Roost by Ali Bryan

Author:Ali Bryan [Bryan, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4604-0222-1
Publisher: Broadview Press
Published: 2013-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

29

In the morning I do a head count. Joan turns on The Littlest Hobo. All the kids watch, mesmerized, from the table where I dispense four bowls of cereal like it’s summer camp.

Dan, looking refreshed, arrives to pick them up just before 10:00 a.m. He brings me a 7-Eleven coffee that smells nutty. I take a sip from my coffee, standing in the driveway, watching my brother pack his kids in the car. He takes the steering wheel and adjusts things on the dash the way he did in the makeshift cars we drove as kids. Opening vents, turning dials, depressing buttons. Cars made from empty appliance boxes. The broken picnic table. Two stools in the sandbox. He backs down the driveway and disappears up the street.

Joan stands an inch from the TV screen, fascinated by a little girl in a wheelchair ministering to a man in blue pajamas. He is also in a wheelchair, newly paralyzed. Quadriplegic and in denial. Wes is less enthusiastic. He pays little attention until the man starts hollering and the dog mysteriously arrives at the hospital.

Joan attacks the carpet with my round hairbrush.

“Don’t use that on the carpet,” I say. “That’s dirty.”

She tells me to sit down so she can brush my hair. A male nurse enters the hospital room and tells the patient he’s going swimming. The patient hollers, “No!”

“Is he going to kill him?” Wes asks.

I try to explain the story as the nurse swoops up the bald man, places him in the chair, and wheels him to the pool where the girl waits in a bathing cap that is red like my mother’s.

“Is she going to kill him?” Wes asks, hopeful.

“No. No one is going to kill him. That hurts, Joan.” I massage the top of my head where my hair has been yanked. “Brush it gently.”

She takes offense, brushes harder, and then says, “It just an accident.”

By the end of his swim, the man has accepted his disability. Joan manages to get this and stops brushing to clap.

“What’s happening now?” Wes asks as the man leaves the hospital in his wheelchair.

“He’s off-roading,” I reply.

“Where he going?” Joan asks.

“I don’t know, you’ll have to watch.”

He comes upon his child companion who has somehow managed to fall out of her own wheelchair and down an embankment. She looks like I did as a child. Long braids, plaid dress, dirty face.

“Is she dead?” Wes asks.

I tell him she’s probably only unconscious and go on to explain what that is. “It’s sort of like she’s sleeping.”

“Then where’s her tent?”

“She’s not camping. She fell out of her chair.”

In a courageous effort, the man in the blue pajamas throws himself out of his chair and hurls himself down the hill. Seconds later the dog arrives and runs for help.

“Dog!” Joan exclaims.

“Yes. He’s going to save them.”

Joan comes around in front of me. Picks up a stray peanut off the floor and eats it. I pat the top of my head. The brush is attached to it. Sitting an inch off my scalp.

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