The human hand contains twenty seven individual bones. Give or take. Nineteen if you don’t count the eight in your wrist. It’s also the home of six different kinds of arteries and two different kinds of arches, although it escapes me at the moment what, exactly, an arch is. Then there are always the variables. The babies that come out plus or minus a finger. The victims of hand saw accidents. Chances are you’ve sat next to a variable on some form of public transportation at least once in your life. Variables are big fans of public transportation. They’re always there on the bus or the train with their six and a half fingers on each hand. No shame at all. As though you’re the strange one, you with your measly twenty seven hand bones - nineteen if you don’t count the wrist.
This is before all that though. Before there is a botched job interview, before the tin buckets of syringes, the drool rags and the diapers. Before all that, there is the problem of the young boy sitting on a stranger’s back porch. He presses a suitcase between his bare knees, bone thin and beet red from the frozen air. Shorts in the middle of winter. Who lets a boy that age out of the house like that?
I’m watching him as he watches the empty yard. Him with his blank stare and his suitcase, me with my cigarette ashing aimlessly into the snow. God only knows how long he’s been sitting there. White flakes have started to collect on the shoulders of his snug corduroy jacket and he didn’t so much as flinch when I pulled my rust bucket of a car down the narrow driveway. Its as though someone’s deposited him there like an unwanted garden gnome or one of those plaster child-shaped fountains, forever spewing rank, recycled water. You know the kind. Your mother probably has one in her yard somewhere, and if not her, your grandmother or aunt for sure. They belong to the lawn jockey and plastic flamingo family. My mother brought me back one from her last trip to Germany – a gnome that is. I put it on my apartment balcony for about a week before I pushed it off the edge in a feigned suicide attempt. It bounced. Two weeks later she found it under a stack of newspapers in the parking garage dumpster. She dusted it off, brought it inside, clutched close to her chest like a baby and asking me in that tone of hers why, exactly, it was in there. The better question would have been why, exactly, she was digging through the dumpster.
This is a boy, however, (at least to the best of my observation) and not a lawn ornament. And a boy is not the sort of thing a person can get away with dumping on a stranger’s porch, suitcase packed. A boy is not the sort of thing you can just leave as someone else’s problem, or buried under a stack of newspapers.
This is before all that though. Before there is a botched job interview, before the tin buckets of syringes, the drool rags and the diapers. Before all that, there is the problem of the young boy sitting on a stranger’s back porch. He presses a suitcase between his bare knees, bone thin and beet red from the frozen air. Shorts in the middle of winter. Who lets a boy that age out of the house like that?
I’m watching him as he watches the empty yard. Him with his blank stare and his suitcase, me with my cigarette ashing aimlessly into the snow. God only knows how long he’s been sitting there. White flakes have started to collect on the shoulders of his snug corduroy jacket and he didn’t so much as flinch when I pulled my rust bucket of a car down the narrow driveway. Its as though someone’s deposited him there like an unwanted garden gnome or one of those plaster child-shaped fountains, forever spewing rank, recycled water. You know the kind. Your mother probably has one in her yard somewhere, and if not her, your grandmother or aunt for sure. They belong to the lawn jockey and plastic flamingo family. My mother brought me back one from her last trip to Germany – a gnome that is. I put it on my apartment balcony for about a week before I pushed it off the edge in a feigned suicide attempt. It bounced. Two weeks later she found it under a stack of newspapers in the parking garage dumpster. She dusted it off, brought it inside, clutched close to her chest like a baby and asking me in that tone of hers why, exactly, it was in there. The better question would have been why, exactly, she was digging through the dumpster.
This is a boy, however, (at least to the best of my observation) and not a lawn ornament. And a boy is not the sort of thing a person can get away with dumping on a stranger’s porch, suitcase packed. A boy is not the sort of thing you can just leave as someone else’s problem, or buried under a stack of newspapers.
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