The Boomerang
One summer we were given boomerangs. We couldn’t figure out how to make them come back to us, and so always had to go looking for them where they’d fallen disobediently into the field, as if their only wish was to burrow down into our land and pop up in Australia. But we trusted that one day we’d figure out how to throw them so they’d return whispering into our hands. I wanted that, to cast something away from myself with such velocity it had to come back. One evening we were practicing our boomerang throwing in a meadow behind our grandparents’ house. Just as my brother’s boomerang disappeared into the grass, something leapt up in the air. It was a surprise. We hadn’t expected any response. Maybe the first step in getting something to come back to you was for it to turn into something else. But when we ran over to see what the boomerang had become, we found a dead rabbit. Not just dead. Beheaded. The head was looking back at the body, while the boomerang was lying nearby, like a dog you find snoozing amidst blood and feathers. Of all the places in that meadow for that rabbit to be. Of all the places in that meadow for that boomerang to fall. Random as a farmer being killed by a meteorite. But can something that precise be random? I can still remember my brother, who’d grow up to become a surgeon, sobbing. Our paltry attempts to comfort him. It could have been any of the three of us who’d thrown it. That was true, but it was just as true that it had been him. On the porch, the adults sat, obscured by the screen, along with something else, the screen that always hovers between adults and children. Faint laughter. Maybe a humorous story was being told, something long forgotten suddenly remembered, as happens on porches in summer. They thought we were having fun. And that rabbit, looking at itself with what I can only describe as a look of pity, the way, in the hardest moments of our lives, we tend to regard ourselves from a distance, and might even say our own names to ourselves in the mirror, embrace ourselves, kiss our own wrists. Years have passed since that night. Decades. That moment traveling out from me in an arc so huge it looks like a straight line, as if it intended never to return. And now look – it’s come back.