We Shall by Mourning
His best friend lives in the yellow-green grass between a bundle of Taraxacum officinale—at great liability to be ripped up by grubby, greedy hands and spit on—and a sharp ridge of cement.
The boy does not grab or spit. He folds one leg under the other and draws patterns in the dirt, waiting until he’s sure his friend is seated and listening before launching into a review of his day: picked last for Red Rover at recess, and how no one wanted any of the cookies his mother had baked and packed to share at lunch. His sixth birthday approaches, and he knows she is greatly concerned that none of his classmates will eat her homemade carrot cake or sing him inane songs.
“I have friends,” he’d told her, truthfully, just before tying his sneakers that morning.
His mother hadn’t smiled. “You can’t bring that mushroom to your birthday party,” she’d said, which the boy thought was a bit silly. Of course he wouldn’t dig up and murder his friend for as stupid an occasion as that, not for carrot cake or even for Boston Cream Pie, which he greatly preferred.
“Be careful crossing the road!” she’d called out, but the boy is always careful, especially at the intersection of Rowland and Terry, because that’s where Speedy Suds Car Wash is.
Ugly, shiny cars loom at the intersection, and the boy’s eyes are alert as they sluggishly scoot forward, a thick bundle of them blocking all of Rowland. A gray Nissan careens from the left, slamming on the brakes as the boy crosses, and he puts on his most dignified scowl, gesturing at the white lines. The driver gestures, too, but the boy has already jumped up onto the curb.
The boy tells his friend about his odyssey in arriving, but then, self-conscious that he’s so rudely dominated the conversation, begins to draw a different pattern in the dirt.
“Does your mom worry about you, too?” he asks softly, gently nudging a fat, pink Lumbricus terrestris so that it crawls in the other direction. He adjusts the soil around his friend’s handsome stem and hopes he’s not too warm.
Something screeches. Alarmed, the boy looks up and gasps. One of the ugly cars waiting for a washing is spinning in his direction, backing away from another car too quickly, and the boy dives out of its trajectory, leaving his poor friend to face the tires naked and exposed and alone.
They collide.
“No.” The boy crawls over, frantic hands in the dirt, trembling as he reaches for his friend. White flesh falls apart in his fingers. Ridged gills crumble, and the boy is going to be sick, right there next to the Taraxacum officinale.
Someone shouts. The boy cannot hear him, doesn’t want to, this murderer in a suit with his shiny, stained car. “Kid? Are you okay? Are—”
The boy is crying. Each teardrop breaks through the thin layer of dirt and bleeds into his decapitated friend, and he holds the fragments close to his chest.
He doesn’t remember going home. All the boy can do is hold his friend in his hands, feeling far away from his body like he’s stood up too fast. All he can do is wait to wake up from this horrible dream, but when morning comes, his friend floats in a glass of water on his nightstand.
Two crumbling chunks circle each other. The boy’s throat burns.
He puts on a clean shirt and wipes his swollen eyes. He finds pants from his piano recital in the back of his closet and dons a tall black hat to greet his mother in the kitchen.
They stare each other down. The boy holds his head high to look up at her, neck trembling with the effort. He expects to beg, but she picks up her car keys from the counter and allows him to take the wet, broken pieces of his friend into her very clean Toyota.
They drive in silence. The cars still swarm like angry ants on Rowland and Terry, and the boy wishes he could hate them, but he can’t even lift his finger to draw circles on the window. He can barely cradle his friend as his mother parks alongside the yellow-green grass where they used to laugh and keep secrets from the Taraxacum officinale, who now wilt in mourning.
They’ve lost a friend, too. He brushes their thin, tiny petals before lifting his friend’s body and carefully placing him on the soft pile of soil, sprinkling dirt on top. His eyes ache, and he can feel his mother watching, but she doesn’t say sorry. She doesn’t say anything, so he speaks first. “You never liked him.”
His mother inhales sharply.
“You never—you’re happy he’s dead, aren’t you?” He hunches over, waiting for the terrible truth, when a hand touches his shoulder. The boy wants to pull away.
“Of course not,” she says. “I know how much it meant to you.”
Means to me, the boy thinks, head swimming. Still means, still means.
Her fingers press into his shoulder, fingers that pluck weeds to throw in the garbage. Fingers that rolled dough into cookies that no one in his class wanted. “It’s going to be okay.”
