It raced down his shuddering throat and pushed at his heart, urging it to pump. Urging it to work! That was what human bodies were supposed to do. They were supposed to work!
But the wind’s pumping only tore the thin tissue more. It only made the bleeding worse. There was a hole in the boy’s heart, and nothing could fix it.
His spirit was almost gone from him. The wind could feel the boy unraveling from himself. He could feel him floating free. But it could also feel him struggling, trying to remain with the wind.
He was trying to speak. He wanted to tell the wind something.
“Wind,” he whispered but didn’t whisper. “Wind. Stay. Don’t come with me. Stay.”
No!
The wind would go with the boy.
It would race up the golden column. It would hug itself to the boy. It would curl around the blazing spirit of him and race into eternity. It would always stay with the boy. What would it be without him? Nothing. Not wind.
“Stay,” the boy said, and the wind thought it heard him laugh. But why? Why would he laugh? Why did the boy always laugh at the worst things. The most wrong things.
You stay, the wind begged. You stay.
I love you, the wind told him, even though it had never told a being it loved it before. What did the wind know about love? Nothing, until the boy.
I love you.
The boy smiled. He was dying, and he smiled. “Of course you do. I always knew. Like you knew I’ve always loved you. You, Wind, are the most loved wind in the whole world.”
Had the boy said that, or was it the wind’s imagination?
The boy wasn’t breathing anymore. His heart was a slow, weeping thud.
The wind had known many deaths. It had lived for eons. It had seen more deaths than sand on a beach. None of them had mattered. Death was nothing to the wind.
But now, death was the thing that stole love and never gave it back. It was the specter that took its boy away.
The wind sobbed, curling on the boy’s chest.
“Wind,” the boy’s spirit whispered, “don’t cry. Just . . . tell me a story. Like you used to. Tell me a wind story.”
So the wind—a brave, courageous, intelligent, wondrous being—told its boy a story.
It told him the story of the boy.
Once, the wind said, there was a wind, and it was happy being the wind doing wind-things. It was alone, but it didn’t know it was alone. Then, one day, it rubbed along the protruding belly of the man’s wife and heard a small hiccup.
The wind was curious about the hiccup, so it traveled inside the womb and found two tiny spirits. There was a girl, and there was a boy. And as the wind swirled around the cosmic fluid, the boy looked right at the wind, his small heart drumming soothingly, and he reached out and curled a tiny pink hand around the wind.
The boy wrapped the wind in his hands, and the wind stayed there for a long time. It couldn’t help it. The boy was holding the wind so tightly, so sweetly, that the wind couldn’t possibly leave him.
When the boy was born, the wind pushed cosmic fluid from his lungs and helped him breathe his first breath. It spiraled on his cries and laughed at how the boy’s cheeks turned red. It rested on his downy baby hair and spun soothing circles on his chest. It sang him lullabies and rocked him to sleep at night.
The boy loved birthdays, and so the wind helped him blow out every candle. The boy loved reading, so the wind cuddled in his lap and helped him turn the pages. The boy shattered the mirror that wanted to kill him, so the wind flung the shards away from him, as far as it could.
The boy was alone except for his books and the strangers on the subway, so the wind kept him company. It rustled leaves to make him laugh. It splashed his tea to make him smile. It sang along with the records the man played and shoved the boy into a dance.
The boy grew up. And the wind stayed with him.
It kept him safe when he protected the girl. It taught him to be polite. It spent autumns with him in the north, and summers with him riding subways. It slid down icy sidewalks with him in the winter and blew snowflakes onto the boy’s cheeks.
It was with the boy always.
