Just as he had done yesterday, and the day before that, Saul slipped through that awful, jagged metal fence behind his apartment complex, feeling one knot in his stomach finally releasing, but making room for a much larger, more nauseating one. He always hung his head and dragged his feet upon first glance of Teaberry Middle School, a miserable beige structure that reeked of Mohawks, indifferent faculty, and daily beatings.

The building wasn’t repulsive alone, maybe homely and unflattering, but not enough to physically assault him as soon as it came into view. However, a year and a half of schooling, if you could call it that, dressed the place up more depressing than its initial appearance suggested. The name Tommy came to mind when he looked to the West wing, where he would corner Saul and spit a thick, stringy wad of phlegm into his hair, something Saul couldn’t wash out and had to wear for the rest of the day. The bathroom window screamed Michael, a tall, 16-year-old punk who would hold his head in the flushing toilet bowl, something so unoriginal that Saul started to think he wasn’t the true victim in that encounter. The entrance was what really made him shudder, as his principle, a bowling pin of a man, would smile and double over to face him, his breath stinking of coffee grounds and garlic.

“Morning, Mr. Harmon. Are we having a nice day?” With the mere thought of Mr. Harmon, a name that belonged to his father, never him, Saul’s hatred of Teaberry faded away, and he was left paralyzed against that tetanus-filled fence, staring up at a building much more revolting.

Saul could stand Teaberry. It was uninviting, but he saw it almost as an escape. An ideal escape shouldn’t be the lesser of two evils, he understood, but the school offered were a series of classrooms, hallways and courtyards where he could hide from the handful of problems, unlike his apartment, room 14. There, Saul had only his cramped bedroom to crouch into, be as quiet as he could, and hope to God that he didn’t anger the problem in the next bedroom.

He tried to suppress the acid sloshing around his gut as he walked toward the complex, defying the best interest of his body with each step forward. Luckily for Saul, his father was usually asleep until five-thirty, allotting him enough time to quietly settle into his room without being confronted. He usually used this time to rest at the tiny public park, take a scenic route home, or loiter around a nearby gas station just to enjoy the relief that existed in any space between Teaberry and his apartment complex. The city regulars would leer at him out in public, suspecting some criminal activity that a handful of teens had stained his age group with, but all he wanted to do was escape, though this was no true escape, nor was Teaberry.

Whether Saul was dodging bullies at school or roaming the streets, the grey urban landscape was all around him still, and everything grey only reminded him of the man passed out in room 14. Contrary to his normal routine, Saul chose the fastest route home and nearly ran the entire way, cradling his book bag the whole time, as he had finally snagged the last piece necessary to assemble the one thing he could indisputably deem an escape.

As soon as Saul remembered his cargo, the nausea and paralysis faded substantially, and he found the strength to open the door to his apartment complex. He couldn’t help but imagine that each room was inhabited by some variation of he and his dad, as an overwhelming sadness seemed to weigh on him in the hallway, and only accentuated by the creaking of the staircase and cigarette butts littered on the grey concrete floor. Was there a motherless child, like Saul, tucked away in each room? If so, did their living predicaments get worse as the room number increased? With this thought, Saul couldn’t begin to fathom the kind of violence the boy in room 15 had to endure, but he didn’t doubt that worse conditions than his had to exist, and that gave him comfort.

He finally reached his door, marked by a taunting, golden “14,” and he slowly turned the unlocked doorknob, wincing as it squeaked a bit. Not a single light was on, Saul noticed as he eased the door to an inaudible close, but that didn’t help in determining whether or not his father was still asleep. He crept through the doorway-and-kitchen combination, where he could view his father’s room. There he was, miraculously still asleep with the drool encrusted on his grey, stone-like face to prove it. Saul was lucky, no sly “welcome home” pounding today.

