TWO BIRDS by Shena McAuliffe
Until he was seven, Jack had a matching pair of straight legs and long, pale arms that freckled in the summer. His lungs were tucked unseen within his chest, inflating and deflating, tender as jellyfish. Summer evenings, he and his sister Jane chased the mosquito truck. Jack was the fastest in the neighborhood – faster than Jane, faster than the older boys. If he saw the truck amble through an intersection, followed by its billowing cloud of DDT, he was the first to catch it. He held up his hands and caught the mist. He twirled and felt it dampen his legs. He filled his lungs. Through the cloud, a hand would emerge, and he knew Jane had caught up. Giddy and breathless, Jane would soon stumble to the curb, but Jack would keep running. He felt his heart thud in his chest, in his throat, in his fingertips.
Jane was chubby. Her father called her Puff for years after she’d grown tall and somber. “Puff, be so kind as to bring me a drink?” he’d say, and she’d bring it, but before she set it on the table within his reach, she’d make him call her Jane. She wanted to be president and hung a sign on her door that read, “Bennett for President 1980.” She was determined to be the first woman president, and the youngest.
“What if someone beats you to it?” their father asked.
Their mother snorted. “Fat chance.”
Jane offered Jack the position of vice president, but then reneged and offered the position to her friend Susan. “Susan has the wholesome looks that appeal to voters,” she explained one evening, shoveling peas into her mouth.
“What’s wrong with Jack’s looks?” asked their mom. “He’s not wholesome?”
“He looks a little sneaky. Sneaky looks run in our family, if you haven’t noticed. It’s our eyes – they’re too close together. We get that from you, Mom. I need to balance my own sneaky looks with someone more wholesome.”
Their father said that was a sound theory, but that he hoped Jane was considering more than looks in her campaign. He had high hopes for his children, though he was busy, and didn’t have a lot of time for them. On Saturdays he put his feet up and read from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Sometimes he called Jack Puck, but usually it was Jacky Jack. He sipped whisky on the rocks. Jack liked the sound of the ice cubes clinking when his father swirled the glass.
When Jack had been born, in August of 1945, his father was in England breaking codes for the army. Nothing could be done about that, and to make the best of things, Jack’s dad took a class on Shakespeare at Oxford. Two weeks after Jack was born, his father was free to go home, but he was happy in his little Tudor on a quiet English street. Rosebushes were blooming in the front garden. He loved riding his rickety bike through puddles, books bouncing in the basket. He stayed to finish his course.
He arrived home on Christmas Eve, when Jack was four months old. He burst through the front door in a swirl of snow. “Ho, ho, ho,” he said, and kissed his wife on the lips. “You look as beautiful as ever, Ginny.” Jack was asleep on the sofa, and his father touched his nose with his index finger. “There’s my boy! This one’s gonna be the fastest quarter-miler this country’s ever seen.” Jack’s mother never forgave her husband for the delay.
The summer Jack turned seven, his mother sent him and Jane to the park almost every day. It was dreadfully hot, but they were forbidden to use the swimming pool because of polio. They were not, under any circumstances, to use the drinking fountain, which was fine with them because the water in it tasted rusty. Every day as they left the house, their mother gave them a dime to buy snow cones. She stayed home, pressing and folding tea towels, fixing a pot roast for their dinner, basting it and turning it until the temperature button popped. Sometimes she ran errands, and wasn’t home for hours: grocery shopping, getting a haircut and style, or helping Margaret with a sewing pattern. Margaret was her best friend, and sometimes, after talking about their husbands, they ended up kissing, and then they wouldn’t see each other for a while.
“Maybe Mom has a lover,” Jane said one day, when she and Jack were walking to the park.
“Doesn’t she love Dad?” asked Jack.
“You can love more than one person in life,” Jane said. “But you’re not really supposed to love them at the same time.” Jack nodded. Jane was two years older than him. He wondered if he would know as much as she did when he was nine.
