Broken Wing

I can still see his eyes, ice-lake-morning blue, cloud-spectrum dense. His pupils were shiny seeds of danger, stelazine-shrunken, you didn’t want to let too much light into those holes, you didn’t want the whole story. While it’s true he drowned his grandma’s puppy and slit the goldfish to let them bleed the bathtub water a bleak pink, he was only six. His cheeks still flushed when his mother, with the same stole eyes, said goodbye and hugged him too hard too long and left him there. Get better little bird, no more shattered glass slashing tantrums, no more soaked sheet mornings, no more belly slapping the baby, no more pin sticking spiders. Me and Grandma we love you so why’d you kill that poor puppy dog? He wanted it to be clean, he told the doctors, who told us, the treatment team, having heard stories of rectal fissures caused by fathers and track-marked mothers dying sideways in stairwells and of buttocks oozing from Jesus said to welt-whipped scars. This was bad, this boy with death lust in his blood and yet blameless. He looked so lost, drug-dazed and muffled, slinking along the walls of the pine-soled hallways, trying to obey staff demands to stand up straight, but he needed the edges, afraid of air spaced options, of what he might not mean to do in the kettle of such emptiness. Sometimes at night he howled in his sleep, woke up wet, confused. Afternoons, we might play Candyland, abating his bogeyman with gingerbread houses and gumdrop trees, until he covered his ears and screamed. Restraints followed, buckled holdings, it took three big men to secure a helmet onto his thrashing head. He would be there for a long time. Early on his name amused us, Branch Starling–the poetry of a mentally ill mother’s miracle–before we understood how it determined him: fragile spirit, brittle-twig-hopping, broken-winged, wild beyond capture. I think of the little boy I knew in a muscle shirt and shaved head eating Corn Puffs with a spoon held shovel-wise over a dimpled, milk-dribbled chin, and I realize today he is twenty-two. I wonder who loves him now.