Blue Ira - Ollie Caillier (Alabama School of Fine Arts, Tenth Grade)

It was then when I noticed it. My mother looking at me. Her pale face peered down at  me, blocking the orange light in the sky; scattering sharp bright lights in every which way. She  was kneeling down, eyes glued to the white smear of skin slowly turning red on my left knee. I  was seconds away from crying, but I held it in. I held it in, just like Mother. 

I leisurely got up, but mother stayed the exact same. Studying me as I slowly limped to  our house not even one block away. 

When I was inside, out of her sight, I dashed to Father’s study to cry. Away from Mother.  Anywhere from Mother. Anywhere but her cold, blue eyes, unfeeling and unemotional– A stark  contrast from the face she puts on around my teachers. I hated it. I hated that only I knew what a  monster my mother was. 

=== 

“Wow, Jay you really do break bones a lot, huh?” one of the kids I was walking home  with remarked. 

“In all of my life, I don't think I’ve ever broken a bone. This is like, uh- the fourth time  for you, isn’t it?” 

They all crowded around my injury, commenting about it et cetera. 

I spoke up. “Uhhh no I think this is the third time, actually. This one I got by falling off  the swingset.” 

“Damn, that must have hurt, then. I twisted my ankle while falling off there once, and it  hurt.”

“Yeah,” one of the kids piped up. “When Daniel fell, he was screaming and bawling and  shit.” 

“Dude, shut up,” Daniel spat. 

Everyone else just laughed. 

“Oh did you see that the new Zelda game came out recently?” someone uttered. “Whoa really? How much is it?” 

“Like sixty dollars, I think.” 

“Ughhh, looks like I’ll have to beg my parents all night again.” 

“You’re lucky. My parents just got me a new monitor, so there's no way they would buy  me something else for a good two months.” 

I just stayed silent and listened to their conversation. It’s not like I knew anything about  video games anyway. I was never allowed to play them. 

“Jay, dude, do you wanna go to my house today?” 

“Oh, I don’t think I can today,” I muttered. “I have a doctor's appointment this afternoon.  Maybe tomorrow if my mother allows it.” 

One of the kids scoffed. “Your mom is kind of really overprotective.” 

“Well at least she works a lot to help out the school. She’s not even that bad,” someone  remarked. 

“Ohhhh, remember when your mom gave my family some food right after we moved in?  That was the best chicken pot pie I’ve ever had,” one of the boys interjected, disconnected from  the former conversation. 

I just looked at my shoes and simply said, “I remember.” 

===

“Ah, he looks like a perfectly healthy boy.” 

Mother went silent. 

“Other than an oddly high salt intake, he looks okay, have him drink at least two cups of  water a day.” 

Mother opened her lips and spoke. 

What do you mean, he’s healthy? He sure didn’t look healthy this morning, vomiting in  the toilet. 

“Well, we don't know what’s wrong with your son. The only thing we see is oddly high  sodium levels. We don’t know how this happened, but if you just have him drink more water and  watch his sodium intake like I said, he should be fine.” 

What the doctor said was true. Very true. He was just about the last doctor in the city to  tell us that. I wasn’t sick. In fact, I was perfectly healthy. The thing is, Mother made me drink  salt. 

Lots of salt. 

Meatloaf with a cup of salt. 

Shrimp stew with a cup of salt. 

She told me how good the salt was. How the salt will make me live a long and happy life. In stupidity, I believed her. 

=== 

“How come I have to drink so much salt?” I asked her on the way home from the doctor’s  office. 

Your body needs it. Just like how other kids need to drink a lot of milk, you need a lot of  salt.

“And why’s that?” 

Because you’re different from the other kids, Jay. 

“But how am I different?” 

That’s what we’re trying to figure out. 

The next morning, I threw up again. It came out chunky and white, and I felt like dying  that day. Mother rushed over to me, her eyes unchanged. 

I never had to drink salt again after that day. 

=== 

I heard some teachers talking about Mother. 

“Something about her seems a bit off… yeah?” 

“I heard that she bursts into screaming fits whenever someone brings up her husband.” “Well it could be due to stress. I read an article this morning about how stress impacts  mental health. Plus, she does everything she can to help the school and the community.” “Yeah, she’s a widow raising a very sickly son. I’d be on edge all the time too if I were in  her shoes. She’s very admirable if you ask me.” 

“Ah, that poor son. Didn’t he go to the hospital last week?” 

“I think so. One of the students told me it was because of sodium poisoning or something  like that.” 

“That’s tough, I wonder what could be wrong with him.” 

“That’s the thing. Nobody knows what’s wrong with him.” 

“I heard a rumor somewhere that he’s perfectly healthy, it’s just that Ira has some sort of  disorder where she fakes all of his illnesses to get attention.” 

“Huh? Who the hell would spread a rumor like that?”

“Yeah, if she was faking it, CPS would have definitely taken her son away by now.” “I agree. Really goes to show that you can’t believe everything you see on the internet.” I wanted to jump out and scream “those rumors are true, I’m a perfectly healthy kid!” But  

it felt like there were invisible arms around me, gluing me to my seat. I just sat and watched as  the teachers rambled on and on about their lives, not knowing that the sickly son that they were  gossiping about was sitting in detention. Listening in. 

A few minutes later, Mother came in and got me. 

You really need to stop acting out, Jay 

“Alright.” I hardly ever meant anything by saying this. 

I mean it. 

“I heard them talking about you again. And me.” I tried changing the subject. This time,  she didn’t even look at me. “They said you’re a faker. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with  me, and you’re a faker!” 

She gripped my arm harder. 

“They said that they know what you’re doing, and they’re calling CPS right now!” She didn’t say anything, only held my hand and kept walking to the house. I remembered  how the kids at my old school would tease me. 