The pool was officially closed starting in July. Jack and Jane looked at it through the fence and it shimmered like a jewel. They imagined it as the fountain of youth, and stalked its perimeter, pretending they were Ponce de Leon. If they could sneak one little sip out from under the noses of the Indians they’d live forever.
In the evening, when the sun was lower and the trees seemed to ooze cool blue shadows, the park filled with grown-ups, but during the day, it belonged to the kids. Once in a while a mother would push a pram along the sidewalk. These mothers always looked exhausted and sticky, and a little nervous, as though they thought the kids might attack them and steal the baby from its buggy. Mostly, the mothers stayed home sipping cold drinks and the fathers went to work.
At the park, Jane was known for telling fortunes. She wrapped a towel around her head and clipped her mother’s pink pearl earrings to her earlobes. Jack was her assistant, which meant he collected fees. They took any form of payment: bubblegum or pennies, petals plucked from the rosebushes that grew behind the snack bar, even an especially sharp thorn. Jane said she was training Jack to see the future, but mostly he watched the ants carrying their heavy loads across the dirt. Sometimes he found a crumb in his pocket and set it out for the ants. He imagined them feasting in an underground banquet hall. There was a microscopic world down there, he was sure.
A boy sat cross-legged across from Jane and she took his hand in hers. She ran her fingertips along the lines of his palm and looked into his eyes until he squirmed. Her voice was low and hypnotic.
“What do you wish to know?”
“Will I get a dog for my birthday?” the boy asked.
“Yes,” said Jane. “Probably a spaniel.”
“Alright!” said the boy, and he ran off to tell his friends.
Another boy asked how he could win a million dollars.
“That isn’t the sort of question I can answer,” said Jane. “You won’t ever win a million dollars.” The boy picked a pebble from the dirt and threw it as far as he could.
“Some fortune teller you are. You could have made something up, like you make up everything,” he said, and kicked the dirt.
A girl asked if her mother’s new baby would be a boy or a girl.
“You’ll have a brother,” Jane said. She patted the girl’s hand. “But don’t worry; brothers are okay, except that you have to take care of them.” She leaned close to the girl and cupped a hand around her mouth. “I’ve never had a sister. I couldn’t tell you what that’s like,” she whispered.
The girl nodded. Her eyes were wide. She walked off slowly, as if already bearing the weight of her future responsibility.
Another girl sat down. She had a red and yellow beach ball tucked beneath her arm and when she tried to set it down, it kept rolling away. Jane took it from her and set it on the old needlework bag she’d adopted when her mother got a new one. Jack and Jane had seen the girl before. She was often at the park with her twin sister. They were lanky, with shining red hair. They looked a little older than Jane. Jane took her hand, and the girl asked her question.
“Who, of all us kids, will get polio this summer?”
In a flicker, Jane saw herself swabbing a thin, twisted leg. She had never really seen the future before. It was all an act. Jane dropped the girl’s hand, as if she’d been burned.
“I don’t know,” Jane said.
“Some fortune teller,” said the girl. She stood up and walked away, red hair swinging. She left her beach ball, and Jane stomped on it. It collapsed with a hiss.
“Let’s go home,” Jane said.
The next day Jack and Jane saw the twins, along with two boys, inside the pool fence.
“Hey!” Jane yelled. “What’re you doing? How’d you get in there?”
“What’s it look like we’re doing? We’re going swimming,” one of the boys said. Both boys were wearing cut-off jeans with frayed edges, and no tee shirts. They were skinny boys, all elbows and ribs.
“Want to come?” said the other boy. He walked over the fence and looked at Jack and Jane, sizing them up.
“Or are you too busy making up stupid fortunes?” said a twin.
“How did you get in there?” Jane said again.
“We climbed the fence,” said the boy. “It’s easy.”
“You guys are crazy. You could die from swimming in that water.” Jane shook her head.
“What’re you, chicken?” A twin sneered.
