Criss Cross
He looks up at her, smiles, looks away. He can tell that she isn’t paying attention, his mother. She’s smoking her cigarette, watching the smoke patter out sporadically before her, as it disperses into the cool blue air. He wonders where the smoke goes; it’s whiteish gray, and the sky is blue. He looks up at the sky, his mother catches in the corner of his eye as he looks up. Briefly, there are faded white sneakers, with pink stripes and a shape which looks like two lines from far away getting closer and closer until they meet. Then legs with purplely lines running down them, then a skirt with more lines, red and blue and green, cutting across each other on a black background. He wants to ask his mother if she likes lines, if the straightness is calming or scary, but he goes past her white blouse and her white vacant face and her thinnish brownish hair to the sky. The sky is blue, so blue, bluer than the lines on his sneakers, or on his glasses, or the letters on his hospital bracelet, which are so faded by now that he can hardly see them. The letters are still there though, if he looks for them, hard enough. He can’t read yet, but he knows that his name is written there: Ernie Jones. Sometimes, suddenly, the fear grips him that when the letters on his white bracelet disappear he will disappear as well; but he doesn’t share this with his mother; and maybe, he thinks happily, when these scary thoughts of him and his letters going away suddenly materialize, maybe he will get to be the orange Ernie from the television. Ernie from television has a big smile, and is very silly, and most importantly he has stripes on his shirt.
But the sky. Ernie Jones, having looked past his mother to the blue dome overhead, looks for the lines in the sky, and cannot find them. This is slightly discomforting to him. Maybe the lines are so thick underneath the blue, so tightly packed, that he cannot see them? While Ernie thinks on the sky his feet play with the purple and brown and red leaves on the ground, his hands clench and unclench and squiggle – as he likes to call it – in his pockets. Although he is deeply puzzled by the linelessness of the sky, he also aware of his nose, which must be red in the crisp Autumn air, and his cold ears and the high whistling sound that erupts there, ever so suddenly, every so often; is the whistling coming from inside, or out? The pain that is beginning to trickle into his neck is present, he can see it almost as well as he sees the blueness of a sky; it is a dull red pain, it is that kind of pain. He knows that if he holds his head in the same position, the red will become a darkling blue, and then a grayish black, and then he won’t be able to see anything at all. His mother knows this too. She throws away her cigarette, and the movement is arrested by Ernie’s eye; he snaps his neck down, and understands that playtime is over. He looks, with longing, at the yellow slide and the red swings that are moving back and forth, playing with the wind. His mother has already starting walking, though, towards the big white building, with her head down; maybe she is looking at the pretty crunchy leaves? Ernie starts walking behind her – not too fast, he knows he can’t walk fast, he musn’t – and even as he tries only to walk on the cracks in the pavement, he looks up to see his mother’s cigarette smoke trailing lazily behind a small aero plane, sailing in the blue blue sky.
Half a Picture 
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