by Bennett Sims
Fables
1.
The boy begs his mother to buy him a balloon. As they leave the grocery store and cross the parking lot, he holds the balloon by a string in his hand. It is round and red, and it bobs a few feet above him. Suddenly his mother looks down and orders him not to release the balloon. Her voice is stern. She says that if he loses it, she will not buy him another. The boy tightens his grip on the string. He had no intention of releasing the balloon. But the mother’s prohibition disquiets him, for it seems to be addressed to a specific desire. Her voice implies that she has seen inside him: that deep down—in a place hidden from himself, yet visible to her—he really does want to release the balloon. Otherwise, why bother to forbid it? The boy feels stung by her censure. He grows sullen at the injustice. It isn’t fair. He didn’t do anything. They approach the car in the parking lot. The day is bright and all the car roofs glint. His fingers fidget, his palm throbs. Before, the balloon had been just a thing that he wanted to hold. Now, he cannot stop thinking about letting it go. He wants to release the string, to spite her. But he knows that this would only prove her right. By forbidding a thought he hadn’t had, she has put that thought into his head: now, if he acts on the thought, it will be as good as admitting that he already had it. He glowers up at the balloon. Why had he begged her to buy it in the first place? What had he ever planned on doing with it, if not releasing it? Maybe she was right. For there is now nothing in the world that he more desires—has always desired—than to be rid of this balloon. The boy knows that it is the prohibition that has put this idea into his head, and yet, he cannot remember a time before he had it. It is as if the prohibition has implanted not just the desire, but an entire prehistory of the desire. The second the thought crossed his mind, it had always already been in his mind. The moment his mother spoke to him, he became the boy she was speaking to: the kind of boy who releases balloons, who needs to be told not to. Yes, he imagines that he can remember now: how even in the grocery store—before he had so much as laid eyes on the balloon—even then he was secretly planning to release it. The boy releases the balloon. He watches it rise swiftly and diminish, snaking upward, its redness growing smaller and smaller against the blue sky. His chest hollows out with guilt. He should never have released the balloon. Hearing him whimper, his mother turns to see what has happened. She tells him sharply that she told him not to release the balloon. He begs her to go back into the grocery store and buy him another, but she shakes her head. They are at the car, and she is already digging through her purse for the keys. While she unlocks the door, he takes one last look above him, raking that vast expanse for some fleck of red.
2.
One day at recess, alone behind the jungle gym, the boy spots a crow perched on a low pine branch. He is used to seeing entire flocks in this tree. At dusk dozens will gather together on its branches, visible from across the playground as a cloud of black specks. They dot the treetop then, like ticks in a green flank. Even at that distance he can hear them cawing, a dark sharp sound that they seem to draw from deep within the tree itself, their black bodies growing engorged with it. After school each afternoon, waiting for his mother in the parking lot, the boy will watch them, listening. Today, however, there is only the one crow, and although its beak hangs open, it does not caw. It is perfectly silent. It just sits there, cocking its head and blinking its beady eye in profile. The boy keeps expecting the crow to caw, to let the tree speak through it, in a voice infinitely older than it is. But its beak gapes and no sound comes out. If the boy listens carefully, he can distinguish the rustle of a breeze, some wind in the needles. And then it is possible to imagine that this hissing is emanating from the bird’s beak, in steady crackling waves, like static from a broken radio. That is the closest it comes to cawing. Maybe, if he startled it, he could get it to caw, the boy thinks. He kneels at the base of the tree, palming a pinecone from the ground. It is pear-shaped, and imbricated with brown scales, like a grenade of shingles. Rising, he readies the cone at his shoulder, the way a shot-putter would. The crow keeps cocking its head back and forth in its branch. Its beak never narrows. The jaws’ twin points remain poised at a precise and unchanging angle, as though biting down on something that the boy can’t see: an invisible twig, or tuft of grass. Materials for its nest. The boy waits for the crow to blink, then lobs the pinecone. It misses by a foot, crashing through the foliage and landing behind the tree somewhere. The crow is unfazed. It retracts its head on its neck slightly, but it doesn’t caw, and it is careful neither to widen nor narrow its beak. It really is as if there is something in its mouth, something that it is determined not to drop. But its mouth is empty, and so the boy imagines that it is this very emptiness that it is bringing back to its nest: that it is building a nest of absences, gaps. The way it jealously hoards this absence between its mandibles, like a marble. Its beak must be broken, the boy decides, broken open. Or else, no: the bird is simply stubborn. It could caw if it wanted to. It is resisting only to spite him. He gathers four more pinecones. The longer the crow refuses to caw, the louder its silence becomes. The gap in its beak magnifies the stillness around them, until the boy can no longer hear any of the other playground sounds: teachers’ whistles; the far-off squawks of his classmates on the soccer field. The boy feels alone with the crow, alone inside this quiet. He hugs the four pinecones against his stomach. He is determined to make the crow caw once before recess is over. He imagines that he is the teacher, the crow his pupil, and he remembers all the ways in which his own teacher calls on him in class: how the boy is made to speak, pronounce new vocabulary terms, say present when his name is said. Before recess is over, the boy will make the crow say present. He will pelt it with pinecones until it caws, until it constitutes itself in a caw, until the moment when—dropping that absence from its beak—the crow will finally present its presence in the present sharpness of its caw. The crow looks up at the sky for a moment. Seizing the opportunity, the boy hurls another of his pinecones, this time missing its torso by a matter of inches. The crow spreads its wings and begins to bate on the branch. For a moment, it almost seems as if it is going to fly away. The boy grips a third pinecone tightly, until its spines bite into his flesh. Soon, he knows, the recess bell will ring. He squints at the crow, focusing its black body in the center of his vision. But just as he is about to throw the pinecone, the bird tucks its neck into its chest, looking down at him. It blinks its black eyes rapidly, agitatedly. Finally it closes its beak. And when at last it caws—rupturing the quiet around them, with a loud, sharp-syllabled awe—it is as startling as the first sound in creation.
