughably ignoble chaos. Dark, glimmering eyes reflect in the water, scattering over ripples so they are multiplied; everywhere. Accusing. Waiting.
I avoid my son’s reflection below us, though I catch the red glimmer of his velcro sneakers as they kick just a little – the suggestion of a paddle. It’s always been a struggle, getting my son to wear shoes. This morning was no different, a game of bribery and threats, new agreements drawn up for each sock, each shod foot. Accessions made in hopes of eventual amnesia, even though I know he never forgets – that he’ll remind me of the terms of our arrangement at regular intervals: ‘Mama, you said!’
He squirms, squawks in the unwitting tightness of my grasp – a living, desperate seatbelt I loosen with each measured breath out. I imagine him bursting from the cage of me and practice breathing against the pain of it. Picture that wound bleeding into the lake, vanishing into the ripples, absorbed by the oil-slick feathers of unsympathetic water fowl.
The shift is invisible; I feel it in our bones, the subtle stacking of his vertebrae. The aperture of his gaze narrows to the mallard closest to us. The wind shifts in some kind of dramatic synchronicity, carrying the boggy, mildewed smell of watergrasses and mud laden with frogspawn. A smell like surrender, like slow decomposition.
He looks over his shoulder, the thin, fragile stem of his neck twists, obscene. His eyes are black. They reflect nothing.
“Mama,” he says, sharp and flat. “You said.”
The ripples on the lake smooth to glass. The black eyes of our audience weigh against my skin, slick and velvet. My hands finally separate, a tearing in the unit we made, and lodge beneath his armpits, round to his curved bones – vulnerable, caught in the cast of my grip.
He’s made of air, easy to raise until his feet dangle above the railing. The movement is muscle memory, repeated in the early years of motion and squealing laughter. He always liked the height, pudgy arms like wings, presented as an offering to the sky. “Fly!” he chirped and I tossed him upward – the briefest breath of freedom from the nest of my reaching fingers. The flickering thought of flight, no more.
Now he hangs from my grasp stiff, still – floating. I am no longer holding him up, but holding him in place.
I don’t throw him, really. The motion lacks the exertion of a throw, the force. The intention to send him away from myself. It’s more a gentle push. The silent encouragement of a thing already in motion.
Really, all I do is let go.
Fly, I think, and for a blissful moment his legs kick and his arms outstretch, and a peal of laughter escapes his lips. In that instant nothing has changed. I never found those first feathers in his bed, little more than puffs of air; never scraped my skin on calamis shafts protruding from his shins. If he turned around his eyes would still be that bright, human blue of sunshine and water.
He doesn’t turn. He hovers in empty, mirrored space – the sky stretched endlessly in all directions, a distorted reality that leaves no room for the human.
I never hear a splash; I turn away too soon (and far, far too late) to walk back through the park alone. Untethered, I am no longer bound to the earth, a lightness – hollow, radiant at the core of me. What did he feel in that ethereal space of empty sky? My arms have no weight to hold, and yet I can not reach where he is.
I didn’t stay to watch his flight, and so I will never know how he landed. He remains in the expanse between the sky and its reflection, a soul caught in purgatory, his face turned away and the laughter of a human child on the wind. I could not bear him to change, and so I consign him to this trapped moment of memory. Eternal.