Jack didn’t think it was chicken, really. It was science: swimming pools were dangerous. That’s why it was closed.
The first day they got their television, his mom had turned it on, and on the screen Jack saw a man that had been paralyzed by polio. His mom told him that lots of kids had gotten polio from swimming pools. Cesspools, his mom said. The man on TV had to live in a silver capsule that looked something like a spaceship.
“An iron lung,” his mother said. She turned the television off. Polio, she explained, made your lungs stop working on their own. The iron lung helped him breathe. She got up and went to the fireplace and took the bellows from their hook. “It’s like this,” she said, working the bellows so they blew air at Jack’s stomach and his tee shirt fluttered. “Inside the capsule it’s like a giant bellows pushing and pulling the air through his lungs.” The man couldn’t leave the iron lung, she said. He had to lie down all the time.
Jack turned the television back on. “I want to see,” he said.
The iron lung had gleaming buckles and screws and round windows along its sides. The man’s head stuck out the top like a knob and rested on a pillow. The man was at a football game, and the reporter leaned over his face so they could have a conversation.
“Wow,” said the reporter. “Wow-ee. Bet you never thought you’d go to a football game again.”
The man laughed loudly, showing his teeth and his tongue. “No sir, I sure didn’t.”
“You’re a miracle of modern science,” the reporter said.
The twins were taking off their shorts and tee shirts, dropping them in a heap on the concrete. The meaner one had a pair of goggles, which she stuck over her eyes. Her hair bunched up in the elastic band, making her head look lumpy.
“How could the pool have germs in it if no one’s even been in it since June?” she said. “Germs can’t live that long.”
Jack and Jane watched as the kids ran across the deck and jumped into the clear, blue water. One of the boys let out a wail as he flew through the air. Their splashes were spangled sunlight. It was so hot standing there in the sun. Jack held his breath, his cheeks puffed out. His skin grew tight around his skull and his lungs burned.
“What’re you doing?” Jane said. He let the breath explode out of him.
“Pretending I’m swimming,” Jack said. “Pretending I’m under water.”
The twin without goggles climbed the ladder to the high dive and stepped off the end, like it was the plank on a pirate ship. She fell through the air, stiff and straight. She barely made a splash.
“They’ll get caught,” Jane said.
But already the kids were gathering up their things and running for the fence, hunched and dripping. They left wet footprints on the cement before heaving themselves over and collapsing in the grass, laughing and pulling on their sneakers and tee shirts.
One of the boys looked over at Jack and Jane. He clutched his throat and made a strangled noise.
“Ahhhrg! . . . I’ve got the terrible PO-LIO!” His eyes bulged. He pretended to try to stand and fell over on the girls.
“Cut it out,” said one twin, pushing him off.
“Let’s go,” Jane said, grabbing Jack’s hand.
They snuck in the back door. Their mother was humming in the kitchen. It felt to Jack like they were the ones that had climbed the fence and gone swimming. He felt an urge to change his clothes, as if they were wet and would give him away. Their mother stopped humming.
“Kids?” she said. “What are you doing back so early?” She had supersonic hearing.
They went into the kitchen. Their mom was wearing an apron, but it didn’t look like she’d been cooking. She was spotless – each hair pinned into a smooth heap on her head. Her lips were bright with lipstick.
“Jack doesn’t feel good,” Jane said. “I think he needs a nap.”
Jack did his best to look sick, letting his eyes close a little.
“You’re sick, honey?” His mom put the back of her hand to his forehead. “You don’t feel feverish.”
“My stomach hurts,” Jack said.
“Well, nothing a little nap and some chicken soup won’t take care of. Go on – go to your room. I’ll bring you some soup in a little while.”
That night Jack and Jane chased the mosquito truck for three blocks before they both stumbled to the curb. The truck drove on. Kids ran out of their houses and chased it down the block. Jack was gasping. They watched the streetlight flicker, and the insects came out and circled beneath it. Jane carried Jack home piggyback because he was too tired to walk.
