Author's Note: This one's a fable, and it's the saddest thing I wrote during the Destination Okinawa years. It's about a boy who wants to fly, the adults who don't know what to tell him, and an ending that will make you go back and read again. A warning: it does not pull the landing.

Frankie wanted to fly, wanted to fly so badly that he could taste it. It was the only thing he wanted to do. He thought about it all the time; during class when he was supposed to be paying attention, during dinner when he was supposed to be eating, and in the shower, when he was supposed to be washing his hair. Frankie’s blank stare into space soon became his trademark look and occurred so frequently that Mr. and Mrs. Frankie’s parents became very concerned that their child might be otherwise damaged in the head. They took him to several doctors, who, despite commenting on Frankie’s obsession with flying, found nothing mentally wrong with the boy.

His parents did the best they could for a child who was going through a rough time in his life, tried to supplement his inability to fly with posters and toys and planes that hung from the ceiling and flew circles around his bedroom. They had a hard time deciding what the best course of action was, whether to bombard their son with images of the very thing he desired or to shield him from the reality that other things in the world could very much fly. Back and forth they went, sometimes arguing well into the night. Frankie would wake up one morning to find all his toys gone and his walls bare. A few days later, it would all magically reappear.

Though he was old enough to recognize that his parents were fighting all the time and that a divorce might be on the horizon or even worse that they were going absolutely insane trying to figure out what to do with him, Frankie didn’t seem to care at all. There was only one thing he cared about and that was flying and that was why he woke up every morning so he could think about it and plan how he would eventually get to fly. It got to the point where Frankie was borrowing three or four books from the library every day. The History of Flight, The Spirit of St. Louis, and Flying for Dummies.

Every day, studying. Every day, trying to find a cure for his affliction. But there was nothing in the books, nothing he could really use or even understand. Books on planes were very technical, had a lot of blue and white drawings that he didn’t understand and numbers that meant nothing to him. A propeller looked like an engine looked like a jet. It was all the same. Finally, Frankie decided he was going to have to get the goose straight from the hen’s mouth if he was ever going to learn.

On a breezy Saturday morning, Frankie woke up and snuck past his parents’ bedroom and then tiptoed around his father sleeping on the couch and out the back door and down the street. His destination was six houses down, where his friend Epson lived, because Epson’s father was a pilot for Southwest and if anyone was going to know how to fly it was someone who flew the big jumbo cargo planes for a living. He knocked on the door and Epson answered and Frankie demanded to see his father and Epson said, “Yeah, whatever” and let him in and there was Epson’s dad, dressed in his pilot’s uniform, sitting at the table, drinking a cup of coffee.

He told Epson’s father, whose name was Mr. Epson, that he wanted to know how planes could fly when they were so big and so heavy and carrying all those cars and trucks around inside of them. Mr. Epson took a long drink of his coffee and seemed to go to another place as if he had never thought about the exact mechanics of flight, but eventually he came down out of the clouds to deliver his summary.

“It’s complicated,” he said, returning to his newspaper.

When Frankie didn’t leave and when Mr. Epson remembered Mrs. Epson talking about the strange little boy from down the street who had a fascination with flying and whose parents were on the verge of divorce because of all the money and attention they were having to spend on him, he cleared his throat and made a second attempt.

“Alright,” he said, looking around to make sure no one was watching, “I’ll tell you the secret to flight.”

Frankie stepped closer to Mr. Epson, so that he only had to whisper.

“The big planes, the ones you see up in the sky, what do you notice about them?”

Frankie shrugged.

“They’re going fast,” continued Mr. Epson. “That’s the key, you have to run really fast.”

“That’s all?” asked Frankie.

“Of course not. Planes also roar. Can you roar?”

Frankie nodded and then roared.

“Not like a lion, like a plane.”

Frankie tried again, sounded a little more like an engine. This made Mr. Epson wave his hands wildly around in the air.

“No, no, son! Not in here! I can’t have you flying around my house this early! Mrs. Epson would kill me! You go on outside and give it a shot. Remember, you have to roar really loudly.”

Frankie smiled, said thanks, and ran out of the house. As he sprinted down the driveway, he extended his arms out to the side like wings and spread his fingers because he had read something about flaps in one of his countless books. He didn’t really understand what they were for or why they were used but the term stuck in his mind because they were part of a plane and called flaps even though they didn’t flap at all. He banked at the end of the driveway and rolled gently into the middle of the street.

His feet fell like jackhammers on the pavement, pushing his body faster and faster down the empty block. When he felt he was going fast enough, Frankie opened his mouth and began to roar. He wasn’t doing it consciously, but the sound that came from his mouth was a mixture of excitement and years of disappointment and anger and rage and all the emotion he had been keeping locked up because he couldn’t fly. The roar echoed down the street. His eyes began to water. But he did not fly.

All along the street, concerned neighbors looked out their windows at little Frankie running down the street, screaming his head off.