The Box Kite

The lift, the very lift and pull of it! They’d wasted the summer morning, father and son in the devil’s breath of July—gnats wheeling madly above the drive—pasting Sunday comics across the struts, like the canvas skin of a Sopwith Camel. Into the close-gnawn yard with its humpback boulder, they dragged it triumphantly, unreeling the twine until the contraption yanked itself from bald earth, high above the matchbox houses on the verge of woods and the sweet-smelling bog, to a height where a boy might peer over the horizon to Boston—and beyond, the ocean. The son was my father. I tottered at his legs, having borrowed his name and my grandfather’s. They payed out the ramshackle affair until it became a postage stamp. The line burned a bloody groove into my palms, the last time they stood at ease with each other.