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Cole is eleven.  Age matters in October, when twelve is the only difference between the haunted hayride and the shelled corn sandbox.  Age matters when a boy says the word "shit" in school (and Cole does).  But age doesn't matter when the same boy has both sneakers dangling over the edge of a 250-foot grain silo, his hands sweaty on the rungs, the state of Nebraska breathing vacant and honeyed and infinite below him.  For the first time in his life, Cole can't be quantified by the candles on his last birthday cake.  Cole is young, but today, he is worth saving.  Three facts about Cole:

1. His eyebrows are the most expressive arches his body has to offer.

2. He's so terrified that his very expressive eyebrows are threatening to take up permanent residence in his hairline.

3. He does not have suicidal tendencies, and later understands--for the sake of his mother's heart and Officer Roy's bladder control--that his strategies for ascension should never involve the climbing of large, dangerous buildings.

On the ground between their parents, Peter is starving for his brother's vertigo.  Pete is seventeen and his feet no longer itch for balance.  He has come to terms with instability, thinks it much more honest than standing still.  Honesty is important to Pete.  Three truths by Peter Spellis:

1. His good friend Geo committed suicide last April by jumping off a balcony in the city where they used to live.  (1a. Nothing of Cole's current situation recalls that tragedy.  Pete is traumatized only by soft faces in car windows, the sound of rain clicking on yellow police tape.)

2. He feels his loss dimly and without drama, as if through someone else's body.  (2a. A poet could find words to make it solid, functional, something strong enough to write on.)

3. Pete is not a poet.

The world is smaller in the countryside.  Its geography is not hyperbolized.  Unlike the city, it shines in crises: Cole is netted with psychiatric platitudes from four separate megaphones, and the town police force is here in its entirety (both officers).  Cole repeats, "Oh, shit, what the hell, what the hell" as he inches down the side of the silo.  Cole is not a performer.  The attention has him half-dead with stage fright.  He went to the circus with Pete last year, and he held his breath while the acrobats swam on their aerial silks, afraid to disturb their air.  If Cole is guilty of anything, it is having too much belief that he can move the world.

Someone passes Pete a megaphone.  "Hi, Cole!" he says.

Cole still has a hundred feet to go.  He manages to nod.

"See anything interesting from up there?"

"Nothing I haven't seen before," Cole calls down.  "Maybe our house?  The roof is green?  The front door is open."

The front door is open because Lindy Spellis kicked it open as she ran screaming to the grain silo.  Pete almost asks Cole if he can read the lines in their mother's forehead from his distance, the verses she has worried into her shirt with fretful hands.  Lindy Spellis is not a poet, either.  The wrinkles speak clumsily: My dumb, daring youngest! / Who told you flight was worth falling? / I instilled in you self-preservation: / the rest is up to you.  She no longer presumes to have any behavioral control over them.  It's why they love her.

Cole has fifty feet to go and his foot misses a step.  He slips an inch and the crowd wails.  Cole flushes with terror and importance.

"Great job, Grace," Pete says.  "Did your life flash before your eyes?"

Officer Roy snatches the megaphone out of his hands.

"If it did, it was so short that I missed it," Cole says, not without a measure of sadness.

Pete understands that.  Rural suicide is slower, and it sounds like Plath reading poetry.  Cole is also not a poet, let alone a self-murdering one, but he is Dickinsonian in his punctuation, with slap-in-the-face dashes like border disputes, or shotgun blasts.  An angry note in the steam in the bathroom mirror might read: peter. dammit!! - learn your colors / because MY bathtowel - is the blue-one.

(For the record:

1. Pete would never use his mirror again if his brother slipped from the silo.

2. Pete sees Cole as something eternal and revolutionary, the only moving hero of a still world.  As an only child, Pete was an underachiever.  Cole was conceived with progress in mind.)

Cole is so miraculous that he bridges the gap between death and life by shuffling down a ladder.  This is the right way to live; with relieved crowds, people who applaud when a boy dares to move his feet.  Here's the punch line: as soon as Cole is safe on the grass, Lindy Spellis tells him he's grounded.  "I am," says Cole humbly.  "I so am."

That evening, after night has swallowed the grain silo and all of its neighboring propaganda, Pete brings Cole a glass of water and asks him why he did it.  If he were more poetic, he'd try with, "Prospective fatality is closer to living than living, isn't it?"  But Pete hates poets.  Poets are liars in stanzas.  Pete accompanies the question with no gilding: he strokes Cole's sheets smooth and says, "Why?"

"I was just tired of feeling small," Cole says.

Pete holds one of Cole's hands and examines it against his own, soft and lineless, his fingers still half-curled from the strain of clinging to existence.  Sometimes Pete wants to tell him that small is an illusion that he will outgrow.  But Pete understands:

1. Why tiny bodies want to test themselves against their boundaries.

2. Why structures scramble into the skies to save space.

3. What, on slow days in Nebraska, makes eleven feel a year and a universe away from alive.