Coffee Can

Once upon a time, there was a girl. On a dark and stormy night, the wind picked up and howled. It rattled the windows. A gust blew open the front door, flew up the stairs, and blew out her soul’s pilot light. In the dark she groped around for light, but there was none. One day she awoke to a flutter in the belly. A flopping fish churned her insides and squeezed her lungs. 9 months later the fish flipped the switch and relit the pilot light on his way out. He flopped onto shore and as the sun dried the water off of his glistening skin, he was transformed into a golden haired boy. Ordinary looking but for his shining eyes. He grinned up at the girl and she knew that he was no ordinary fish.

They laid on the shore soaking up sunshine until the heat forced them into the water to cool off. The girl swam out, watching the smiling boy on shore. She dove down deep reveling in her newly ignited soul. When she came up for air, she watched in horror as a lumbering monster stole the boy’s voice, put it in an old coffee can and ran off over the hills with it. The boy seemed not to mind and happily went back to playing.

His mama was bereft at the loss of the boy’s voice. How would he survive without a voice? How would she find out what the boy had come to tell her? She left the boy on the river’s shore and chased the monster demanding that he give it back. She grew more and more weary, running slower and slower. Her soul’s light again began to dim, so far from her boy.

Exhausted, she tripped and fell and the monster stole something from her. Too tired to chase the monster any longer, she stumbled slowly back to her boy on the shore and lay recuperating. The boy’s eyes still glimmered and his little chubby hands tugged at her to build sand castles, but she lay there too tired to move, feeling like she had failed him. It was her fault that the boy had no voice because she looked away for that split second. Her body sank deeper into the shore and weeds began to grow up around her. She could hear the boy splashing along the edge of the river, but she was too tired to lift herself out of the muck. The boy could no longer reach her through the weeds, and with no voice, he could not call to her to tell her to come and play with him or that the sun was still beautiful on the water.

Being the mischievous and stubborn little boy that he was, he began to toss things over the weeds to disturb his mother’s sorrowful slumber. He had lost patience with his sulking playmate. At first,he scooped small pebbles, then wet mud dug out from the shore.

Finally fetid stinking swamp muck from further down the shore. She awoke with a glop to the face, angry and filthy she charged out of the grass weeping and wailing about all they had lost.

The little boy looked on with curious wide eyes that still glistened with mischief and delight. When she had sobbed all of her tears and had nothing left, the little boy walked over and put his chubby grubby little hands gently on her face. The girl asked “But aren’t you angry that I couldn’t stop the monster,

that I couldn’t get your voice back?” The boy just shook his head and wrapped his chubby little fingers around her hands and tugged her to standing. His face lit up with delight. He splashed her and stood back with a devilish grin on his face. She looked at him and she began to forget what it was exactly that the monster had taken. As they played in the water, she kept expecting to see a shadow come over the boy’s face, some sort of sadness or anger about what they had lost. But there was nothing.

The boy just beamed, happy to have his playmate back. As the summer faded, the girl realized that everything the boy had come to tell her could be read in his eyes, in his chubby little fingers, in his mischievous grin. They sat on the shore watching the sun dip lower in the sky. The heat dried the water off their skin and an old rusty coffee can drifted up on shore. She left it where it lay and nestled her head against the boy.

Ethan was born missing part of his brain. After five years, countless specialists could not determine the cause or whether the disease would progress. I discovered that I had late stage neurological lyme disease that caused lesions in my brain and that Ethan had contracted lyme disease during my pregnancy. We are both currently being treated. I will most likely recover completely. Much of Ethan’s brain damage may be permanent, but we swim a lot more these days. Ethan still occasionally flings muck to keep his mother in line.