Fly Away

It starts when you find your father on the kitchen floor at 6 am breathing hard. You're just a kid so you don't know what to do. You think about slinking back out of there, but your cold feet won't move. "Are you OK, Dad?" you say, and he snaps his head off the linoleum and stares at you with bloodshot eyes. "Fine. I'm fine," he croaks and waves his fingers. You go back to the couch and slip into your sleeping bag. If he's fine what's he doing lying on the kitchen floor at 6 in the morning? Did he fall down? Is he sick? Or is this what he does? You're just visiting, so how do you know.

All that day you don't talk about it. You just do the visit. You go here and then you go there and finally you tell him that you are getting a little hungry. After lunch he steers the old car to the library and you get lost in a manga while he's searching for some books he needs.

Back on the pavement the wind whips and his steps are unsteady. He lurches to the car, you safely behind, worrying he might fall down. He puts the stack on the roof and unlocks the car. You're both in now and he throws his arm behind your seat and snaps his neck to see behind. The car lunges back and then forward. There is a clunking noise. You turn to see the books sliding off the back hood.

"Christ," your father says, and stomps the brake.

From the corner of your eye you catch one of the books, a paperback, jump off the trunk.

As your dad gets out, the book starts to flap. The pages snap in the cold. But it's not the wind that is carrying this thing off. That book is flying, like a bird. A big heavy bird, maybe one that got injured or stuck in an oil spill or something, but still, a bird. You are half out of the car watching it gain momentum. Your father is picking up books off the street.

A horn blast startles you. "Get out of the road," the driver yells through the cracked window, his face contorted.

"Shut the fuck up," your father shouts, and you think there may be a fight.

The book is furiously flapping, climbing higher in the blue, blue sky. You knew that some books had magic, but you didn't believe. Once it clears the building tops, the book starts to glide. Like a hawk it soars, adjusting on the current.

Robert Oakes writes fiction and teaches school in Boston. His work has appeared in Flywheel.