Jack’s nose dripped onto his corn flakes. Jane went to the park, but Jack stayed home and slept. His mother brought him lemon tea with honey. His legs ached. He dreamt of a bird’s nest containing two eggs, their milky shells quivering. A yellow beak poked out of one, followed by a chick unfolding its damp feathers. From the other came a wingless chick, raw and naked. Its heart fluttered beneath thin skin. Its mouth opened endlessly until its body crumpled. The healthy chick pecked at it until its little heart ceased thrumming. Then the healthy chick tore bits of gooey flesh from its dead sibling and swallowed them. It stretched its wings. Jack woke, but the thrumming continued. It was in his head. He pushed himself up on his elbows and found he couldn’t get out of bed. He called his mom.
His dad carried him out to the car and the entire family got in. They drove him to the hospital and his dad carried him inside. Jane was ordered to stay in the car. After Jack’s dad talked to a nurse and his mom wrote on a clipboard, his mother kissed him on the top of his head. Then she dabbed her lips with her handkerchief.
“They won’t let us stay, sweetie,” she said. Jack’s father pulled her away.
“We’ll see you soon, Jacky Jack.” His father’s voice sounded funny – like a voice coming through a radio speaker. “Be good, now.”
Jack was one child in a room full of children, each resting on a narrow cot. Two nurses in peaked caps meandered between the rows, but were often gone. The children looked like snowdrifts, sleeping and sniffling. Two boys in a corner passed toy cars back and forth. Jack cried, and the girl on the cot next to him propped herself up on her elbows.
“Are you scared?” she said.
Jack said his legs hurt, but in his mind he watched his mom and dad getting back into the red Fleetline and slamming the doors. His father turned the key and the engine spluttered and they drove off. They stopped for ice cream and Jane ordered strawberry on a sugar cone. Jane always ordered strawberry. Then they got back in the car and drove and drove, licking their ice cream cones.
The girl on the cot next to Jack’s had frayed blond braids. Clinging to the end of one was a blue ribbon, tied in a lopsided bow. She gave Jack one of her two teddy bears.
“To help you sleep,” she said.
Jack was supposed to start second grade. His mother had bought him a package of black socks, two white button-down shirts and two pairs of navy pants. They were on his bed at home, neatly folded. If he concentrated, he could see them stacked and creased, waiting for him. If he died, he thought, Jane would take the shirts and socks, even though the sleeves would be too short for her. She would roll them and push them to her elbows.
“What did you do to get sick? I let our cat out of the house and it got hit by a car,” the blond girl said. “That’s why I got sick. Because I didn’t take good care of God’s small creatures that can’t take care of themselves. What did you do?”
“What do you mean?” Jack asked.
“What did you do that chapped God’s hide? It must have been something bad.”
Jack thought. He saw himself and Jane, fingers twisted through the chain link fence around the swimming pool, watching the kids jump in. He saw himself sweeping a dust pile under the rug, saw himself taking a dime off his father’s desk, saw himself sitting in the backseat of the Fleetline, jabbing his sister hard between the ribs. He saw himself doing a crazy dance around the living room, singing a war cry at the top of his lungs, until his mother, who had been sitting on the couch reading a magazine, pressed her hands over her ears.
“You kids are making me crazy!” she yelled, and left the room.
Then there was that day in the garage. He was rooting through his father’s tools, just to see what was there, and he found a packet of cigarettes and a book of matches. He lit the matches, one by one, and watched them burn until he felt their heat near his fingertips. And once he had thrown a bottle into the gutter, just because he wanted to hear it break. He left the shattered pieces there. Maybe a kid or an old lady had cut her foot on them. And once he put on his mother’s lipstick, and then, when his mother found the stained tissues he’d wiped if off with, he blamed it on Jane.
“You expect me to believe Jack used my lipstick?” his mother said, when Jane denied it. “You should be ashamed of yourself, young lady. Stealing and lying.”
