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Though Bird hasn’t spoken her name, he doesn’t need to: both of them know who he means. There is only one her, for them.
His skin feels too small for his thoughts.
Bird has a sudden impulse to run to him, the way he did as a small child. When his arms barely circled his father’s knees, when he still thought his father was the tallest man in the world.
No sign of her anywhere here. Signs of her everywhere here.
Anything could happen here, everything does happen here. It is like fairyland, or a fairy tale.
They step onto the flat roof into a pool of night. It is chilly, and the wind scrapes across the top of the city like a knife leveling flour from a cup,
Like her parents, she strove for unremarkable, anchoring herself firmly in the hill of the bell curve.
Left unsaid was that unity required a common enemy.
Like most children, Bird has seldom considered whether his father is happy or not.
He stood there, framed by the doorway, a strong man made fragile by grief.
She thought again of her parents, how they’d lived their whole lives trying to avoid trouble, and in the end it had ferreted them out anyway. Maybe sometimes, she thought, the bird with its head held high took flight. Maybe sometimes, the nail that stuck up pierced the foot that stomped down.
Small joys, too: the silver-green dragonfly that had landed on her forearm, stilled its wings, then vanished again; the improbable red of the maple leaves just beginning to fall—things that felt only half real when she could not share them with him.
All she wants is to not let him go.
Each of them needs to be remembered as a person unlike any other, not a name on a list but as someone, someone unlike anyone else.
But in the end every story I want to tell you is the same. Once upon a time, there was a boy. Once upon a time there was a mother. Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his mother loved him very much.
Who ever thinks, recalling the face of the one they loved who is gone: yes, I looked at you enough, I loved you enough, we had enough time, any of this was enough?