His sixth birthday looms ahead, a dark and friendless place. Something wet falls on his back.
“I’ll never forget you,” he whispers, and the drops fall harder behind him, dampening his clean shirt. The fingers press tighter, where they keep him from falling forward into the dirt. “Never, never, never.”
An Aeronautic Aspiration
His fingers press gently against the sliding glass door. The orange warmth from the kitchen doesn’t reach him, but if someone leaned in closely enough, they might see the tiny puffs of his cloudy breath.
No one will, but that’s okay. He doesn’t particularly wish to be seen.
The daughter and her mother stand inside the kitchen. He supposes they look alike. But mostly he recognizes their voices and the lilt at the end of a question and the shake which predicates a laugh. And so he listens, rather than watches, as they settle around the table, plates long since cleared.
“What is a Mach number?”
“Mach number, capital M, is u over c—the local flow velocity over the speed of sound in whatever medium you’re in.”
“Sure.” The mother flips the white card with words over. He mulls over her answer carefully: local flow velocity divided by the speed of sound in the medium. But in which situations would—
“And what exactly does that mean?”
“It comes up with like, supersonic flight,” she says. “Super fast. So, if your Mach number is one, or approaching one, then that’s approaching the speed of sound.”
He tries to imagine, just for a second, something that could move as quickly as sound. That one of these ingenious machines could not only hold itself up, suspended in the air, thumbing its nose at gravity so audaciously, but that it might also move faster than a bird’s caw? Faster than those monstrous squirrels could chitter and complain?
It’s unimaginable. But he imagines, anyway.
“And this comes up in…?”
“This is for fluid dynamics,” says the daughter. “The next question asks about how it changes with temperature, pressure, and density, right?”
The mother laughs. It’s a warm sound from the warm, orange kitchen, and for a moment, he wishes that he could be warm, too. “Are you sure you need me for this?”
They keep going. He remembers when she got into this school, when she got into the degree program—aerospace engineering—and although this test sounds harder than the others, he knows she’s smart. He knows she studies very hard, even when she’s at home for weekend dinners.
“What’s funny,” says the daughter. “Is that none of this really matters, you know? I mean, it matters for the class, but it’s not like I’m going to be plugging away at equations when I’m, you know.”
“In the air?” her mother suggests. “Flying the plane?” They both laugh again, but this time, he feels far away. Like he’s looking down at himself from some distance.
Something hard lodges in his throat. A sudden, uncomfortable heat despite the chill, a sudden wave of, stupid, so stupid, sitting here listening to something that he will never be part of. She is right; no matter how much he tries, no matter how many equations he memorizes, no matter how many sleepless nights he spends studying velocity and density and airfoils, it will never be enough.
He clenches his tiny, webbed fingers and closes his eyes against his reflection in the glass. He would never fly a plane. A frog could never fly a plane, no matter how much he knew about aerospace engineering.
“Tell me about the pressure over an airfoil. Where is it high and low?”
The others all think he’s strange, for listening to the humans. If they knew why he really waited outside after their noisy dinners, if they knew how often he looked up at the sky, at the vastness of it all, imagining the impossible, they would laugh at him. They already laughed.
Stupid, the frog swallows. He is too warm in his skin. Too exposed, just sitting at the glass, and he can’t bear it for another second.
He prepares to hop away, and nearly does, except he’s almost sure he knows the answer. He can picture the diagram in his head, the way the wing would hold steady against these forces, how the higher pressure would push upwards, so it would be at the bottom of the airfoil, and—
“High pressure on the bottom, low pressure on top.”
Despite everything, some pride remains. Because the pressure variation around the surface of the wing is how these strange, wonderful machines soar through the sky. Because he’s sat here for so many dinners, as the girl built her understanding of aeronautics from the ground up, and he’s learned, too. Stupidly and uselessly, he learns anyway.
The frog looks up. The night air is cool on his skin. A plane flies overhead, a distant white speck guided by high pressure and low pressure and capable human hands.
He is sad again, for a second, that he’ll never know what the earth looks like from 35,000 feet, but not as sad as he could be. Maybe it’s enough just to know why most planes hover that high. To understand how the air folds around them, and in turn how the pressure folds. To marvel, yes, but also to see the miracle for what it is.
The mother asks her daughter another question. He dreams of flight, but settles.