After taking great care in closing his bedroom door as quietly as possible, and checking three times to make sure it was locked, Saul then switched on his ceiling light and rummaged through the bin he had hidden underneath his bed. He knew if his father caught sight of anything in this bin, he would be left with something much worse than the usual purple marks he could pull sleeves over. But he felt safe enough now, with his door locked and loud, thunderous snores echoing from his father’s room, so he lined up the bin’s contents along his floor, sorting them based on when he had acquired them. The fishing line came first, just six months ago and a few days after his dad destroyed his first kite, the genuine one given to him by his mother nearly five years ago now. He knew there were tangled wads of fishing line under his dad’s bed, beside the family pictures and other tokens of his life before Saul’s mother passed. Saul had to shake the memory when thinking of the confrontation that followed his theft of the fishing line. He managed to get away with it, but not without lying about viewing his mother’s picture and taking a beating for that, instead. But Saul had no reason to look at old, dusty pictures of his mom, because everything she had left him with was embodied by the kite he would soon rebuild.

He laid out everything else he needed, from the wooden dowels he carved out of an old couch he found on the curb of his apartment complex, to the scissors, packing tape and twine he stole from the art workshop at Teaberry, and tried to remember the correct order in the steps his mother had given him when they built the first incarnation of his kite. The memory of these directions brought with it the day he was introduced to his mother’s sense of wonder and how this translated to something as trivial as flying a kite. He remembered that morning spent in his kitchen, when his mom laid out the materials and an order identical to what he had just done in the present, before unveiling the final, most important component of the kite. “You should always choose which color you give the kite wisely,” she said, sifting through a rainbow of plastic sheets, though Saul had only one in his possession. “Now, I know your favorite color is green,” his mom was always keen on these little details, “but I’m going to use this color instead.” She held up a soft, sky blue sheet for Saul to examine, grinning from ear to ear as she prepared to explain her choice. “Do you know why?” Her eyes glistened as she asked him.

And Saul’s eyes were glistening as he answered the question from five years ago, in his mother’s words verbatim, through a sheepish smile that rarely made an appearance. “Because the sky is this color, and that’s the only place this kite belongs.” He was aware that she had gone on a tangent on how kites are always bound by those holding the other end of the fishing line, and that Saul would experience this soon enough, but he should seek comfort in the fact that the sky is always visible to a kite, and the same comfort will never truly leave him. This was the way she chose to tell a ten-year-old boy she was sick. She was always a Romantic, and encouraged a nuanced understanding of the truth in Saul, but he was able to decipher what she was saying right in that moment. She was sick. He didn’t need the subsequent months watching her lose hair and weight rapidly, or his dad’s plunge into alcoholism, to make the situation clearer, but he witnessed them anyway.

Saul was so lost in the memory that he failed to notice two things. The first of which was miraculous, as if his mother was beside him, guiding his hands when his mind was so invested in her. Saul initially took himself back to that day in order to determine the correct way to build his kite, and though he couldn’t recall those details, his hands subconsciously built the frame for him. When he came out of the memory, he stared in wonder at a perfectly aligned cross made from the two dowels, a long piece of twine stretching over the ends to make a skeleton of the diamond shape it would soon take on, and the fishing line attached to the body. The hard part was over without him even realizing it, and the last touch was the most important. This would bring flight and color to the kite, and perhaps to Saul again, as his mother had asserted on that day. As he turned away from the kite and toward his book bag, he noticed something unsettling, something that may ruin his project entirely. At some point, whether it be due to Saul’s daydream or fixation on the kite he was working on, he failed to notice that his father had stopped snoring. He checked the clock on his desk. It read 6:47, around the time his dad would be awake and working up to that intoxication he needed to escape from the greys of his own reality, greys much more menacing than his own, Saul was convinced.

He realized he only had a few more minutes of productivity left before his dad would come stumbling into his room to curse, shove and spit at him, and he knew if his dad caught sight of the kite, he’d try to destroy it as he had done to the first one. Heeding his own experiences, he fit the kite, which was too wide to fit into his supply bin, under his bed and against the far corner of his wall, moving the bin and two more blankets to hide it completely, though he doubted his dad would be suspicious of anything, let alone think to look under his bed. He threw his book bag onto his bed, preventing any off chance that his dad trips on it and the plastic sheeting spills out, and slowly opened his door, making sure yet again that no noise came from it. He peaked his head out of his room and peered into his father’s, finding his booze-stained sheets kicked up and crumbled at the edge of the bed, meaning his father was awake or, at least, out of bed. He snuck through the small hallway that separated the bedrooms from the living room and found his dad sprawled out on the couch, surrounded by many more empty bottles and cans. Tonight would be a bad one, Saul knew by the sheer amount of alcohol evidently in his father’s system, but he had some time before he had to endure it.

