Neither of Cassidy’s parents was particularly demonstrative.
They didn’t deal in doting displays, tugs and hugs.
“The glories of God are sometimes best kept hidden” Harry would sigh mysteriously whenever a love scene came on the TV. There were posed family shots scattered within the beach house, but no individual candids. The only picture that featured Cassidy alone sat on his mother’s dresser. Two pictures actually. Cassidy aged five standing on some windy beach, profiled against a rough sea. A study in black and white, he is framed in the bottom left, holding what he knew to be a kite string, looking out across the scene, peering up into an empty white sky. To the right of this photo stood another, this one in colour. Here a startlingly slender version of his father looks skyward, the wind blowing his thick hair back off his face revealing Harry’s handsome, young man self. One hand shields his eyes; the other arm is extended, reaching up towards a small red kite with a blue tail. Annie would say “Oh my” and press her hand to her breastbone whenever she looked upon this picture. She always swore that she had taken the candids in the same instant, an invisible kite line connecting the two moments, but Cassidy wasn’t so sure. But he did remember loving that kite, his first real prized possession.
And he had named it.
What had he named it?
‘Red’ something. After someone in the family.
Red Tom?
Red Dick?
Surely not.
Red Harry?
Red Annie?
Red Cassidy?
He rubbed his forehead and recalled the vivid moment when he’d let slip the string and watched helplessly as the kite rose up and out to sea and… just kept going.
Pretty symbolic, sighed Cassidy who was starting to see an undercurrent of meaning in everything and was beginning to tire of all of this self-regard. He just couldn’t help himself. A slow burning cadence, an almost exotic undertow kept shifting him outwards, upwards, “like Icarus ascending, on beautiful foolish arms”. A silent prompting voice kept urging him to decipher this secret code, and he persevered if only because… he needed his life to fit him better.
He wanted to feel free.
He wanted to shine like the sun.
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