kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"Simplicity.0"

words

On a brisk morning in the fall, on the Eastern coast of the United States, a boy waited out of line for his school bus. The air was noisy, with the noise of other children in and out of line, and smelly, with the smell of exhaust and litter decomposing in the gutters of the street. There was shoving, and jostling, hooting and hollering, and a delicate breeze.

The boy noticed none of it but the breeze, that blowing through the red and yellow and green leaves of a maple surviving stoically in the middle of the city. He was watching a seed of the maple sway back and forth on a branch, slowly wriggling itself loose, the branch swaying back and forth as well.

He noticed but did not notice the bus pull up, and the children in line tighten together and the children out of line rush to push through the line. Their voices were muffled, insignificant. The bus, though large and yellow and bringing with it far more fumes of exhaust, didn't begin to register.

He watched the tiny seed sway back and forth on the branch of the maple tree.

He could imagine, very closely, the sensation that the seed was feeling at that very moment. It reminded him of sitting in a boat that someone else was gently rocking; rhythmic, but not quite, always the slightest bit off.

His name was called, but he did not hear. His arm was grabbed, but he was not there.

He was a seed, rocking back and forth on a maple tree, waiting for the right moment to let go and float along the lazy currents of the curling air.

He was a seed, rocking back and forth, bursting with the life of a _huge_ maple tree himself. But first he had to let go. First he had to let go and ride the currents of the wind and find a patch of moist soil to lie in, and then he would grow.



Grow.

A chill twitched up his spine and he let go of the branch, let go with no thought for safety. He was spinning. He was dizzy from spinning, yet it was right that he spun, and he closed his eyes and concentrated on the motion that was his spin; as he quantified it, the motion became a constant, and he was no longer dizzy. The world spun around him but that did not matter; he was a top, riding the wind.

He was life.

But where was his soil?

With the world spinning, it was hard for him to focus. He knew that the soil immediately beneath him would not do; he could not grow there. But some part of him knew as a boy that there was no other place to grow, and he despaired. If he could not grow, he would not be. The little boy, the seed, desperately wanted to be.

Confused, the wind blew him this way and that, and so it was he fell through the window of a yellow school bus, into the hands of a little boy, staring out the window at a maple tree.

And he looked down at the seed, and knew how much it wanted to be a tree, and he cradled it in his hands and swore to the seed that he would take it to his teacher when he was delivered to the school; his teacher would help him find a place to plant the seed and help it grow.