On Cold Fingers and the Death of Jay

Despite gloves, in the woodshed the cold found its way to his fingertips, the pain flaring like the dull blow of a hammer to each. 

     There was dry beneath the green, seasoned, and he hurried to dig for it at the back of the shed where the rick was lowest, wishing again that he hadn’t buried the better burning wood last fall beneath the new. 

     Mindful of the rise he had created picking through this way, the towered end of a rick nearly his own height, held upright, surely, by a single split he could remove at any time and bring the whole of it down on him, he remembered Old Jay, as he often did when the chance of death by suffocation arose. 

     He cupped his gloved hands, exhaled moist warmth from his lungs into the hole of the pocket they made, flexed his fingers. 

     Jay had always stood at the back of the little church his parents took him to as a child. He couldn’t sit. Jay's skeleton had grown faster than his skin, his father once told him, when he had asked why Jay would never come join them in the pews.
     Inside, the bones of Jay’s spine had been crushed in their struggle against the unyielding, ungrowing, tissue that bound them. In lieu of bones, beneath his suit jacket, Jay wore a brace of steel ribs attached to a steel backbone cinched and held into position by black leather straps, stainless and polished buckles.
     If he were to take the brace off, his father had told him, Jay would collapse, something like an accordion. The air would be forced from his lungs and unable to fill them again, Jay would soon die. 

     Jay did suffocate to death. Nothing to do with his brace, however. Too proud to take money from the State, Jay worked the brick plant down by the river, a custodian of sorts. 

     Several times, as a boy, his father had driven him by the plant. He'd always marveled at the enormous hive-like brick dome, in which, he was told, was kept dry a mountain of red clay dust, waiting to be transformed by water and fire into building materials.
     It was this mountain that fell upon Jay. Collapsed. And despite his armor, his brace, drove the wind from his lungs, and like the hand of God, squeezed the life from Jay's wrongly-grown and permanently upright body. 

     Having filled the wheelbarrow with wood, he blew again into the cup of his hands. He closed back the shed’s doors, took up the work-polished handles and turned the barrow toward the house. His fingers ached and in his walking, he heard the collapse of the precarious rick in the shed behind him, saw Jay again at the rear of the church, standing safely as the promises of God poured down, mountainous, around him.