First, They Fall

Kathy Morris must have been half-bat, half-opossum because no human could hang upside down for so long and not feel funny about it after. She’d flip herself over the monkey bars and chase us back into school like it was no big deal she’d just hung there with her hair sweeping the woodchips and eyes shut tight like she was sleeping. We called her an oposs-a-bat, which some of us said endearingly and others not so much. Once, two brothers found an opossum behind the dumpsters at 7-Eleven, its mouth frothing and acting strange till their daddy had to come and shoot it. A bat bite, some of us said—don’t you know them things got rabies?—like a handful of fifth graders were suddenly scholars when it came to bats. Maybe they were Kathy’s folks, we said. We didn’t know what things were like in her home. Didn’t know her father had punched a hole in their wall and shattered her mother’s medicine cabinet, or that her mother spent each night behind a closed door that double locked. Kathy just hung there like she always did, never bothering to hear us or open her eyes, not even when word got out and one of us whispered: Maybe it’s your dad we ought to put down. There were plenty of things we didn’t know back then. Like why our clothes never came with tags or what would happen to the dreams we kept. We didn’t mind being dirty. Didn’t mind when our daddies left us, as long as the ones who stayed were worse. In our freshman year, a teacher told us about flying. From the Wright brothers to pterodactyls, from great blue herons to bats. You know why bats hang upside down? she asked. We hadn’t thought of Kathy in three years. Hadn’t said her name since her daddy picked her up one day and never brought her back. ’Cause in order to fly, she said, first they’ve got to fall, and for a moment, we saw Kathy again, hanging from the monkey bars as her daddy came to yank her down, only this time she rose, zigzagging and swooping, beyond his reach and ours.