he only shook his head at me apologetically. A little wave of panic swept
through me as the kind man closed the door behind him, defeated. I
was alone, stricken. As I stood there the white walls and dirty tiles of the
classroom seemed to close in on me. Black lines crossing against white
tiles reminded me of bars: intricate and impenetrable. I rushed out into
the hallway, closing the door to block the path of that suffocating sense of
reality that slowly encroached the room.
That day when I came home from school my brother Ryan and I
found my dad in the back yard. He had gone to mow the lawn, he told
us, and found a fly caught in a spider web just above the lawn mower.
“That’s the circle of life.” Said Ryan, but my dad kept looking at the
little thing suspended there. Ryan left grumbling about being hungry,
but dad reached out and took the fly in his hand. Slowly and with
great concentration he worked on removing the spider’s string from the
shocked fly. After a while he had freed it and set in on a blade of grass.
“Hope the poison didn’t kill him,” he tisked. “He could just be in shock,”
I said, quietly. He dusted his hands off on his jeans, and leaning closer
he took one last look at the shocked, numb creature and sighed, “That’s
all I can do for him now. Hope he’s all right.” Seeing him lumber away
hesitantly I couldn’t help but smile.
Mr. Crossen asked us in class the next day to compose a short
paper that, in essence, described our view on life. I wrote that we are
all little bugs in someone’s yard out there in the universe, awkwardly
struggling through the grass. Some of us have long legs or slick bodies
that give us an advantage. Some of us have short stubby legs, or wings
that impair us and force us to struggle and fight to get by. As I wrote, I
thought about Jerry sitting in his cell, but the more I thought of him the
more I thought of the little fly stuck in the spider’s web. “That’s all I can
do for him now.” My dad had said. Of course it was. When I think about
that fly I think about Jerry, I think about myself, I think about all of us,
awkwardly struggling, fumbling around. “That’s all I can do for now.” I
know that those halfhearted words, full of kindness, will probably catch
up to me as well, but as I followed my dad back into the house and heavy
white beads were tossed this way and that within the confines of my
backpack, I couldn’t keep images of Jerry’s colorf