Skein Home
Author's Works
View 30 comments
 

I stood up to clap. I wasn't sure why. Tears seeped down my cheeks in streams and my lips pressed tight together. Everyone ignored me. I was the only one standing. Maybe the only one clapping. I couldn't tell. My eyes wouldn't leave the stage. Maybe everyone else had gone home. If everyone had gone home, I might have stayed there clapping until it became automatic and my arm muscles cramped around the elbow and I stumbled for the door unaware of the bruises blossoming on the meaty part of my palms. But they didn't go home, and a rope ladder tumbled from a small hole in the ornate arched ceiling seventy feet away, unfolding to my seat. No one noticed it. I wiped my palms on the edge of my linen jacket and started climbing.
 

I'm sure it hasn't always been this way. You're sure it isn't this way now, but let me quell your doubts. It is this way. Please don't ask why, because it will possibly be revealed by the end of this story, but more likely it won't. In any case, it's a silly question. Why anything? Why, chicken, are you shaped just like that? We like to say imperiously, "Miss Chicken is shaped thus-and-so because she is descended from a long line of beasts shaped thus-and-such and her genetic structure is the following" or "Miss Chicken is shaped thus-and-so because the farmers, who at the turn-of-the-century desired this-and-that, bred chickens shaped to meet these-and-those expectations" or "The market and the competing demands of feed companies and the consumer require thus-and-so." But none of these answer our question, not even about the shape of chickens. After we exhaust them, and bruise our hands applauding ourselves, we find that the only answer to the child who persists is to ask her in return:
 

Why are you, darling, shaped just like that?
 

This question, when applied to the shape of an entire life built from indecipherable events, becomes so empty and imponderable that we leave it for the dead to think about in their disintegrating sleep or else we write short stories that take us up into the ceilings of old theaters.
 

Like I said, it probably has not always been like this. I haven't spent all my life taking hold of things. My brother and I lost our new, black and yellow kite when I let go of the string, and I was inconsolable even as my father walked to every house in the neighborhood, a mile or two easily, asking if they had seen our kite coming down to roost in their trees. I wouldn't talk. At another point, as my mother strapped my brother into his tiny carseat, I stared open-mouthed as our new helium balloons floated shinily up to join the clouds. That was the first time I looked directly into the sun, but I didn't even stop to notice how it looked. I couldn't stop to notice or to speak or to cry. These are much closer approximations of the vast majority of my life -- notable are the silences, and the repeated slipping away into air.
 

This time it was me slipping away. My stealth action, and I started to know why the kite and balloons had wanted it so badly. But more than that, I was climbing a very long ladder into a realm I had feared since I was six. I only made it to the top of the big monkey bars twice, while other children swung from the top bars easily, gibing the teachers, and the popular girls claimed bars that the others were not allowed to touch. Too much like monkeys. I preferred to lope along the ground, enjoying my evolved status, using it to make patterns with stones and peeled sticks and to talk to trees on windy days. In the theater, the wind was not blowing, only a light shift of air from the ventilator, but this was enough to make me grip the rungs and notice my bruises for the first time.
 

Where is this story going, you might wonder. It is going up. But here is some plot, although it will be a tad sketchy, I fear. It starts with fear. As I reached the pit in the ceiling I suddenly lost my nerve. I felt it going, tried to get it back, tried to reestablish the bond that had grown between my self and my hands, to make everything one trusted unit in one long upward motion, but I kept returning to the playground and the day that Jamie Martineau broke her wrist. I didn't see her fall, but I heard the story and built the image from collective memory, in all its gory lack of detail. The red-streaked tears, the loud crack, the fast motion, the open-mouthed silent lack of pain. It dug a rut into my brain. I looked down.
 

One person looked back up at me. Eye contact from seventy feet away? It held me for a second, unbreakable. Had he been watching the whole time? Was he the only other person there? He watched me through his clunky glasses as if I was his helium balloon. Having never lost something by dropping it, I didn't know how to look at him, so I watched myself through his eyes instead. From the seats below I saw a tiny head and shoulders disappear into the hole and then flop one leg and the other.
 

It smelled like hot, close dust in there, but he didn't know that. He didn't see the funny peaked room with the one grilled and cobwebbed window high up. But I did. Nor did he see the one object in the room: a slender volume entitled Why the Animals are Shaped as They Are by God. Chapter III: "The Chicken." I opened the book. I felt a tug on the rope. My hands ached too much to turn the pages. The rope again. I looked down and met his eyes immediately. He was on his way up. I began to clap for him but found my wrist too full of pain. I looked up for an explanation for the pain and found the sun burning its way through the grilled window. I looked at it for the second time, made eye contact with it, and was held there. Tears began streaming down my face. A lost kite fluttered at the window's edge. I dropped the book and it fell seventy feet.