There was a little house on a quiet street in a quiet town. The house had its pros and cons, but it was always permanent, a fixture in a wildly changing world. There were a mother and a father in the house. The mother shall be described as a porcelain ballerina, forever graceful, eternally turning around and around with her arms raised. The father of the house was a bespectacled, intelligent man, forever sitting at the kitchen table and contemplating the secrets of the universe. The house sat in silent stasis – Mother turns lovely endless pirouettes and Father grows more leaden with every tick of the clock.
How, then, would it have been for the child of this household? She must have walked on eggshells, aware of the fragility of her parents. She would have been angry, starved for attention. This girl, a bird too long trapped in a cage, our Sparrow, gathered energy until, at the first opportunity, she burst forth. A shining dove – Sparrow! – burst forth from the rooftops and fled.
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Sparrow was beautiful. She walked lightly, spritely, and when she ran she did not lose an ounce of grace. Her arms moved in the air as though it were water. She appeared to float. With elegance like Sparrow’s it didn’t matter that her eyes were too far apart, that her lips and cheeks were too taut, that there were five small hairs between her eyebrows.
When Sparrow’s arms went up, the world paused to await direction. When Sparrow danced, when she disappeared into a golden swirl, the universe took care to echo her motion. Sparrow was motion. The girl with the long brown hair, with the invisible wings, was the world’s secret conductor.
Sparrow, around whom the world turns, approached the boy with the red-rimmed eyes. “Do I know you?”
The boy scowled through a curtain of blue-dyed hair. “No,” he said, like a sulking child.
A pause. For a moment the world was a satellite with nothing to orbit. Then Sparrow spoke again. “Then why were you staring at me?”
He looked at his black-painted fingernails. “Just thinking about the vapidity that has become the celebrated norm in American teenagers.”
Sparrow smiled a smile that could have powered a city. “Okay then. See you around…” she searched for a name.
“Ian.”
“Right.” And she was gone, back to a life at the center of it all.
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Flourescent hallways were her stage. Classrooms worshipped her. She had friends –oh yes, such wonderful friends – and they spun a heady fast-track around her. All the while Sparrow, liquid motion, artfully illustrated the cosmos.
Failing English. Ditto Math. Ditto Chemistry. Acing gym. Sparrow had no interest in the dry, disconnected world of academia. For her the richer sun-drenched world known as Freedom.
For longer pauses now the world lacked its central polarity. For longer pauses, indecision, confusion, pain. Where was the daughter of the stationary household, where was Sparrow? She was with the boy, the blue-haired, pale-faced Ian, just talking.
“What is beauty?” she said. Even her words were fire and gold.
He: “Beauty is that which inspires.”
“The Holocause inspired the world to address anti-Semitism, but it wasn’t beautiful.”
Ian smiled. “Beauty is the product of inspiration.”
For a tiny instant, the air inside their shared dark broom closet fluttered away. Sparrow was no longer a principle of motion but a girl. “I’ve got to go to class,” she breathed, and the air rushed back in. “Bye, Ian.”
And with the rebecoming of the dancer, the universe was in order once again, and the caged adolescents resumed their rotation about their gleaming sun, Sparrow.
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Her world was not perfect. Oh, not perfect. When the once sun-warmed sidewalks turned cool with dusk, Sparrow traced a line of spider’s silk to the small house on the quiet street. She skirted the piripheries of her parents’ lives, watched from a distance as a porcelain tear slid down Mother’s porcelain face, watched pensive Father decay into convalescence. And then she slept the way a prisoner sleeps: flat on her back, eyes squeezed shut.
Oh no, certainly not perfect. Sometimes on the walks between glorious symphonies, she would stop, paralyzed by some nameless emotion, just long enough to cry before continuing on. Sometimes her thoughts veered off on dark detours. Heavy, dripping forests filled the spaces between waking and sleeping. Leering faces with beastly grins chased her down the corridors of her mind. Every day she got out of bed, slipped past pensive Father and music-box mother and resumed her place as the jubilant center of the universe.
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“What is love?” Sparrow asked in the familiar dark of the broom closet.
“I can’t be sure,” Ian said with a quick flick of his hair. “But I think it might feel something like this.”
The stillness came alive with her glory, his adoration. Sparrow laughed, and all of creation rejoiced.
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Sparrow died on a Wednesday.
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This is what Ian said to the wooden coffin, which was the color of her hair:
“I’ll miss the way your fingers danced even when you were sitting. I’ll miss the way you listened. I’ll miss your cowlick. I’ll miss your weird shoes, how kind you were, how gentle you were. Goodbye, Sparrow.”
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That Wednesday, the day they found her dangling from the chandelier, the also found a not. This is what it said:
“Dear Ian: Thank you.”
