Those were his last words before the kite string, pulled taut on a gale day, decapitated my uncle.
The hobby shop warned him against professional grade string.
He wouldn’t listen.
“Don’t tell me my business. We’ll be fine. C’mon boys,” he said before we, me and my two cousins, walked back across the gravel parking lot to his ragged short bed.
“Change the oil regularly and you can run anything over 150,000 miles—easy,” he lectured.
Movies don’t exaggerate. Their father’s body (actually corpse, not to be morbid) remained erect several moments after the lopping incision. Forever when you’re ten and shrieking.
Movies don’t exaggerate. Their father’s body (actually corpse, not to be morbid) remained erect several moments after the lopping incision. Forever when you’re ten and shrieking.
My cousins faired terribly.
Later in life family picnics ended with grown men howling inaudibly while crawling across national park designated picnic areas, after flipping over tables under shelters #10 & 11, four types of chip and frankfurters taking flight, baked beans scalding poorly situated onlookers, mirth become Sicilian mourning, after florescent kites took to the repugnant sky.
The scene resembled a Dresden air-raid with petrified though mobile men crawling like Edenistic serpents, bellies damned into dust, pissing themselves, darkening their pleated chinos and laughing manically from feared kites—winged Devil machines they’d bellow from sweat soaked sheets nightly—while covering their necks to protect against random string lacerations. Tears turned dirt to mud. Their mouths spewing inadvertently digested crab grass and dandelions, they begged all other recreation indulgees to hit the ground and crawl from the designated picnic area, flee the winged devil machines and seek shelter under the cars.
Witnessing, before the police handcuffed him, Cousin Danube sprint towards a kite operating seven year-old while wielding in his clenched fist a serrated knife with cake frosting spewing off the blade and over his shoulder, tackling the youth, separating both the boy’s fawnish collar bones, breaking a few guppy-like ribs, then forcibly cutting the string to observe an oak tree confiscate the downed devil machine.
Cousin Danube heaved with relief while the rookie Park Ranger guessed a radio number for Armed Forcibly Downed Kite W/ Assault, Aggravated Battery, hoping the bungled code wouldn’t affect negatively his 90-day review while waiting for State Troopers.
Ambulance stretchers and EMT personel, white gloves and white sheets, usually indicate assistance and hope. Cousin Danube handcuffed to the collapsible gurney, a weighty juxtaposition, exasperated his children’s tears, I think.
Regrettably that wasn’t rock bottom. I randomly opened a Britannica at their house. The H volume. Thumbed through and paused at the article scribbled out with black marker, realizing it was the history of the Hudson River, where a boy flew a kite across the Hudson laying the foundation to construct the first bridge. Cousin Danube edited history to placate his paranoia, erasing kites’ historical significance least his children read vaunting accomplishments about the contraption that murdered his father, my uncle.