Jane had to wash the dishes three nights in a row. When Jack got into bed the third night, the sheets were wet, and his secret candy stash was missing from under his bed, but he hadn’t even tried to get it back. Jane hadn’t spoken to him for a week.
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “I guess I’ve done a lot of bad things.”
“My mom said that it might be good to get sick – that I might get to go to heaven if I die, even though I was bad. She said it’s kind of like going to jail. You pay off your debt.”
Jack didn’t think any of the bad things he had done were bad enough for jail.
That night a nurse came for the blond girl. She helped her up from her cot.
“Say goodbye,” the nurse said. “We’ve got to get you cleaned up. You’re going home.” The girl bounced up and down on her bed and the railing fell to the floor with a clatter. “Shh,” said the nurse. “Say goodbye quietly now.”
The girl forgot her teddy bear. It lay on the floor, partway under her bed, facedown.
“God?” Jack said. It was dark in the ward. Even the nurses seemed to have disappeared, but he could hear kids sniffling and wheezing. He pressed his hands together like the statues of saints at church. He tried to think of a way to explain himself, but there didn’t seem to be any way out of it. When he’d burned those matches, he’d known he wasn’t supposed to. Each time the heat neared his fingertips he’d feared dropping the match. The flames would leap to the curtains, which would explode in ragged flame; the windows would burst. He’d run out in the street, screaming and waving his hands, while flames poured out from the broken windows and fire trucks careened around the corner to his house. All the neighbors would come out to watch. And the day he drove his mom crazy by shouting, he’d seen her look up, her eyes bright and frenzied, but it had been so fun dancing around the living room, and Jane’s war whoops only made him want to shout louder.
“God?” Jack said again. “I know it probably doesn’t matter now, but I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” He closed his eyes and waited for sleep.
All night the nurses moved like ghosts. Jack’s toes stuck up at the end of the bed like twin meringues. Tiny flames licked his eyelids when he closed his eyes. He couldn’t get up to use the bathroom, and besides, it wasn’t allowed.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he whispered. “God? I have to go to the bathroom.” He pulled himself up, grasping the rails of his bed, but soon fell back.
In the morning, he found he had soiled the sheets. He scooted to one side. The nurses never stopped; they were like seagulls circling. Jack lifted a corner of his sheet and saw a brown smear. At lunchtime, he refused to eat. A nurse took him to the toilet, and while he was gone, they took the sheets away.
When he got back to his bed they wrapped him in a sour, wet blanket. It was warm, but smelled awful.
“Shhh . . .” said a nurse with black eyes. “Shhh, now. This is good for you.”
He was a caterpillar in a cocoon. The cocoon was too tight, its threads pulling ever more snugly around him. The cocoon began to spin, hotter and whiter. Maybe this was Hell, and Hell was inside the sun. There were a million other children, dancing around his cocoon in a circle, holding hands, but he couldn’t see them. It was too bright. They were sickly, twisted silhouettes. Their heads were too small. And they were completely silent. The cocoon tightened.
Jack’s mom was on the telephone, her mouth moving like a fish’s. She twirled the cord. She pulled a pin from her hair and studied it. Jane opened the refrigerator. She stuck her index finger into a bowl of whipped cream and popped it in her mouth. Her mother smacked Jane’s hand, which was still in her mouth.
“Ow,” Jane said.
“Margaret, I have to go,” her mom said into the phone. She hung up. “Go wash your hands,” she said to Jane. Jane left the room, but instead of hearing the water run in the bathroom, she heard the back door slam.
Margaret was Jack’s mom’s biggest secret, and what good would it do to confess? Those little kisses, they were scraps in the scope of a life. They were slivers. The first time it happened, almost a year ago, they had been talking for hours, about their mothers and about the Japanese, and their school days, now long past. She and Margaret had each seen one ghost in their lives: she of her grandmother, Margaret of an unknown man with the most beautiful, pale hands. They both had thought, when they were girls, that love would be different from the way it turned out. They agreed – love was quieter than expected. It seemed they could go on talking forever.
