“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment”- Thoreau

Without a sound, the boy sets his coffee cup on the counter. He touches the near bottom edge to the brown speckled linoleum and inch by inch, rolls the ceramic rim to a balanced rest. No one else is in the house, but it doesn’t seem right to make any noise.

The squiggly cartoon on one side of the coffee mug is an illustration of cows- scientific name Bos taurus-situated in a sterotypical office with confused expressions on their faces. The office is messy. Staplers appear as aimlessly situated on the desks as the transients on Fairmount Park benches.  The vagabond staplers wear jackets of forgotten manilla folders. Pieces of paper dance about in the air around the eye level of the cows. Phones lay without anchor.Pens and pencils sit on the tables and floors like demagnetized compasses. There is one intelligent appearing bovine in the middle of the chaos. He is looking out at the coffee drinker with a faraway, cynical expression. The caption reads: “It was utter chaos”

The boy forces himself to break into a wild, maniac grin. He imagines he is Alex from A Clockword Orange, his right eye is painted and he stares out into the camera. Today, the camera is a giant paper menorah sent by his mother for last year’s Hanukkah. It is a clip art candelabra. It says: “my fire burns for you these 8 crazy nights.” The stock illustration shows 10 candles.

The camera, the clipart menorah, stares back at the boy. Son, you are so very special and talented. He can hear his mother’s voice in the camera/menorah card. He flashes back to sitting on the plane, flying to see his mother the summer after his junior year in college. He is moving home. His shiny forehead struggles to crane past the sheen, mats of hair between it and the airplane porthole. If he jacknifes his body, wedging the buckled seatbelt into his hairy lower abdomen-the captain has illuminated the seatbelt sign, if you are up and about the cabin, please return to your seats- he can see between the waxen heads to the flaring candles of his hometown below.

He always feels such pride when he can pick landmarks from a plane at night. Pride at seeing the park where he goes running, and the intersection where he made a left turn at his drivers test, and the cookie-cutter housing development with the house with the bedroom where he was first totally naked with a girl. He can see these from the plane and he can see them from the ground level in his mind’s eye. Each scene washes over him and as if dancing underwater, the moments blur, recede, reorient, and rematerialize. Like trying to focus on a single leaf in a forest, the boy has trouble capturing a solitary still mental photograph. The bright blues of the Southern California sky mix with the hard, gray, steaming asphalt of suburbia. The adobe colored mansions, pale and blinding, reflect the woody azalea bushes. The paranoid streetlamps rush overhead as he runs stop signs at 2:30am.   Scrambling up the, green, hot, iceplant covered hillside of his high school to the walk home. Making out late at night in his mauve Honda with the purple speckled interior. Smoking rooms, rooms on fire. Movies and shouting. There are too many of them and eventually, gradually, the images combine until he sees a layered still-wet moving watercolor painting of his life. The white edges are subsumed in the frenetic colors.

But he is not proud this time, this time he is running away.

The window reveals  a thick, opaque carpet of murk holding tiny stars of living.  It tumbles out in front of him as he is moving just below the speed of sound. The boy wonders and dreams if the carpet would be soft and forgiving if he fell out of the airplane. The blackness always looks like it would.

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When I was young, you were good at everything. You were always lucky and talented.  It was terrible. I couldn’t stand it. I desperately wanted you to fail. Board games, soccer games, conversations, anything. I wanted you to lose. It would give me such pleasure knowing you might lose.

His brother’s words echo in his ear. He silently closes the cupboard, careful to permit the magnetized latches to gratefully reunite with little violence. He feels slightly sick after spooning a breakfast of raisins and coffee into the bottom of his stomach. He resists the urge to flush this meal with anything more nourishing. The boy drags his bookbag, laden with clothing and books that he won’t wear or read in day to come, to his shoulder. He is mindful not to turn his back to camera/paper menorah as he leaves, after all he must perform for it once again tomorrow.