The Veering
Longshadows in the slow fade of a late summer afternoon. Tristan’s body in the dirt. Memories. Brainshapes. Apparitions.
They awake together, bleary eyes meeting across the space between their beds as the window begins to glow. Stretching. Blinking. No words. Old bones of the house beginning to flex and creak as they warm in the sun’s rise. Creeping downstairs, reading comics in the morning paper that they spread on the kitchen table, a quiet intimacy to this, eyes moving in private patterns, but pointing out favourites to each other, tapping with a finger, smiling, giggling, slurping grainy sludge from the bottom of cereal bowls or licking butter from fingertips, tapping and pointing, yeah, I read that one already, but then reading it again anyway, together, and this makes it funnier than the first time.
Out the backdoor, the back fence, across the back alley, across the train tracks, then across the grass fields west of the house, morning mists ghosting skyward. Spenser hitting a dead sprint just as soon as he can. Running so hard he can taste hot needles of fizz at the back of his throat, running harder, pretending he has to run as fast as he can, right now, in this moment, as if his life is at stake, and the lives of his mom and dad and little brother. Legs churning concrete, lungs melting, running as if it is a kind of penance for all the bad things he has ever done, all the bad things to come.
Tristan pleads with him to slow down, but he pretends not to hear. He leaves Tristan far behind and has to wait for him at the edge of the small forest. Somewhere overhead, raven thrum and raven croak. Spenser watches his brother running towards him, then slowing to a jog for a few steps, then a defeated walk. Tristan drifts towards him through the tall grasses, his silhouette awash in fragile constellations of golden light momentarily caught by the droplets and pollen stirred in his wake.
Cold dew has soaked through their shoes and Tristan’s pants are wet up past his knees. Spenser makes a joke about Tristan pissing his pants and then immediately regrets it when he sees the hurt in his brother’s face. Sodden fabric is rubbing at Tristan’s ankles so he takes off his shoes and leaves them next to a tree. Spenser’s feet ache from the damp but the cold doesn’t seem to bother Tristan.
They enter the forest together, scanning the ground and then crafting ensorcelled weapons from assorted limbs and scraps of deadfall. They hunt giants and goblins, run from spidery warlocks, Spenser always in command, telling Tristan where they should hide, how he should hold his sword, when they should attack, who is still alive and who is dead.
Timeless day, day without end. The boys return through the back door, ravenous for lunch, surprised to find that it is only ten o’clock. They spackle butter on white bread and lay down a few thick shingles of hard cheddar cheese. They stand at the table, too hungry to sit. Spenser pours milk into two stubby plastic cups, then gulps his cup down in one go. Tristan, watching, does the same. They take some red licorice from the basket above the fridge on their way out. Crossing the railroad they leave two pennies on the tracks, waiting forever in tall shrubs until a train thunders by, blistering their ears and sucking the air from their lungs as it passes. It takes a few minutes to find the remains, brassy glints in the rocks transmuted beyond reckoning, smoother than glass beneath the whorls of their thumbs.
Back to the forest. Tristan in bare feet. Tristan without shoes. The soles of Tristan’s feet somehow impervious to thorn and bramble. There is a sticky lump of red licorice in Spenser’s back molar, which he gently troubles with the tip of his tongue, nursing it like a bruise.
Tearing through the woodlands at tremendous speeds, Spenser’s eyes looking not at the ground blurring beneath his feet but five or seven yards down the path in front of him. Ducking branches, evading the clutch of raggedy limbs and knuckled webs of roots. Not seeing these obstacles but sensing them as he passes. His lithe dexterity part anticipation, part muscle memory, part vestigial means of echolocation, finding his place in the world by listening to the shrieks of other boys through the trees, his own yips and thrills, his calls for Tristan to keep up, the static signal of his hot breath – the way it all resounds off shadow, light, and mass.
Behind him, Spenser hears the shotgun crack of breaking branches as Tristan trips and falls. He stops and turns to see Tristan’s body shipwrecked in the black soil, cut into puzzle pieces by blades of light breaking through the canopy. Twigs in his hair, clutching his left arm like some wounded nestling. Grit in his teeth. Barefoot. Sprawled. He looks utterly alone. In an eyeblink, Spenser is struck by the full measure of a lonely heart — his brother’s or his own, he isn’t sure.
He wonders now if lives don’t pivot on moments of catastrophe or triumph but rather along the innocuous, the mundane. If you get dressed in a different order for just one morning, will your entire life spin out differently? Or imagine this: it’s not the fatal car accident that ends you but the extra slice of cheese you put on your sandwich for lunch, the way you took an additional second to savour, chew, and swallow and that one second placed you in the intersection so that the rusted blue pickup hits you just right, running the steering wheel up into your chest. No extra cheese and you escape unscathed as witness, not victim. Run it back further. The blue cow on the packaging of the more expensive cheese sparking cold memories of a childhood book, something to do with a clown being thrown from a circus train and then working on a farm. The memory of the book is why you buy the cheese, like a secret message you’re sending to your childhood self and you both smile inwardly at this gesture. Easing it from the shelves, a large book, pages ripe with an acrid tang. You remember the smell of the book, but not the story. Not just large, but huge, a huge picture book that hid the lower half of your body when you spread it open on your crossed legs. Something about a clown and a blue cow or maybe a red cow. Did finding that book in the library end your life? Run it back. If you let your brother keep pace with you that morning, maybe even let him run ahead, would he still be here, right now? Run it all out in one direction, and everything’s been set in stone since day zero. Or, run it all out the other way, and every decision matters. Life or death, every last one.
If your brother didn’t trip and fall, if he didn’t experience that minor structural trauma to the joint in his left wrist as a nine-year old, could he have gripped a little tighter the next summer at the lake? Fingertips slipping away underwater with the suddenness of a broken shoelace.
Take a piece of black licorice and everyone gets to live another day.
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