That afternoon, her children were far away, in a dream of their own – her sweet, grubby chickens. Her husband was probably sitting around a table with a bunch of other men, their beards growing ever so slowly, roughing up their skin. They were probably smoking cigars, laughing their deep, rolling laughs. And she was sitting next to Margaret in the safe, soft light of Margaret’s living room. The world outside was full of soft green fields, stretching from Margaret’s front door to California, across Japan, across the Sahara. When Margaret leaned towards her, it had seemed the most logical thing in the world. Why shouldn’t they kiss each other? But afterwards, the green fields vanished. The light in Margaret’s living room was too bright, too pale. There were tiny blue veins around Margaret’s eyes and the skin around her nose was flaking. She got up from the sofa and tripped over a wrinkle in the rug. Margaret’s hands steadied her.
“Ginny,” Margaret said. “Don’t do this.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m fine. Are you fine? It’s fine,” she said. “I’m going to go home now. I’m late starting dinner.”
Every time it ended similarly, but those moments beforehand! She kept falling into the same trap. And now Jack had polio.
“Oh, Jacky,” she sighed. “I’m so sorry.”
Jane didn’t wash her hands, but went to the back yard. The grass was getting long and yellow. Their dad had forgotten to water it, and he certainly hadn’t mowed lately. In one corner of the yard there was a sandbox. She and Jack never played in it anymore and a toy dump truck lay on its side, half-buried. She pulled it out and set it in the grass. She stood in the middle of the sandbox with a long stick, closed her eyes, and turned in a circle, dragging the stick, enclosing herself in a circle.
“Keep me safe and keep me sealed,” she said. “Keep me safe and keep me sealed. Keep me safe and keep me sealed.” She knelt in the circle. “Jack Jack Jack Jack Jack,” she said. “Be okay.” She dusted the sand off her hands.
Jack had a comic book that starred a silver robot, a willowy spaceman in a round helmet, and a boy with a gun that shot purple flames. He flipped through the book over and over. He marked off the days on the back with a pencil. He drew the third mark with a shaky hand.
A nurse fed him because he couldn’t hold the spoon. Soup dribbled down his chin and she scraped it up without speaking. When she put the spoon to his mouth, her eyes followed. When he slurped, she looked away. When she looked at him her eyes were like a cave he could enter, a place where it would be cool and dark, but when she looked away they were only eyes, small and sealed. She did not touch him. The soup traveled a great distance on its way to Jack’s mouth, most of it dripping on the bib she had tied around his neck.
Everyone made promises. Everyone struck their own private deal.
Jane promised not to pretend to know the future when she didn’t. Had she stepped on God’s toes? “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, doing the sign of the cross for good measure. “Sorry, God.”
Ginny promised to be faithful to her husband in thought and in deed. She talked to Margaret on the phone, but when Margaret stopped by with a casserole, she didn’t look at Margaret’s slim waist. Yes, Margaret’s blond hair was gleaming in the sun, but so what? “Thank you,” she said, accepting the warm dish. “You’re such a good friend.” They talked for a moment, Margaret standing on the front steps, Ginny holding the door open with her hip, the casserole dish warm against her arms, but Ginny did not invite Margaret in.
Jack’s dad promised to stop reading Yeats at work. He shoved the pocket volume to the back of the bottom drawer of his desk. When he got home, he kissed his wife. He said, “How are you?” He said, “How are my children?” He waited for her answers.
In the dark, Jack listened to the other children snore. He tried to see the nurses in the doorway, but could barely turn his head. His lungs were sticky and he couldn’t cough. A nurse leaned over him and called another, who came quickly with a wheelchair. They wheeled Jack into the bright hallway, and then into a room full of gleaming metal machines – the iron lung room. There must have been a dozen of them, buckled and shining in the shadows. Jack’s head was full of a sound like ocean waves, but over the din he heard the machines wheezing. There was an empty one for Jack, and the nurses unhinged it. They lifted him from his wheelchair and slid him into the lung. A white rubber ring sealed around his neck. There was a mirror over his face and the nurses tilted it, positioning it so Jack could see what was going on behind him. They were talking – he could tell because their mouths were moving – but he couldn’t make out a word.