“Jay, your mom still holds hands with you? My mom stopped doing that when I was  five.” 

I felt my cheeks getting hotter. With all my might, I pushed against Mother and ran back  in the direction of the school. I had to tell the teachers the truth. I had to. While I was running, I  heard thunder and felt a drizzle of rain coming down from above. I didn’t need to look back. I 

didn’t need to look back at her to know that she stands still, unmoving, watching me with those  cold blue eyes. 

=== 

“Daddy, why does mom treat you like that?” 

It was a cold winter day. The sky was a saturated light blue, obscured by the occasional  cloud. This weather made me miserable; made us all miserable. Father was driving me home  from my old school. 

“She treats everyone like that,” he simply said. 

“But I can tell that she treats you differently. Her eyes get all weird and stuff. She’s so…  nice to everybody else except us. It’s starting to really scare me.” 

He simply sighed and said “how about we go on a family trip this weekend? To relieve  stress, ya know?” 

I often heard them fighting. Father and mother. I would hear him echo “he’s a perfectly  healthy boy, Ira! You don’t need to be doing all of this.” 

And she would say nothing to that, because she had nothing to say. To her, he was  nothing but a nuisance. 

And because of that, I know the reason behind Father’s death. The official cause of death  was stated as a suicide, I remember seeing Mother hold her face in her hands and say that as she  pretended to weep. 

He was always suicidal. She said that a lot. It was the final straw for him. He was  suicidal. So suicidal. That’s why he jumped off that cliff. She said it so much that even I started to  believe her. And I still kind of do. What good would knowing his true cause of death do for me?

What good would knowing the reason behind mother’s actions, the truth behind my  frequent injuries, why we moved around so much. 

After tossing the idea around in my head for a bit, I soon came to a conclusion. Someone  out there clearly had planned for my life to be like this. Perhaps they wanted me to suffer. So I  sucked it up, and accepted it. 

=== 

I burst through the school doors. Today, I will tell everyone the truth. Those gossiping  teachers, the kids asking about my broken arm, today they will all know the truth. I felt my lungs  burn as I ran back to my classroom, imagining my mother put behind bars. But, there was  nobody there. 

The classroom was empty. 

=== 

I often liked the swingset. I liked to close my eyes and feel the wind lick my cheeks. I  enjoyed imagining other realities where I was anybody else other than me. “Wouldn’t it be cool if superheroes existed?” 

I opened my eyes, peering down at two kids playing cards on the bare playground mulch. “Yeah, but if they did exist, it’s not like life would be that much different.” “How so?” 

“Well they wouldn’t be all that different from police officers or firefighters. Everyone  already calls those people superheroes anyways.” 

I closed my eyes again and tuned out their conversation. I wished that a superhero would  come and scoop me away. Away from Mother. Away from everything, really. I often dreamed of  being abducted by aliens. Soaring away to new galaxies. Fighting in nonexistent wars, saving 

nonexistent planets. The captain of the spaceship would put his arm on his shoulder and say  “well done, Jay. You’re a real hero.” But when I looked up, I saw Mother instead. === 

She was shaking my shoulder rather hard. Gripping my jacket and roughly pulling me  back out the school entrance. I had foolishly run into an empty school, hoping to be saved by a  superhero. 

I revisited that old memory. 

“Wouldn’t it be cool if superheroes existed?” 

Yeah. Yeah it would. 

=== 

I was laying on my white bed. Mother and a couple of doctors stood over me, giving the  illusion that my very white sheets were instead a sickly gray. They were mumbling about  something, something about me being deathly ill. That I was too sick to even get up and stand,  and that I was probably minutes away from dying. I tried to get up and look around, but those  same invisible hands held me there. I couldn’t talk or move, so I just watched in horror as one of  the doctors injected something into me. 

=== 

I was on the swingset again. 

Jay, It's time to come home. 

I didn’t want to go home. 

Hey, get down from that swing 

Instead, I swung higher and higher, breaking the ozone layer and soaring into outer space.  But instead, I was on the ground, my arm bent in a very unnatural angle. Mother was holding my 

other unbroken arm and dragging me to the car. Under her breath over and over I heard her  mumble. It’s time to go home, it’s time to go home. 

=== 

I woke up. My eyesight was foggy, and my head hurt like hell. Then, I noticed Mother.  Mother was crying. 

=== 

Sometime during grade school, my teachers had us make cards for mother’s day. Most  normal kids love their mothers. Mothers are supposed to care for their children, and protect them  from bad things. There were many “bad things” that Mother protected me from. I looked down at the card template. 

What is one or more thing(s) that you like about your mother? 

I thought about it for a bit. Mother was never to mean, though she was never too nice,  either. She always held the same look of content while looking at me. Only breaking her poker  face while talking to my teachers or classmates. She often helped out during school events,  sacrificing her own time. She made friends with my classmates’ parents, usually going to their  parties and encouraging me to play with their kids. To an outside view, there was a lot to like  about Mother. 

I picked up a colored pencil, and wrote my answer on the card. 

My mother is good at acting. 

=== 

I was watching Mother. I didn’t remember ever getting up out of that bed, but I kind of  accepted it at this point.

Mother was talking to a woman in a white coat. Mother was truly crying, truly crying.  For once not failing to show what an abhorrent mess of a woman she truly was. The woman she  was talking to carried a clipboard, and had a nametag on her coat. She put a hand on Mother’s  shoulder, and I could now tell that this woman was holding back tears. My heart started racing  for some reason, and I took a couple of shaky steps back. For the first time in a bit, I was able to  hear a voice. Clear and crisp. 

“I’m sorry, Ira. Your son-”