His voice was deep — it reverberated around the wooded cul-de-sac every day like this, marking time.

BY SAM WESTCOTT

IMAGE BY MEAHA CAUDLE-CHOI

His father explained how gravity worked by tossing a soccer ball up in the air. They watched it plummet, smack the frost-bitten grass, bounce a couple times, and stop by his father's foot. It was a law; his father had said it applied to all things, meaning it would apply to all things until the end of time.  

The boy began to see the inevitable pull back toward the earth everywhere. The collapse waiting to befall everything airborne.  

When he sat buckled into the passenger seat of his father’s truck, speeding down the highway, the boy would crane his neck to watch the birds — dark specks of wingspan and muscle against a blue sky. Sometimes he’d hold his breath and count, turning to keep the dark formations in sight as the truck passed underneath. He wondered how they stayed up there; how they competed against the law. He wondered how long before they spun and fell back toward their earthbound homes — nests of sticks and brambles, tucked between the crevices of tree limbs.  

* 

There was a girl who lived across the road from the boy. She was a few years older than him. Lately, he’d found that no one answered the doorbell when he rang. To the left of the veranda sat the girl’s rusted swing set — black plastic curved into seats and held aloft off the ground by intertwined strands of rope.  

He watched the wind play with the swings, easing them forward and back.  

The boy clutched the frayed rope and small bits of yellowed fibre flaked off onto his palms. The seat was cold, but the cold was bearable in an autumnal way. Warm woodfire smoke clung to the chilly air as he kicked his legs out straight. 

The girl’s house loomed to his left. Turning his head mid-swing, the boy caught his reflection — his small face beamed back from the dusty, opaque glass of the windows as his body swung up and back like a pendulum. His palms burned from the coarseness of the rope.  

When he tired of the swing set, and the games he played in his mind — running around the silent yard — he tossed his soccer ball into the air. As it fell toward him, the boy imagined what it would take to defy gravity. This law. This fact of life. As sure as the sound of his name in his mother’s voice. Maybe, he thought, he could invent something capable of breaking this law. Breaking the mould and living forever above the world.  

It would make his father proud, he thought. To be the first to break a law. The boy turned toward his house across the street to where his father was getting out of the car and calling him home for supper. His voice was deep — it reverberated around the wooded cul-de-sac every day like this, marking time.   

* 

The girl had once told the boy that she wanted to be a physicist. This is when the boy first heard about gravity, although she never told him what it was, she spoke about it as if he already knew. The boy tucked the word back within the worn grooves of his memory, storing it to ask his parents about it later. The girl wrote words in the way his parents did. This new word was a stepping stool, something that might prop him up and into their world.  

The boy knew the girl could write because one time, reaching beneath her pillow in her bedroom, he’d found her diary. He’d opened it. When he scanned the bumps and dips in the cursive, the boy gathered that there was something about the girl waiting to be discovered. Something she kept secret from her parents, her friends. The boy felt a pit in his stomach — a yearning to be let in. To know, although he did not know the methods by which he could come to know what her secret was. 

The girl was in the bathroom when he found the diary, and so he stole another moment with it. He felt the softness of the pages and imagined the lines of the letters and words as movements of figure skaters upon ice.  

But then he turned pages and the cursive morphed. The lines swapped their roundness for straight lines. And these smaller lines produced images. Pictures. They were hard to understand — these images like illusions — he had to pick the image out of the entanglement of lines. The diary landed with a thud upon the girl’s carpeted floor.  

“You should go,” she said from the doorway of her room. She was watching him. Her voice dripped with disappointment, but a hint of knowing and understanding. Like the boy finding her secret was inevitable. Like she’d been waiting for him to be pulled in all along.     

* 

Time passed to the push-lull-pull of the swing in the girl’s vacant yard. The cuts on the boy’s palm calloused, and he could no longer feel the rope upon his skin. He watched his face in the dark windows, but the movement had become predictable. His reflection no longer smiled back at him but seemed to peer into a part of him that was empty and longing for the return of the girl.  

“They’re probably just on vacation,” his mother had said one evening. “Lots of people go away this time of year. I don’t blame them.” She ladled soup into a small bowl for him, and he watched the steam rise; a transparent countermotion to the thick white flakes of snow falling outside the window.  

The boy returned to the swing set, letting the wind gently rock his body back and forth. The autumn had given way to the early frost of December, and no longer was the cold bearable for any real length of time but had ventured out in quick, intermittent bursts. When his fingers turned numb, he stopped the swing with a kick of his heel. He stood and the girl was there before him.  

“Would you like to come inside?” she said. 

He didn’t say anything but followed her.   

