JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL
ORANGES
When I was growing up in Florida, we had thirteen orange trees in our yard. I never wore shoes unless my mother made me. Then I fell out of a tree—not an orange tree but the only tall oak where a friend had built a tree fort. A branch broke in my hands. When I hit the ground, my back broke too. Then I was in the hospital, flat on my back. I was fitted for a back brace. My doctor took photos of me that he published in an orthopedics journal, naked, with the brace on, though there was a black floating rectangle over my eyes. When I got out of the hospital, even in the brace I wasn’t allowed outside. I could only imagine my friends playing without me, pretending we lived on alien planets, rolling across the spiky-sharp Florida grass shouting, Gravity Wave!
My mother was worried. Down the street was an old house with a mausoleum in the front yard. People said there was a girl in a glass coffin inside. My mother was worried I, too, might die. My father was worried. He looked at my back brace and was afraid I was a girl made of glass, one with no more life ahead of her than that girl in the coffin. My doctor told my parents I could take my brace off when I swam, that swimming was good for me, but the ocean was forbidden. The waves were too rough. A neighbor we hardly knew lent us her pool which she never used, in her backyard which no one used. I spent the summer there, the only human in a perfect watery world.
When the doctor said I could take off the brace, my parents threw a party in our back yard. My mother set up a table under the orange trees, the waxy blossoms smelling unbearably sweet, and invited the neighbors and people my father worked with. My old teachers. So many people. Too many. I sat at the table full of guests and I felt as if I were floating, as if I were staring at the guests from the bottom of a pool. I closed my eyes and swam away.
And I never did come back.
VEHICLE ASSEMBLY BUILDING
It seems strange now I didn’t know you when your son, a boy I went to high school with, crashed his sports car through the fence around the Kennedy Space Centre, climbed the largest single-story building in the world, just to throw himself into the air, saying he was Jesus Christ, saying he could fly. God, in all his wisdom, gave man many things, but wings are not among them. Your son fell forty stories, four hundred feet, and they say that he fell fast. But creation slowed for you, his father, eating dinner alone in your apartment, the one you shared with him. You heard it on the evening news, then closed your eyes.
Later, when I came to know you better than I ever knew your son, you showed me a picture of the two of you. In it, you are standing, all tall legs, the boy between them like a cello, his blue eyes focused on something no one else could see. Even then, you knew you were losing him, like the French you’d brought back from Paris, like you’d already lost his mother, but in this picture, you are holding tight, as if steadiness, no heroics, would be enough to keep him safe. When your eyes opened, you told me, it was months later. Your son already buried, ex-wife come and gone, the world moved on as well, the evening paper full of other leaping stories, as if the children of the world could hardly wait to throw their lives away. Grief was still there, like a break in every bone, and always would be. But you imagined you saw time, that good hand, pointing toward an open window where, like a white and moving curtain, life was starting up again.
JESSE LEE KERCHIVAL is a writer, poet, translator and artist. Her latest poetry collections are I Want To Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and Un pez dorado no te sirve para nada / A Goldfish Buys You Nothing (Editorial Yaugarú, Uruguay). Her graphic memoir, French Girl, is forthcoming from Fieldmouse Press.
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