Metamorphosis

My uncle’s son and I are a year apart and separated by fifty acres of farmland. Our farm was always better, he would say, because we have a creek running through the back woods where we can search for slugs and fresh worms, but his has a pond with a rope swing. I was always too little for the rope swing, but one day, I would tell him, I would be tall enough, old enough.

During the summers we would play spy and watch our dads work the tractors in the fields or hunt down lost jewelry outside for our moms. Our moms always put a stop to it once they found us trampling through their gardens. In the winter we built igloos and snow forts and made snow angels just below the porch light, so that when we were finally coaxed in for hot chocolate and looked out the window, they really did look like sleeping angels, with halos of light that made them seem warm and glowing, just like I felt, tucked inside the farmhouse on that December piece of night.

In the spring, he and I would hunt for birds nests. When his friends were over, they talked about finding eggs and chucking them at Mrs. Simpson’s house, but I would shout at them about the babies and the mom-bird until my face grew hot and I began to cry, and they would run off and I would sniffle and look up into the treetop, the sun glistening through the wind-blown leaves, and imagine that the birds there were thanking me.

He wasn’t like his friends, though. Once we watched a baby bird try to fly, only to fall out of the nest. His sister’s cat was watching, too, and pounced as soon as the bird hit the ground. I ran behind him, our sweet tea forgotten on the porch as we shooed the cat away. The bird was hopping around on feet that reminded me of twigs found in the woods; one wing was folded back, the brittle bones broken by its fall. We found a cardboard shoe box and stuffed it full of toilet paper and tried to nurse it back to health, but it died two days later. I didn’t see him for days after that, not even for the funeral I begged my dad to give it.

School divided us once the fall came, and although we took the same yellow school bus every morning, he would wordlessly shuffle down the aisle towards the back where his friends hollered and threw paper bits at the back of pony-tailed girls while I slid against the window in the front seat to watch the farmland pass in a blur of wheat and leaves. On the walk home from the bus stop I would ask him who he ate lunch with and what did he learn that day and was it easier than my grade, and he would respond with words like “people” and “stuff” and “yup” and kick at the dirt with his sneaker.

We used to walk back to his house every afternoon, where my aunt offered us chocolate chip cookies and cold milk in large glasses as we sat at the kitchen table to do our homework before being allowed out to play, before he was called in to dinner and I was called home. I always let him have the last cookie and he would look over my math and show me what I was doing wrong. Both of us would watch for the clock to shift to four o’clock and then our pencils would drop onto our books and chairs would scrape across the tile and the screen door would bounce against the grooves as it slammed shut and we ran outside to play.

That was another year, another time. That was a different him. That new school year, I hopped down the bus steps and waited for him to follow, eager to point out the empty beehive I’d found earlier that morning on the way to the bus stop, but he didn’t even pause before starting down the path to his house, the tires of the bus kicking up waves of dust beside us as it drove past, down another road, towards another stop.

I waited for him to turn around, to tell me to hurry up and catch up, that he would eat all my cookies if I was going to be such a slowpoke. But he kept walking, adjusting the straps of his bag against his hunched shoulders, sneakers kicking loose stones and leaving faint tracks in the dirt that would quickly be covered up, like the ones from all the mornings before, no trace at all that we had once stood there.

I should have known then that we were becoming different people, that snow angels and trips to the creek were distant days, but every afternoon I watched him walk further and further away, still wanting to cling to those memories, seek them out for comfort, not willing to let them go. Like the mother returning year after year to that same oak tree, still looking for her fallen bird.