The Swing

When we were young, my brother built a swing. Like any worthy childhood craft, it was made entirely out of scratch from a wooden board he found laying around and an old laundry rope that had sat unnoticed in the quiet shelves of the garden shed ever since mom had deemed it unworthy of supporting my father's heavy duty pants. From the window, I watched my brother cross the lawn cradling it in his arms the way he would eventually come to hold his daughters many years from then.

Slung over one of the sturdiest branches of the guayabo, the swing swayed lazily in the afternoon breeze, beckoning us to it with its slow, hypnotic rhythm. My brother stood before it, gangly arms akimbo, and surveyed it with the look only comparable to that of a quality control inspector. Once he had found it appropriate, he proceeded to squat down into it, pulling slightly on the ropes to check for their sturdiness. Taking a deep breath, he fixed his gaze on some point in the horizon and yanked the yellowing mecate as he pummelled into the first swing.

After a couple of seconds, I saw him fall back into place. My name suddenly rang across yard and I hurried away from the sink were I had been furiously scrubbing the oatmeal pot. He motioned me to push him; I dried my hands on my cutoffs and took my position behind him.

He was a year older than me, but that summer I had grown so tall I towered over him whenever we stood side by side. Oddly, he never seemed to mind his sister looming five inches over his head. At school, this came in handy when it came to scaring off anyone who tried to pick on him for capturing bugs during recess to examine them inside the little glass mole jars. I guess that for someone whose peripheral view allows him to put more things into perspective, this fact appeared highly irrelevant.

As I stood pushing him on his makeshift swing, I began to grow tired. Sensing this, my brother piped up that I should do it harder. His screams grew in the same crescendo as the force I put into each shove. With a new and irritated resolve in my blood, I put my whole strength into one last mighty push that could have sent him higher than any swing he had ever sat on, had the rope not snapped in that precise moment. Stupefied, I saw him soar through the air in a slightly awkward arc before he landed with a sickening thud on the ground, smacking the nape of his neck on the edge of the wooden board.

Round green eyes looked up at me before turning into two slots of mortification when he discovered he was bleeding. Wailing, he got onto his feet and stormed across the garden, hand clamped tightly to the back of his neck.

Although my mother pulled my ears so hard I worried it might fall off, my brother was back to normal in a week. He received six stitches and a rather rowdy haircut, but other than that he was fine. After I snuck some chocolate from my dad's secret tin up to our room and placed it under his pillow, he was back to making me cardboard pinwheels and kites pieced together from scraps of tissue paper. Although he even got to make our baby sister's birthday piñata, he never came around to building another swing.

Forty years from that August day, my eldest niece still maintains I pushed her daddy off the swing.