Cleave
Stephen D. Gibson
After Arturo Rodríguez’s Sin Título, from the series La Tempestad, 1998, oil on canvas
Once there were two brothers and a sister and they weren’t allowed inside their house. Their parents, nice people, told them this. Here, they said, here is a kite for a house. And they gave the children a nice box kite kit that would indeed make a kite shaped like a nice house. Close enough, the parents said. Play with that and don’t come inside.
Jane’s parents let her in the house, the sister said to the closing door. She’d just arrived from swimming at her friend’s and still wore her wet red swimming suit. She thought of Jane. She could go back there, to the cake and soda, but she was the oldest of the three siblings, and the oldest, her father had told her because he was an oldest child too, provides leadership for the children.
The sister and the two brothers looked at each other. She did not like to babysit her troublesome brothers. The youngest one aimed for jail: he played with the lighter she usually had to pry out of his trusty left hand. Nothing but plastic, butane, and flint. She saw it even now tucked in the loose band of his striped shorts. Her middle brother was a judge in personality and future. Sitting so anyone inside could see, he had already started assembling the kite in the clothes he had to iron himself—even when she wanted to help he wouldn’t let her. He set the complicated sticks, ten of seven lengths, in rows in front of him, the instructions on a scrap of paper flattened on one knee. The string, thin and white, floated enough in the cold breeze to entangle itself around blades of grass and the kite sticks.
One stream of string, like the web of a lunatic spider, drifted toward the youngest child and she, the oldest child, silently willed it with all her mind to go still. She watched him look at it and look at her and look at the middle child, and she knew if it got closer the youngest child would grab it, and the middle child, so many of his toys already burned, could not allow this thin string to be touched by his younger brother, who stared at the string drifting, pulsing closer, and she saw him swallow, resisting his desire to have that string, so graceful and fluid and so close, and the closer it came the less he could withstand its appeal.
And the cold breeze lifted the scrap of the kite instructions off the middle child’s knee and the boys, like track stars at the sound of a gun, bolted after it.
She watched them run. Shoes were clearly an advantage. She considered the jumble of string, sticks, and bright paper that might form a shape that might resemble a house. She considered her goose bumps. She considered the warm chocolate cake she knew was at Jane’s house, by the sunny pool, under the green trees, the smell of clean air and life.
What about just knocking on the door of her own house? She could do that. They will, her parents, of course, just let her in. She was the favorite. Wasn’t she? Before her brothers were born she was. She knew that. What could have been better for her parents than having her as an only child? Her brothers in the distance still darted after the instructions. One to be instructed, the other, well, he loved fire.
The house was before her. Her parents had told her no. But the oldest child, her father had also told her, takes risks in the name of others.
She put one bare foot on the chilled stone porch. The door was open, but only slightly. By the thinnest, sharpest edge it was open. She shivered in her wet suit. She planned the right words to say and, fingertips of her left hand on the door, pushed it open and stepped into the darkness. Mom, she said.
Her brothers having watched, having seen, acted quickly, acted together, sending up the kite and lighting it on its way. The house kite burned above them all, a warning, a signal, a call for help.