He slept, listening to the bellows whoosh and wheeze. In his dreams, a fire flickered and flared.
Sunlight glared off the mirror. Even with his eyes closed, Jack could see the brightness on his eyelids. He opened his eyes. His favorite nurse was there. How long had he been sleeping? The nurse took a comb from her pocket and ran it through his hair. He studied the weave of her cotton uniform in the mirror. Her hand moved over his face, gripping the plastic comb loosely, preparing for another stroke.
“You’re a lucky one,” she said. “You’re going to be all right.”
Jack could only speak on the exhale, his words a breath infused with sound.
“Will I go to football games like this?” he asked.
“You’re not strong enough to breathe on your own, but you might get stronger. We have to wait and see.”
“Will I have to live in here?”
“I just don’t know,” she said. She leaned over him, and he saw her skin was smooth as clay. She pressed a cool hand to his cheek, and then straightened up and took her hand away. In the mirror, he watched her walk on to the next patient.
A doctor came and opened the lung. He slid Jack’s body out so Jack could see it: his arms, his stomach, his legs and feet, his chest rising and falling.
“I’m breathing,” Jack said.
“You are, but your lungs are weak. You won’t be able to breathe out here for long, but I think you can handle a few minutes. It’s time to see how you’re doing.” He folded the sheet to Jack’s waist and lifted a foot. Jack saw that his leg was incredibly thin – a bone covered with pale, loose skin.
“It’s melted,” Jack said.
“Yes, they’re very thin. You haven’t been able to use your muscles, so they’ve gotten small. Can you push on my hand?” the doctor said. He waited. Silently, Jack told his leg to push, but it didn’t seem to be listening. Finally, the doctor said, “Good,” and switched legs. Jack breathed for ten minutes before the doctor slid him back into the lung and buckled it around him.
It was August and the dandelions had gone to seed. Jane stood on the new sidewalk at the edge of a vacant lot, full of pale, seeded globes. The wind scattered some of the seeds, leaving bare stalks, and Jane ran into the lot after the seeds, her hands raised, until she tripped. In the grass was a spine, picked clean and white, curved like a snake. It was thin and long – a cat’s probably. The world swarmed with danger.
“Leave it alone.” Jane said aloud to herself. “You are going to be president. President.” But she knelt and lifted the spine anyway. It swung from her hands like a brittle rope. She stood, cradling it like a baby.
Jane was not allowed in the ward, but Jack’s parents visited. In the car they agreed, optimism was best. His father waved in the mirror at Jack as he approached.
“Jacky Jack, how are ya?” He slapped the side of the lung and Jack’s lungs stuttered mid-wheeze.
“Hi,” Jack said.
“You’re looking fine, my boy. As well as can be expected.”
His mother’s eyes glistened.
“Jacky,” she said. She pushed his hair from his forehead. “My Jacky.”
“Ginny,” Jack’s dad warned.
“Do I get to go home?” Jack asked. “Are you here to take me home?”
“Not yet. Not just yet,” said his father. “Are you feeling better? They say the worst is past.”
On the exhale, Jack said yes.
“It’s your birthday tomorrow,” his mother said. “Seven years old. You’ve got a long life ahead of you. You’re a survivor now, Jack.”
She settled in a chair beside his head and opened an illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland. In the mirror, Jack watched the doctors and nurses coming and going. He listened to their shoes squeak across the floor. He listened to the lung, endlessly wheezing, pushing the air in and out of his body.
Shena McAuliffe’s short stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Land-Grant College Review, Black Warrior Review, and CutBank.