“Another book about phoenixes?” the girl stood over Al. He was sitting at the bottom of the red slide in the neighborhood playground just on the corner of their street. She had spotted the top of his auburn head and a large book in his hands from a distance. That was all she needed to know that it was him.

“Nope.” A smile spread across his face. “Ice skating!”

“Ice skating?” The girl always wondered how there was no limit to Al’s curiosity. He always had a new interest that would attract him almost within the next week. Phoenixes still managed to remain at the top of his list though.

“I don’t get it,” Alex was hanging off the red monkey bars, showing off again. It was almost a duty for him to be around Al. He was covered in scrapes again. One time the girl had asked him why he was not more careful while patching him up with a band aid. Just because they are covered and you cannot see them does not mean they are not there, that it hurts less. “What’s so great about it? It sounds dumb.”

“Think about it, spinning and spinning and never getting dizzy.”

“Until you fall on the cold hard ground.”

“But when you get back up, think about how you’ll just glide. It’s almost like you’re floating!”

“Let’s try it! I wanna learn how to ice skate!” The girl wanted to see how Al’s face would look when he was really on the ice.

“Yeah!” He was already beaming at the thought of it.

“Still sounds dumb.”

“Then you don’t have to come.” The girl stuck out her tongue at Alex. Alex slipped off the monkey bars, his face matched the color of the metal playground. He crossed his arms, turning away from the girl and his brother. There was no way he was not going to be there.

The boys’ parents would not allow Al to go anywhere near the ice skating rink. They argued for days that it would be too dangerous. They knew how much of an impact a simple falling injury would be, even tightening the laces onto his feet would be too much. Alex was the one who intervened, saying he wanted to try it and bring Al along. Their parents always left him do as he pleased. He told them he would be by his brother’s side the entire time. It was with this that Al was given a chance.

It was private lessons at first, just the three of them facing the realm of ice. Alex and the girl had fallen down countless times. Al had managed to slip, but never fall. He claimed he already knew all of the tricks from the books he had read. The girl was the second to grasp the skill of ice skating. Al was right, like he was for most things, it was fun. Alex fell the most and was the last to master this skill, but he was the quickest to learn all of the fancy moves. Jumps, spins, turns, he was not surprising that he was talented in everything. Showoff. That is all the girl saw in him.

“Hey, look at this!” Al tugged off the aluminum tab of his soda. The three were sitting on the benches behind the edge of the rink.

“What?” The girl sipped her soda. Al placed the tab on his left pinky finger.

“Look, it’s a ring and….” He looked through the second gap in the tab “a window. ”

“That’s dumb.” Alex crushed his empty can.

“No it’s not.” The girl glared at him. “Why’s it a window?”

“Here,” Al slipped the ring onto the girl’s finger, “look through it, what do you see?”

“It’s not a real ring ya know,” Alex mumbled. The girl looked through this window, dividing the space between themselves. She tried to see what Al had seen.

“I only see you.” The tab created a shiny silver frame around Al.

“Nope, there’s more than that.” He gestured towards the rink. “There’s this here too. And the clothes I’m wearing, the skates. There’s the vending machine we got our sodas from, the cans. There’s a lot of things you missed. You missed a lot of things, you only saw what was directly in right front of you, but there’s much more than that.”

They moved on to group lessons. It was not a surprise when that boys would be constantly surrounded by the other children in the ice skating group. They got along well with others. This was a problem though; this was how the accident occurred. Some of the children had decided to race. Alex was leading, he would have probably been the winner of this race, if it had finished. One of the contenders of the race had been a little too competitive. They were the ones who stood the tallest, yet they all toppled down like dominoes. Al was dragged into this pile. He plummeted into the ice. Hard. Cold ice and silver blades. Like the ice, time was frozen.

Everything else was a blur. Sirens blared as they arrived, and faded as they carried Al to the emergency room. He was hooked up with the oxygen mask connected to the cold metal tank, it was as exhausted as his visitors, it wheezed and shuddered as if it would suddenly stop breathing the life back into Al. Every slow breath of the machine meant another one for him. The IV drip trickled down from its chamber into the tube linked to his arm, it was routine for the nurses to regularly come in to change this bag. Every metronomic beep from the heart monitor meant his heart was still beating, if this mechanical rhythm stopped then had so his heart. His body was laced in heavy swirls of black and blue bruises. The cuts on his body did not heal so easily without help, his existence hung on the life line dangling from his arm. His brother was attached to the other side of this line. Al recovered after weeks of observation by the white coated doctors at the hospital, the kind with their names embroidered on to it in gold. It was as if they wanted to keep the company of the ten year old boy, despite his apparent recuperation. After all, the boy spent his entire vacation to the hospital with a smile on his face.

“Don’t worry, I can always try again later!” It was not likely that he would ever get to play again, but he urged the girl to continue skating for him anyways. “You’re really good at it!” He looked out the half drawn window next to his reclining bed, the view was nothing more than the other side of the brick building. “I can’t wait to get out of here, I can’t stand being behind this window.” The internal injuries disappeared, but its memory did not. A different kind of broken.