Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [16]
The planes that Milo and his father constructed were made from balsa, a lightweight wood optimal for model building because of its versatility and flexibility. Milo’s father would purchase kits for the two of them to build and they would occasionally dabble in scratch builds of their own design, but in either case, these designs invariably called for the builder to bend the balsa wood in varying degrees in order for it to take on the shape of a wing, fuselage, or tail section.
For Milo, this process seemed inexplicably wrong. Regardless of the time that was spent cutting, sanding, and treating a piece of wood, Milo found it nearly unbearable to bend the wood to the correct specifications without applying just enough additional pressure to make the wood snap in half. He couldn’t explain his need to snap it, and neither did he feel he needed to. It made perfect sense to him, and he couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t feel exactly the same way. To Milo, balsa was like the thin, pale sheets of ice that he would sometimes find at the end of the driveway while waiting for the school bus, the kind with no water beneath that crackled like Styrofoam when broken.
The kind of ice that was impossible not to break.
When the wood finally snapped beneath his unyielding pressure, Milo would suddenly be consumed with a sense of euphoria, the gratifying combination of satisfaction and relief. The increasing pressure on the wood seemed to build equally increasing pressure on his mind, persisting until the wood had to be broken. With its satisfying snap, Milo would shiver in delight.
Unfortunately, his father’s reaction was anything but delight. Though normally a patient man, he could not understand why his son was incapable of bending the wood without snapping it. Again and again he would demonstrate the process to Milo, modeling the technique and providing ample time for his son to practice, but as soon as he as he turned his back to affix a propeller or assemble a fuselage, his son would invariably break some piece of balsa that had required the smallest degree of bending. At the sound of the snap, his father would spin, hands balled into fists, eyes wide, lips pursed. Exclamations like “For God’s sake!” or “What in hell is wrong with you?” would follow, and Milo would invariably be shuffled over to the staining table where he could do no more damage.
There were times when Milo thought that it took all his father’s strength and self-control not to lose his temper and scream at him.
Even when it was his father who bent the balsa into place, the process still felt terribly wrong to Milo, and the thought of the pressure that the wood was under would plague his mind for days. It made model building maddening for Milo, as he struggled to find new ways to snap pieces of wood that he should have been able to bend into place with relative ease.
This phenomenon was remarkably similar to Milo’s feelings when words like conflagration took up residence in his mind. When he finally answered their call, it was like the satisfying snap of balsa in his hands.
Euphoria.
When that snap came this time, Milo’s sense of relief was greater than usual. Conflagration had proven to be an especially difficult demand, particularly now that he was living on his own. Though many of his other demands benefited from the absence of Christine, finding a means of answering the demand of a word like conflagration had proven to be more challenging than usual.
In the end, Milo had turned to the Internet to help satisfy the call, a resource that he’d started using several years before. Prior to the Internet, answering these inexplicable demands had been incredibly difficult