It would have been wise to get back to his project, but Saul couldn’t help but stare at his father now, mumbling in his sleep on their rotten couch, grey like everything else in room 14. His dad was rather grey, too, he noticed, and the sickliest, most faded shade he had ever seen. The face was almost identical in appearance to the face his father had before his mom’s death, one with thick eyebrows, and a minimal number of wrinkles that made him look about ten years younger, and a rosiness in his cheeks and nose. This was a promising appearance in his prime, when he actually left home to go to work and kissed Saul and Saul’s mother on the cheek before leaving, but the softer, younger features only made things more tragic now. The rosiness was still present, but only accentuated the pale skin around it, and the youthfulness in his face only mocked Saul as it spat and screamed at him, like he was constantly at the mercy of a six-foot-toddler throwing a temper tantrum. But these greys were only clear when his dad was asleep, falling into irrelevancy when his beady eyes were open, lacking any human sense of sorrow of reason. Saul pitied his dad for so many years, despite the beatings, until the day he destroyed the first kite.

All Saul could feel for his dad after that was hatred. After his dad took years to beat into him the notion that his mom was to be forgotten in the Harmon household, made even clearer by shattering each picture of her in a drunken rampage and burning her clothes, Saul made sure to never mention her, and even got rid of his own artifacts of the memories made with his mom. The kite stayed, though, as that feeling of escape his mother preached the day they built it was something too precious to throw away. It wasn’t a problem whatsoever, either, as Saul always kept it well hidden, until a year ago. Saul’s dad had finally blown through his life savings, and the two were evicted from their home in the suburbs, moving to his current apartment complex, a much cheaper situation than the house, and a much greyer landscape. With the apartment came Teaberry, and with Teaberry came Michael and Tommy. Saul was never sure why they targeted him, but he knew from comments like “Nice shirt, Harmon, did you find your way from the trailer park alright?” or “Christ, Saul! I don’t even need to spit in your hair today, it already looks greasy as shit!” that he looked filthy. They were right, as his apartment had no washing machine, and he was too young to work for the few cents that the laundromat nearby would cost him, and he didn’t shower often because showering meant having to leave his room and risk another beating.

What bothered Saul the most, though, is that everyone at Teaberry, Michael and Tommy especially, were blind to his reality. He wondered if they’d still be laughing after learning about the incredible parents he'd lost, one to death and the other to the fallout of that death, and how the two bullies were only minor pests compared to the monster his father had become. He wondered if they’d sympathize, or at least lay off, and that Teaberry could go from a place of more beatings to a normal, albeit beige and boring, middle school. He thought about their reactions for a while, and decided one night that the only way to find out was to show them this story the way his mother had shown him. If any bit of his mother’s intuition was still inside him, he’d be able to use the kite as a symbol, and the two of them would figure out, even if Tommy had to explain to Michael. He woke up one morning with the best intentions and left for Teaberry flying his kite. His father had been asleep well into the morning, so Saul didn’t worry about keeping it discrete. He felt so strong that day, like his mother was with him, and bounded up to Tommy and Michael, who always spent their mornings smoking out of the bathroom window.

They had their backs turned to him, so he mustered up a faint “Hey guys.” When they turned to him, they were clearly disgusted, an appropriate reaction, Saul realized, for two teens who worked so hard to confirm their superiority by breaking kids like Saul. Though he knew approaching them was somewhat of an accomplishment already, his confidence was already drained from him. It was that look they were giving him, like he was challenging them somehow. He tried desperately to push on with his explanation, pulling his kite from behind his back. Those nasty looks softened when Saul showed them, something he mistook as pity. He only got out a simple “this is my kite, my mom made it for me,” when the two bullies broke out in a mocking laughter.

