Windward Review Vol. 20 (2022): Beginnings and Endings

Nancy Spiller
“As the massive star contracts, it’s gravity becomes so strong that light can no longer escape.
The region from which light cannot escape is called a black hole and its boundary is called
the event horizon.”- Steven Hawking
A Brief History of Donny
I did my best trying to get along
with my son, Donny. He used to be a
real mother’s helper, picking up the dry
cleaning, emptying my ashtrays, the
little man of the house. Saturdays were
soccer days. Sure, I had to yell for him to
keep his cleats off until he got to the car,
but he so loved clickety-clacking down
the driveway. My fondest memories are
of him running the full length of that
impossibly green field, the one built over
a former waste dump—they’ve only had
to close it twice for methane explosions
from the rotting garbage below. My boy,
kicking the ball, leaping in the air like a
baby Billy goat, feeling the full wallop of
his life force.
But all that changed in the
bitter morning hours the winter of his
seventh-grade year. He’d snuck out of
the house with a group of like-minded
delinquents, his “crew,” to spray paint a
freeway overpass. Tagging, they called
it. I had to get out of bed, throw a coat
over my nightgown and drive to the
police station for the little booger. That
was what he became to me that night,
no better than a noisome waste product
headed for a tissue and the Big Flush. He
was in his crew uniform, a T-shirt, baggy
jeans and a stocking cap, his bare arms
scabby from self-inflicted burns. I told
him I’d knock the stuffing out of him if
he ever did anything like that again. Of
course, you could whack a kid like him
all day and he’d still manage to say or do
something, or just give you a look, that
made you want to keep whacking him.
I’ve thought about this a lot.
I’ve had the time to, now that things
have quieted down. All those volcanic
explosions claiming he never asked to
be born, making me wish he’d come
with a return mailing label. Sometimes
I wonder if he just did that to make
himself stronger, like they do with
steel blades, heating and cooling, then
heating and cooling, until it’s tougher
than whatever it needs to cut through.
I treasure my son, don’t get me
wrong. His Spirit. God knows I wish his
little sister had a tenth of his spunk.
Sometimes when I’m yelling at her I
worry she’ll just dry up and blow away.
Even worse, I won’t notice. I’ll be paying
too much attention to Donny. Only now
it’s a different kind of attention.
I first got the idea of how to
deal with him from Steven Hawking,
you know, the late twentieth century’s
Einstein. Einstein invented the theory of
relativity. Something about a train going
a certain speed and out the window
everything starts to stretch out, or
maybe moosh up, like a yeast dough left
too long to rise. Or something.
Einstein didn’t talk until he was
four years old. His mother claimed
Beginnings X Endings
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