brave new world

I weave the fruit aisles at the local Save-On. It is a rainy January in Canada, 2006. Mangos are on sale – 99 cents. I hear a noise and look up. A small brown bird flutters nervously around the antiseptic, white-painted framework that is the rafters. My mind does a loop-de-loop and suddenly I am back in the world of 1984, feeling queasy. I am twenty-five feet up in the branches of a mango tree with a boy I will call Michael Smith and there is something not-quite-right about the look in his eyes.

He is average for a five year old jungle boy – wiry, lean, with an independent shock of hair swishing across his eyes. He wears a plaid hand-me-down shirt with snaps. His feet are bare, calloused and cracked. His shorts are tattered and his eyes are blue – blue like the sea during a shipwrecking storm. Blue like the sky right before that very first leap from the clouds with a piece of silk on your back. I suppose you could say that the overall effect of Michael’s appearance is of a pleasant, polite young kid, but he doesn’t leave you a whole lot of time to dwell on it.

There are clouds on the horizon. I’d like to say they are ominous, but we are in the Amazon rainforest. If there were no clouds, that would be ominous. Still, the way they reflect in Michael’s eyes makes his corneas look misted, like he is seeing off into a world of his own. In time, everyone at Yarina will come to know that there is something a little… well… “off” about Michael. For me, though, this is the first inkling – in the mango tree by a house where some Campa natives live.

All little boys love to clamber over things and Michael and I have been lucky enough to be born into an all-natural, free-of-charge, jungle gym grocery store. We are still too young to know the clanking shackles of the educatory experience, so our days are spent moving from fruit tree to fruit tree, eating until we can eat no more and then bouncing and gurgling our way to the ground like bloated sacs of juice – a carnivorous hummingbird’s dream. Nothing in our location in this tree, therefore, would in any way indicate to the casual observer that Michael is a fruit of a different flavor.

That is, until he turns and bayonets me with a certain devilish look that many will come to know and fear and says, “OK, Josh. This is why I brought you here. Me first, then you next.” Without further ado, Michael launches, fires, catapults and projects himself out into space. Arms and legs splayed to the corners of the earth he sails boldly forth, like a mutant flying squirrel who is tragically oblivious to the fact that he has been born membrane free.

Out, out, out he sails. Out past the thinning mango branches he sails with poise and grace, until gravity says “hello” and he falls through the air with the greatest of ease. Down, down, down to the overlapped branches of another mango tree, loosing a blood-curling screech that permanently curdles my spleen and a good part of my liver. He clutches desperately at the branches with his orphan monkey hands until the greenery embraces him, lowers him, and rolls him gently onto the thick, black loamy soil below.

And I up on high, caught between the dying echoes of a piercing shriek and the comforting scent of ripe, luscious mangoes, squat on the secure branch and sense that I have encountered one of life’s defining moments. A choice is there, so palpable you can almost feel its warmth running down your leg. It is a moment where, if you are paying attention, you can feel the almost imperceptible shift that accompanies the birth of an era. His eyes catch mine and I know my world has suddenly grown very, very dangerous. Far off, I hear the flutter of little bird’s wings.

“Your turn!” he yells.


NOTE: This is the first of a series of stories. If someone I did not grow up with is authentically interested, I'll serialize them on this site. If not, forget it, done, bye.