A door bursts open and slams into the wall. My little sisters and cousins flood the room with yelling excited voices so loud the room spins like a kamikaze. Talking about there\u2019s gonna be lightning, there\u2019s gonna be rain, let\u2019s go to the tire swing above the dried up river bank.<\/p>\n
Maybe there will be a river tonight. We run barefoot across slippery blades of grass. We are tarzan children doing flips on the trampoline, boomeranging into electric air, daring the sky to catch us. We are birds sitting on a line staring at the sky, waiting for something to change, waiting for something to cause us to flutter.
\nMy sister turns to me and says, \u201cWe won\u2019t really get struck, will we?\u201d No, I say, it hasn\u2019t even started yet. I don\u2019t mention the daydreams about what magical gifts and superpowers I\u2019d acquire if it did happen however, like the gifts our brother has. Right now, he\u2019s squatting down in the mud, barefoot, creating mounds and his mind sees nothing but potential. His obsession is uncarving the extraordinary he sees from the mundane that most of us cannot see past. Our brother is something of a savant when it comes to clay. The very first thing he ever sculpted was Winnie the Pooh climbing up the tree with stunning accuracy, demonstrating his exceptional memory. He was four years old at the time. My friends ask me why he doesn\u2019t talk, if he understands me. I say he doesn\u2019t need to talk to understand me. I say he sees more than we do. I say that because of the details in what he sculpts: the roughness of the bark, the twist of the branches, his fingerprint pressed into the clay.<\/p>\n
Eventually we get called inside, told to hurry. It\u2019s time to go home. Say goodbye to your cousins, kiss your grandma. It\u2019s a long drive home filled with six hours of staring at open fields, windmills, oil rigs, and bathroom stops on the side of a red dirt road. Mom replays a Maroon 5 CD on the stereo singing, \u201cClouds are shrouding us in moments unforgettable.\u201d My sister and I want Nelly Furtado, banding together to vote out the other three siblings, singing offkey, \u201cI\u2019m like a bird, I\u2019ll only fly away.\u201d The words vibrate off my tongue, sweet like foreign fruit I\u2019ve never tasted, away from this dry, tumbleweed land. We arrive home to a red brick house and endless views of barbed wire and horses, interrupted by a single strand of neighboring houses. I walk inside to the familiar smell of home: wood floors and old, worn leather couches intermingled with the smell of newly painted walls.<\/p>\n
We start to unpack. A voice causes the wall before me to vibrate and the pace of my heart to quicken. A door bursts open and slams into the wall. Yelling voices so loud the room spins like a kamikaze. Talking about there\u2019s gonna be lightning, there\u2019s gonna be rain. Maybe there will be a river tonight. A crash booms, a voice cries, and I know this sound like the back of my hand, like storm scrying. I gather my three youngest siblings, tell them to be quicker than the lightning, \u201cgo, get outside.\u201d Our oldest sister stays behind, a role that is only hers. We all know this drill, having practiced storm
\nsafety so many times before. We run to the backyard and stay there and wait for it to pass. It rains from our faces and the ground is wet. My sweet brother begins to sink his hands in the mud beneath us. At first, it is just a mound. But he sees the extraordinary. His hands push the mud into an upward spiral, unfurling into the sky as if we were just tiny fae creatures. He creates barks and twists, branches that pretzel in many different directions with flowers and leaves blooming in milliseconds. His fingerprints bring this creation to life, his creation expanding into the sky like a timelapse of spring. A hole appears at the base of the tree. He goes in first and we follow, making our way up the tree with our brother as our guide. When we get to the top, home is simply a dot on Earth, a faraway star whose stories are lightyears away. Untouchable, the four of us sit on a branch, perched like birds. We dream of<\/p>\n
wings and the day we get to take our maiden flight. Until that long-awaited day, we stay together and stare at the clouded sky. Waiting for lightning. Waiting for something to change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","meta":[],"genre":[27,26],"year":[44],"class_list":["post-107","writing","type-writing","status-publish","hentry","genre-fiction","genre-writing","year-44"],"acf":{"contributor":"Emory Williams","bio":"My name is Emory and I am a 26-year-old Hard of Hearing writer\/poet who aims to merge magic and the mundane together in my writing. I fell in love with the beauty and power of weaving words together at an early age and I haven\u2019t stopped since.","text":"","contributor_page":null},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dekonstruktr.com\/tidepools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writing\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dekonstruktr.com\/tidepools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writing"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dekonstruktr.com\/tidepools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/writing"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dekonstruktr.com\/tidepools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dekonstruktr.com\/tidepools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dekonstruktr.com\/tidepools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/year?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}