HORIZONS
Mum tells me that crying cleans the eyeballs, which is very important since we live in a dust bowl in this vast land of "assure bright" where even the green grass is spiky and sore to run around on with bare feet. The ground is hard and cracked, like an old man’s heels, but it’s teeming with life. I always shout, “Watch out below!” before I start walking on it to warn the lizards, spiders, and ants of all varieties coming and going at a pace.
“Look at that horizon,” enthuses Dad, every sunset, but I can’t see beyond the five tall trees at the end of our sloped garden. I like to look up and watch the sky shift from dusk to dark, staying hold of Dad’s hand because it makes me dizzy.
Anyway. Our eyeballs have no other way of cleaning themselves. The lashes protect them but it’s a lost cause. I know this because my mum cleans her eyeballs a lot.
“Why are you crying mummy?”
“Because my eyes were sore and needed a clean.”
“Are you sad?” I ask.
“Why would I be sad?” she wails.
“Your face says so.”
“Oh! Is that a snake in the strawberry patch?” she says, leaning forward in her white wicker chair on the front patio to gaze over the healthy crop.
“Howard! Get a saucepan!” she shouts to Dad (counting his tomatoes). “With a lid!”
I know it’s a lie. I know more than the grown-ups realise, of course I do. For starters, none of my other friends' parent's bedrooms have oxygen tanks lined up along the wall like soldiers that I can salute. I’ve looked. I am an expert on what’s the same about suburban folk and what’s different - about each and every one of us. No one else’s mum is in and out of the hospital either. Unlucky for them because the attention from the nurses, particularly Sister Amy Ada Webb, is welcomed compared to teachers (kind but boring) and my adults, who are always cleaning their eyeballs.
But I don’t say these things, I go and play in the back garden instead, just Susan, my beagle, and me. The sky is bluer than the ocean today, which is green by my reckoning anyway. The unrelenting brightness of the sun makes the ground shiver so that nothing seems still yet everything is still, save for the breeze through the silver leaves of the five tall trees.
The horizon is always there, but no matter how high the tree I climb I can’t find where it starts. I can’t feel what the sky is like, or put it in my mouth and roll it about with my tongue. Even when I run at speed down the pavement, to finally leap, arms outstretched, chin up, towards the great and kind blue and white (to the sound of Donovan’s ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ in my head) the sky eludes my touch. No matter how hard I run or how high I jump. Sometimes I cry about it. My eyes do indeed feel clean and bright afterwards, and my sense of despair has gone.
After Mum passes I imagine she’s on the horizon. Dad marries Sister Amy Ada Webb. I guess I’m the only one in the family with an imagination.
When I'm an adult and living on the other side of the world in London, UK, boys call me an airhead. Sometimes they are holding my hand at the time as we watch the sunset. I feel betrayed.
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