Tommy was the first to contribute to the verbal assault, “Aw! Your mommy made you a kite? You want us to fly it with you?” He was wheezing with laughter, turning to Michael, who then added “what a moron!?” Tommy was next, his temperament becoming more sinister. “Oh, we’ll fly it, into the toilet!” He snatched the kite from Saul’s hands, who was frozen in shock, shame and fear as Michael opened a stall, chuckling like a Neanderthal and gesturing for Tommy to throw the kite to him. Tommy threw his arms over his head, gripping the kite with two hands, but was tackled by Saul before he could throw it. They could spit and beat on him all they wanted, but the kite was the only escape Saul had, and he wasn’t going to let them take it from him. His voice grew ten times since he last said anything, and he screamed “You give me that back!” to Tommy, gripping his hair in one hand and punching him as hard as his thin arms could with the other. Tommy let go of the kite, but Saul didn’t retrieve it on account of Michael sliding his arms beneath Saul and lifting him up, allowing Tommy to get up and dust himself off before unleashing the burden of physical humiliation on Saul’s face and torso.

Saul didn’t know how long this beating lasted, nor did he remember any of the pain, though he remembered the deep purples and blues Tommy left on his stomach. It was a beating close to the severity of his father’s, but he removed himself from the present, staring past Tommy and at the sky blue of his kite. His mother was right, it was an oasis he could stare upon for hours, but little did he know that within hours that color would be gone. Saul’s condition made him unable to stay in school for the day, and the faculty had somehow found his father’s number. When his guidance counselor tried to comfort him with this news, he looked around the room desperately to find his kite and escape from the situation soon to unfold. His dad arrived at Teaberry as the “Mr. Harmon” they expected, dressed in a crisp, white shirt and a plaid tie, having clearly showered, shaved and ran a comb through his hair to throw off any suspicion that there may be “trouble at home,” as Saul’s counselor often asked him. A few faculty members interviewed him as Saul sat in the waiting room, watching with awe as his dad answered their questions with a warm smile and bright eyes. There was something fake about it, like he was a politician. Soon enough, Saul’s dad exited the room and, conscious of the faculty around them, gave him a sickening “ready to go, bud?”

The ride to the apartment was dead silent, as were the two hours following it. Saul knew his dad had seen the kite. In fact, the kite was in his dad’s possession, so he stared blankly at his grey walls, the same knot in his stomach threatening to burst his appendix, something he decided wouldn’t be too bad. After sitting in the dark for those two long hours, his dad finally swung his bedroom door open, grabbed his arm without saying a single word, and dragged him across the floor into the living room. Saul begged his dad to let go, and apologized for the incident at Teaberry, but his father’s face was a rock in that moment, stern, stiff, and silent. When they got to the living room, Saul noticed with horror that his dad had lit a fire on the carpet. “Are you crazy!?” he screamed at his father, who retreated briefly into the kitchen, still completely silent. Saul watched as his dad emerged from the kitchen, holding his sky-blue kite. “Dad, no!” he pleaded, but his dad walked right over him before plunging the kite into the fire. Saul was screaming and ran to pick up the kite from the flames. That’s when his father acknowledged him, first looking down at him with a hatred he had never seen in a human’s eyes before, and holding one of his hands into the fire. Saul remembered that pain. He had no light blue plastic screening to escape into that time.

Since then, he couldn’t help but hate his dad, which only fueled his desire to recreate the kite he had destroyed. With this spite fresh in his mind, Saul rushed into his room to finish what he had started, hastily slamming his bedroom door shut behind him. He didn’t use a memory to guide the last step, as his mother stressed the importance of fixing the color to the kite. He made sure he was conscious as he unzipped his bag, removed some books from the top, and pulled out the pre-cut diamond of sky-blue plastic identical to what his first kite had worn. He tried looking away, to avoid ruining the satisfaction of the final product, as he pulled it over the skeletal wooden cross and secured each point with four nails. It was once these nails were hammered in place that Saul allowed himself to look at the kite. He had taken great care in making the measurements identical to his old kite’s and had the photographic memory to prove that the color was exactly the same. It was the most beautiful thing he laid his eyes on and opened his window to watch it fly over the city before realizing he wasn’t the only one who saw it.