Inside, her house smelled the same as it always had; the birch of the hardwood, the panelled interior, the oak nestling within the woodstove, the beef and onions stewing upon the stove. The boy felt abuzz and warm from the house, and shook his head — how was all this going on just beyond the darkened windows that he’d seen from outside? All this time he’d imagined the girl away. Some place far away for the winter, some place across oceans that needed to be accessed by plane.  

 “Anything wrong?” she said.  

“No,” he said.  

When he turned back towards her, she was already spiralling up the staircase.  

When they got to her bedroom, she stopped and turned to face him. “I want to play a game,” she said.  

“A game?”  

“I want you to hide in the closet.”  

The boy peeked in. He recognized the array of sweaters and shirts that hung along the rack. But there seemed to be something different about the closet now. He stepped towards it, unsure.  

With the door closed, the boy could no longer see the girl — though he knew that she was there. He closed his eyes, willing her into the space with him. He could hear the physical separation between them. The way her breath was muffled from the other side of the closet door.  

“Can you see it?” she said.  

The boy opened his eyes. His head swivelled up and down, then around in all directions. Small lights crystallized and twinkled like stars overhead. They stretched into the blackness of the closet, as though the closet he sat in was not a closet at all, but something else. Something unmoored and something gone, drifting into the limitlessness of outer space. 

He felt a tightness in his chest. The bones and tendons of his ribcage constricting. A pang in his diaphragm made him cough. A windless air played like a ghost upon the skin of his forearms, and he shivered. A deep, full-body shiver that left his molars clacking together, and his teeth coming down hard in an overbite. 

The boy was enamoured with the beauty of the lights; once red and blue, and then twinkling orange and yellow. He was reminded of the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars his mother had pasted on the ceiling of his bedroom. And though he knew that those plastic stars were replicas, he’d never realized just how incorrect they were. As his body drifted further and further into the black of what had once been a closet, the boy was aware that the girl had found something that would come to redefine his very idea of what the world was. Of what it meant to be apart of this space. He wondered if the drawings he’d seen in her diary were realized now. Perhaps this was just some experiment, some manifestation of what had previously just been notes and drawings.   

He swivelled back toward where the door had been. He could no longer see the light of her bedroom filtering through the gaps of the closet door — though he thought he could hear the girl’s breath. In this augmented space, her breath had somehow become the source of air that was sustaining him.  

“How did you make this?” the boy called toward where he believed the door to be, and then coughed, his palm rubbing against his chest. He felt the vast emptiness around him, realizing she was gone. He twirled and rotated — like a swimmer lost upon a nocturnal sea — and searched for any sign of land. He screamed, but the sound caught and died in his chest. He clutched his hands to his throat, feeling the air around him dissolve as the girl’s presence had, and then there was an explosion of light. 

The boy closed his eyes, but he could still see the brightness, the yellow bathed his retinas. Like the birth of a sun, he thought. He felt a small hand clasp his shoulder, and then she was dragging him out of the closet onto her bedroom floor.  

She stood over him. Her long black hair rested on her shoulders. The boy realized she looked older. He wondered if he was seeing her as she truly was for the first time, or if he’d been lost for a very long time. She wore a red cardigan, a white t-shirt beneath it with a single black circle in the centre. Like a Venn diagram, the boy thought, marking the demarcation between what he thought life was and what he knew it now to be.  

His jaw popped when he tried to speak, and then the girl’s hand was around his back.  

“You survived,” she said, patting his head. 

* 

That night, his mother asked him — as she always did — about what he’d done at the girl’s house. And for the first time, the boy failed to tell her. He’d kept what’d happened in the closet up in the air. He chose to keep it silent, something that would remain unspoken between him and the girl. 

When he didn’t answer his mother, she asked him again. 

“We played a game,” he said finally. “About gravity.” 

“What were the rules of the game?” his mother said. The potatoes and green beans and fish and gravy she’d made for supper had been reduced to a single plate, and she was reheating its contents in the oven for the boy.  

The boy watched the night sky from the living room, still a little unsure about where he was now. “The only rule,” he said, “is you have to find the rules. You can’t just tell yourself they exist.”  

“Oh,” his mother said.  

She’d emerged around the corner of the kitchen to peer at him, and for a moment, the boy wondered if she was seeing in him what he’d seen in the girl when he re-emerged from her closet. That more time than was accounted for seemed to have passed, and that within this augmentation of time, the boy had become someone else. Someone like before, but just a little bit wiser.  

Sam Westcott is a writer and producer in Ottawa, Ontario. He is originally from Topsail, Newfoundland. His short fiction has appeared in The Bear Creek Gazette, Close To The Bone, FILTH, Nauseated Drive, The Paper Mill Press, and others. You can reach him online at samwwestcott.com.

Image: Meaha Caudle-Choi, Courage My Love, acrylic paint on canvas, 2019.

Edited for publication by Ridge Harripersad, as part of the Professional Writing and Communications Program.

The HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by Applied Research & Innovation.