Ken Poyner

Talent

 

I think it was discovered on my first trip to the beach.  I was at that bubbly and grandiose age when most children are beginning first grade.  I am told the news ran up and down the beach like an unbreakable rip current, herding people in our direction. My parents tried to explain, to put together a logical process, but the phenomenon was new to them. They were as surprised as anyone.  They had no idea my talent was going to suddenly reveal itself, or that I had this talent at all.

 

There is no explanation they could have given.  I was too young to assist.  Ultimately, they just pushed and shoved through the gathering crowd to the parking lot, with me in both arms, getting and giving a fever of bruises on the way.  A few agape people tried to follow us as we drove off; but Dad knew the area well, and supposedly we caught some propitious lights, ran some others, eventually made our way home alone.

 

The next day they bought a wading pool, set it up in the garage, and tested the problem.  At their hesitant urging I softly stepped out, took a turn about the cold, blue plastic pool, walked back to my gaping-mouths parents. Yes, their son could walk on water.

 

They tried to keep it quiet.  They warned me about pool trips, deep puddles, shorelines.  But I was a kid.  At times occasional activities looked to potentially hold too much fun and I would slip into noncompliance.  At first, parents would not believe reports of witness from their astonished children – but eventually they would investigate their son’s or daughter’s claims, keep hounding until they could see for themselves.

 

And then my parents would be stuck giving out the same old song and dance:  no, our son is not the second Jesus; no, he cannot cure your child’s asthma; no, sorry about your mother’s cancer, but he cannot do anything about it.

 

And then we would move.  Often.

 

As I aged, I tried to use this talent, in private screenings, to advantage.  A supposed chance exhibition that in fact I had been queuing up for weeks.  I soon learned that those in awe preferred to be in awe at a distance; those who were envious preferred to be mean, jealous and plotting.  My talent led to less romance and companionship than I had at first imagined.  Few carnal surrenders from a state of wonder, more distance, less worship and more worry.

 

All adolescent ideas of going on tour, making a fortune, being the headliner of a miracle show, evaporated early.  I let that idea deflate even before leaving my parents’ home.  Too many mornings we woke up with someone having overnight erected an altar on the property, with a line of the infirm crowded on the walkway, crushing the flowerbeds:  some rattling canes, others pushing and shoving for positions closer to the front door. Some, more enterprising than others, would climb the fence and lay siege to the back door.

 

One simple gift, and everyone assumes you come with the full package.  I did not.  I could do one seemingly miraculous thing.  And it did not seem so miraculous to me.

 

How the public discovered us we stopped trying to postulate.  Somehow, I had screwed up.  Somehow, someone traced the data stream.  A chance encounter.  A random witness.  Who cares how?  Here the supplicants, beyond all logic and denial, were.  The curious.  The envious. The deniers.  The faithful.  The unbelieving.  Those with worship and a need of something to focus that worship on.

 

We would start packing.  After getting the always ready boxes filled, we would stay a few nights at a hotel, start sampling other small towns.  My parents would negotiate a change in jobs, over the phone the selling of the home, the purchase or rental of another.

 

I have long avoided all water more than an inch deep.  I’ve changed my name.  Any time anyone follows the long line of changing jobs and changing addresses to show up on my porch, I deny everything, call the police, threaten a harassment suit.

 

But I must admit that every so often I will drive at night well away from my home, select an anonymous stream stretched unremarkably deep within nothingness, and go happily running along its surface moisture for a half mile, maybe more.  Barefoot or in sneakers, it does not matter.  The activity seems to release some pent-up creative static in me.  I feel wonderfully better for three weeks, possibly a month.  Then I begin to wax heavy again, stunted and withdrawn, dense, and I have to go walk or run or dance on the face of water.  Any water.

 

My parents, still in hiding and unknown to me for decades, would be proud of how I now stoically manage my non-conformity.  My younger, better prepared, sister I have not been able to see in years.  Our parents were able to keep a closer hold on her talent, hide her occasional explosion of productivity, protect her with the experience they developed from failing with me.  But I wonder if, even now, she, to feel whole and fulfilled, needs to sneak out to some long-forgotten farm-corner graveyard and gingerly raise the dead.

 

Ken Poyner’s collections of brief fictions, “Constant Animals”, “Avenging Cartography”, “Revenge of the House Hurlers”, and “Engaging Cattle”; and collections of poetry, “The Book of Robot” and “Victims of a Failed Civics”, can be located at Amazon, most online booksellers, and www.barkingmoosepress.com.   He spent 33 years in information system management, is married to a world record holding female power lifter, and has a family of several cats and betta fish.  Individual works have appeared in DM, Café Irreal, Analog, The Cincinnati Review, and several hundred other places.  He has had so far seven Pushcart nominations without fielding a single win.

​

​