Six Enumerated Complications of Gravity

1

This is how it starts: a boy, having spent a good ten minutes bouncing on the springs of his twin mattress, finally does what his mother fears and rolls his ankle beneath him, launching sideways off the bed in a nimble arc toward the ground. Laws of physics define the sensation of suspension that rifles his body, his weight offset perfectly by gravity for a few, precious moments in which the solid arrangements of the world flicker on and off. And so as he falls, as the corner points of his bedroom walls spin, as though lenses align briefly with his vision by chance, the boy has time enough to spot his father—young and vivid as the day before his suicide two years prior—on a stool in the corner of his bedroom blasted with sunset light. Enough time for each to recognize the other’s face. The father widens his eyes, half rises from his seat. Exactly the way the son remembers: tall, broadwshouldered, a beard he let grow in the summers. It startles the son to find him so solid in his memory despite the empty years after the body had been found, and their family had broken. The son’s lips form a word, he is not sure which. Then his shoulder cracks against the wood floor. Weight returns along with knifelike pain. The last image before his eyes squeeze themselves shut: the stool, its empty seat a brutal and winding hole patching this world through to another.

________

The son’s shoulder is examined by an attending doctor at the hospital speaking in the same monotone hum of the overhanging air ducts. The doctor’s hands are warm, cruising expertly over the awkward bulge under the skin. The son keeps an eye on his mother, who has barely looked at him since pulling him off the floor of his bedroom and hustling him into the car. She appears in her pajama shorts and garden sandals like a stain on the white floors and walls. In two years, she has grown too thin for her clothes. “It’ll set,” the doctor says. “Don’t lift anything heavy for at least a couple days.” He chooses the word least as the moment in which his fingers tighten and in one swift, forceful rotation, jams the son’s humerus back inside his shoulder. The pain is gone in an instant. The son screams for an hour after.

The son and the mother don’t speak for the rest of the night; an accident was not reason enough for more words than they are used to. Words, after all, were the father’s great delight and not theirs, or so it seemed from the way he made their house manic with them. Past midnight, the son lies awake in his bed, eyeing the seat, a black framework lit sparingly by the moon. The son’s thoughts spiral in their little ways. He fears he is dead. He throws off his blankets and walks down the hall to his mother’s room, listens at the door to hear the television on, light seeping under the gap, over his toes. He knocks to no answer. “Umma.” He strains, listening for noise, the sound of a breath. He starts to cry, his bad, bruised arm hanging limp. He bangs on the door with his good hand, palm flat against the wood. “Umma, Umma.” His shirt billows with the rush of air that floods behind him as she wrenches the bedroom door open, stares at him dripping snot and tears down his chin. He can’t read her face in the dark but the sight of her, alive, brings him down on his knees. She swears, calling him something he doesn’t hear, puts her hand up in the air as if to hit him. He is pulled into her arms, counts the moments: one, two. “My baby,” she says, “my baby.”

2

It takes the son another month, the first afternoon home from school while his mother is working, to do it. He drags his twin mattress off its frame...