May 14, 2025

Speck

You can never tell the size of a bird in an empty sky.

And you never know its velocity but I think it’s an infinite acceleration, birds must have some dangling matter that says when or they’d go straight into space or like Icarus.

It would have put the world into a spin if the newspaper picture Bobby altered ever went further than Fairmount elementary, he put a speck in the space above Neil Armstrong’s shoulder and don’t ask me how he did it but he loaned intention and personality to his speck, nobody once said what’s that it was so clearly a bird in the moonsky and it’s impossible to tell the direction of a speck but this little squish was definitely on its way to the nearest shoulder.

Nobody knew what to do with Bobby.

I learned to tell when he was cooking something up, he had a way of tilting his head like he was listening to far flung directions, my mother was confused and shocked at the artwork he came up with and she limited his alone time. She encouraged television and gave him a tray upon which to balance his dinner but he was watching those sitcoms without watching and I knew by the increasing tilt what stage he was at. Her plans backfired, his plans grew in scope and required extensive execution, he’d stay up all night in his room across the hall from mine, I’d get up sometimes and see the line beneath his door and although I was the one who burst through he burst bigger, his electric presence when he was in the process of making something, anything, it was the way they depict birth on those stupid shows, part agony and part something I could not determine.

I think now it contained a sort of indifference – a vibrant and saturated indifference – like deep space where nothing is everything.

My brother was the only true artist I’ve ever known, he tread so softly between normalcy and deviancy, lightly lightly, just enough, he joked when we were older, to keep him out of jail.

Not many kids slip by with their selves in tact, but Bobby sailed through the school system nobody said anything was wrong exactly. One spark at a time my parents without understanding accepted and supported him, my father finished the basement with surfaces all around the perimeter for him to work, and I don’t think Bobby ever slept in his bedroom again, it eventually became an extension of mine, I blinged it out and danced with my girlfriends, they were always going on about Bobby, I could feel their heartthrobs, an entire generation of small town girls dreamed of being in Bobby’s arms, content to be mildly ignored forever.

He was never one of those savants who can’t relate to others, Bobby was a popular kid, he was smart and athletic and funny and surprising, one night he turned not only my bedroom door upside down but my parents’ as well, my mother was famous for always waiting until the last minute to go to the bathroom, on trips she made my father pull over and she ran full speed into the bushes, she’d never had an accident until the morning her door handle was on the wrong side, she said you never knew what was what at our house.

His imagination –

I don’t know. Whatever space we have for imagination –

I don’t know if he had more space in his brain for the wild imagination it housed, or if less because it squirmed out and touched everyone.

You couldn’t unsee the things Bobby showed you, or unfeel the things he made you feel – nor did you want to – being with him was like swallowing lopsided gemstones I can still feel the sharp edges, other edges so soft they seeped. He was never angry and seldom disappointed. Later in life he lived in a sort of intentional poverty. During his sculpting years, and those were mighty prosperous years, he gave his work away, one piece alone could fund charities for a long time, my doctor recently revealed she had received a scholarship and was educated on my brother’s dime. He lived on couches and in slow-moving trains, he visited me once a year or so and stayed until he left, I know how that sounds but that’s how it felt, he was mine again for x and then so very not mine.

I didn’t start this piece with an analogy in mind, I am not one for such opportunities, the bird thing simply came to me when I woke up this morning, it was in my head when I made coffee how you could never tell the size of a bird in an empty sky, that’s all.