The Way the Family Got Away. Michael Kimball

       Mineola to Birthrock

      We drove away from our house and away down the road. We drove past some other houses that were all broken at the walls and didn’t have any families living in them anymore. They had broken windows and broken doors. They had broken cars in the front yards that didn’t have any tires on them so that those people that had lived there never left but stayed there and died.

      We drove all the way out to the far part of Mineola where there were houses that had people and families that were still living in them. We stopped and got out of our car and walked up to this one house and looked in the windows but they were only old people that lived there and they didn’t have any babies left in their family anymore so we didn’t even knock. We needed to find a house with a family that was going to have a baby in it.

      We knocked on doors and looked in windows until this other family that needed a baby came up to their door and answered us. Their faces were the only things we could see through their screen door—their mother and father, their brother and sister, and the way they looked like a family in there. Their family stood there behind their screen door and in their doorway and inside their house and with all their stuff. Their father pulled their brother and sister in close to him and his leg and hip and their mother stood next to him too.

      Our family stood there in the same way but outside their house and on their porch and without anything with us but us. My father asked their family if they were going to have a baby in it and their father nodded that they were and their mother held the bottom of her stomach up with her hands. My father asked them to stay there and wait there and we went back to our car and opened the trunk up. My father got my brother’s cradle out and my mother got my brother and the other baby stuff out. My mother gave my sister and me the small blankets and the little pillows, the stuffed animals and the other baby toys, and we all carried all that baby stuff back up to that family and their house and stood there on their porch with it.

      My mother cradled my brother in the blanket in her arms and touched her hand over the blanket and my brother even though he wasn’t crying or moving his arms and hands or even doing anything anymore. My mother kept my brother with her inside herself and in her arms. My mother wouldn’t let anybody else hold my brother even when their mother talked like a baby talks and held her arms out for him. Their mother said that she wanted to practice with him some but my mother said the baby might break and she wouldn’t let go of him. Their family’s baby wasn’t born yet and their mother cradling my brother in her arms might have killed the baby inside her stomach. Nobody else was supposed to touch my brother anymore or somebody else besides him might die in some other family or house.

      The thing that killed my brother was that the cradle didn’t have anymore baby years left in it. My mother didn’t have anymore baby years left in her arms anymore either. My sister and me had already lived them all up and the other baby stuff didn’t have enough baby years left in any of it to keep my brother alive. My brother’s cradle was probably going to kill their family’s baby too but they could not have known that yet.

      They got my brother’s cradle and other baby stuff and we got away from there. We walked away from them and back to our car so we could be a family again. My father opened the trunk up and my mother laid my brother down in his casket and closed its top and closed the trunk. The casket was the only other baby place that we had left for my brother after my mother wasn’t holding him in her arms anymore. The rest of our family got back inside our car and closed the doors. Their family walked down off their porch and into the driveway so they could watch us go. Their family was a family there and then and we were going to be a family somewhere else. We drove away from them and they waved at us from their driveway and we waved back through our car windows.

      They got my brother’s cradle and other baby stuff and we got out of Mineola. The only baby thing we kept with us was my brother. We stayed a family that way. We drove away from Mineola and toward Birthrock—away from where my brother was alive once and died there and toward the miles and the everything else that was going to happen to us everywhere else we went.

      We traded my brother’s life away to that other family when we traded my brother’s cradle and other baby stuff away to them. My brother and the baby he was going to be were going to grow up with some other family somewhere else. We got the life of my brother that we didn’t leave buried in Mineola. That was why we were going to see my brother in so many other babies and other families and other places. My brother was going to be alive in Campbell Station and in Far Town and in other places that we went away to on our way to Bompa’s house in Gaylord.