the boy who could fly

Originally published by
Silver Birch Press

his face, a silent scream: eyes and mouth cartoon wide, he felt the floor leave his feet as he lifted by the scruff of his shirt to heaven…

as when, after the whole lot of them viewed Mary Poppins for the price of a brown paper sack of canned goods, a gust unexpectedly sailed all forty pounds of him and his dad's good umbrella across the yard;

or the station wagon reeking of cigarettes and his chain smoking dad helpless at the wheel as it tobogganed down the ice clad hill a February day in the drifting snow at the lake house to the tune of Nana's stories of the great Coney Island and the howl of the first long heart-in-your-throat drop in the front bucket of the famed roller coaster ride: all danger and impending consequence and the two tow trucks and all the curse words it took to extricate them.

or that recurring stomach flutter dream of two figures who climbed the clouds and stepped together into eternity only he was alone and falling and crying out to God: catch me, catch me, please, because he'd only meant to fly, and the voice of God like W.C. Fields on acid: “Go away kid, you bother me,”  and he knows it's God that's tossed him: dashing him as he had here-to-fore done with only a word or a look or the flat of his hand.

… from across the room he hit the top of the high backed couch (the same couch he'd fallen from and split his chin into a chattering little mouth of blood) it teetered as if it would flip but instead regained its ground; he spun over the top, smacked the plaster, just missing the double hung front window glass, and the cast iron of the radiator, and crumpled out of sight to the floor.
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and if it had been the hand of God that had sailed him then surely it was the Virgin Mother now running soft fingers over smooth skin checking once again for broken bones...