His accomplishment was cut short but a slurred but vile “You little bastard! How dare you!?” and he knew exactly what he did wrong. When he foolishly swung his door closed, it merely bounced against the frame and back open, not only making a noise loud enough to wake the passed-out madman, but also making it so no noise would indicate his dad’s presence, making an ambush possible. He could feel his dad’s rage in the air around him, but didn’t turn to face him once. He wouldn’t let him destroy the kite again. Saul realized as his father closed in on him like a distorted shadow that he had to let go of the kite, letting it fly away from his grasp to prevent another destruction, and he was ready to do just that. He wouldn’t let his dad have this one, no matter how loud he screamed “Give me that thing! Now!” so he said a silent farewell to what the kite embodied before letting it go. As soon as his hand released the fishing line, his father grabbed him by the hair on the back of his head and began to pull. Saul could feel his scalp tearing as his father pulled out tufts of his hair. He could take this abuse alone, but no soothing blue kite in the world could have smothered the anger that ignited when his father, in between yanking at his hair and choking him, said “she’s gone! Do you understand? That stupid kite doesn’t mean shit anymore! Neither does she!”

This hard truth circled around Saul’s head a million times. Though it was babbled as a product of the stupidity that came with intoxication and the visceral hatred that came with seeing the kite, “neither does she” said so much about Saul’s dad that he finally felt a one-sided understanding. It was brief, but Saul recognized how much of his dad’s family was built with his mother, a woman who kept him afloat through such an ambitious life. When she passed, none of this life they built had any purpose to him alone, so he reverted to the lowest state a human could possibly inhabit, but one thing stuck with him through these subsequent years, a constant reminder of the life stripped from him. That artifact was Saul. That’s all he was then, a burden made irrelevant and revolting by years of living as an assault on his father’s composure. That may have been true, but the notion that his mother meant nothing to either of them anymore was the biggest blasphemy he’d ever heard, and it stung his ears enough for him to do something he had never done before- hit back.

He first shot his elbows behind him, making contact with his dad’s swollen gut and knocking the wind from him hard enough to relieve his head of the hand pulling at it. Once his head was free, Saul thrashed his head backward, making a contact so hard that he temporarily lost his vision and heard his father’s nose crunch against it. He spun around, facing his father fast enough to watch the utter shock in his eyes. This was a man who had beaten Saul, without any resistance, every single day for five years. Now, under the thick spatter of blood from his nose, Saul saw fear in his dad’s eyes. This expression only existed for a matter of seconds, before his father wiped the blood around his eyes, revealing a primal, ape-like ferocity. This fear, combined with the anger and alcohol, had taken all of the humanity from Saul’s father, rendering him a hulking, cornered animal. Saul only caught this expression for a matter of seconds as well, as his father soon did to him what any cornered predator does.

After that brief moment of stillness, Saul’s father charged across the room, picking up Saul and lifting him above his head in the process, stopping the stare at him one last time, and hurling him to the ground. But Saul didn’t just hit the ground. His fall was broken by the wooden bed stand, which broke into splinters upon impact. This was a pain that Saul could only liken to being hit by a train, as he felt everything in his torso break in some way. The harder, solid structures within him shattered just like the bed stand, and the softer bits burst open, spitting the fluid he needed to function into the void of his chest cavity. He lay there, facing his father’s shoes and feeling those ruptured organs fill with fluids that were never supposed to enter them, before turning away from his father for the last time.

He knew to turn his head to the window, where his kite was floating still out of the window, but waiting patiently to take off, the fishing line just within reaching distance. Saul didn’t have to question his fate anymore, he knew to grab the fishing line, and wasn’t astonished one bit when he began to float out of his window, following the lead of his kite, at a leisurely ascension into the sky above his apartment complex. He had gained a fair distance from the building when he decided to look down upon his open window, where he heard his father weeping, cursing himself and pleading with Saul and God alike, though Saul didn’t credit his departure to the work of any deity. He then had a clear view over the entire city, bidding one final farewell to the beige of Teaberry, gravelly tones of the endless urban streets, and foul grey of his apartment complex, before looking up, where he would never see a lick of grey again. Where he focused, spanning much wider than the plastic sheeting of his kite alone, Saul only saw one color, the only one that mattered to him.