PARALLEL MOTION

             The Mildes didn’t have chores; they had tasks.  A different set of young brothers might claim that chores were far worse given the routine nature of them, but any one of Ray, Jim, or Tibby would have mocked the ease of a checklist.  They lived like spies stationed overseas fearing one day someone would knock on their door in the middle of the night.  A task thrust into the wrong hands at the wrong time was cancerous to a day’s joy.  That was, unless they had numbers.  They’d figured out the key.  If a single parent supervised, two brothers were needed to tip the scales in their favor.  If both parents were present, all three were crucial.

             This task was to chop down a tree.  Pops Milde presented no thesis as to the problem with this particular tree nor did he leave room for a discussion on tactics.  In fact, the only complete sentence he’d spoken since breakfast was, “We’re going to cut down a tree.”  The rest had just been pointing and speaking in fragments.  Thankfully Ray, the oldest, was a master interpreter.  “Go get the-” meant, “Go get the handsaw from the rack in the garage next to the snips.”  With Jim’s help they extrapolated that, “We’re going to tug left first then-” meant, “We’re going to tie a rope to the tree’s trunk and pull it as we saw so that it falls away from my barberry bushes.”  Most confusingly, “I don’t want- falling on that there- to damage- and make sure- okay?”  This really demonstrated Ray’s skillset.  “The branches on the side of the tree where we intend to have it fall could damage the lawn so we’re going to have to chop them down before finishing off the trunk.”  High branch chopping?  Tibby’s job.  He knew immediately.

             Pops didn’t know how lucky he was that his sons happened to fit the flawless trio team of: Mind, Muscle, and Multitool.  Ray and Tibby could be used for lifting too of course.  So long as you didn’t have to move quickly, Ray could handle it, and so long as it wasn’t that heavy, Tibby could manage well enough.  There was just more lifting to be done than thinking or miscellany.  Tibby had once asked his parents if they’d considered buying oxen instead of having kids.  Jim, though, was just built like someone had drawn a picture of your quintessentially man-shaped man to demonstrate our species to aliens.  His special power was powering up to perform feats of outrageous strength over the course of short, terrifying, usually minorly injurious intervals.  Hysterical laughing served to heal and recharge.

             Tibby was needed because every task got weird somehow.  Small places, places for small fingers, dark places, high places, weirdly angled places, places infested with bees, wet places, underground places, and places that defied the laws of space and time - those were Tibby’s specialty.  If two guys were needed to hold something heavy so one guy could run cords from it into the ceiling, Tibby was balanced on rafters.

             Today, Tibby found himself fifteen feet up in the tree with a saw, working away at branches that looked particularly pointy.  He also had an ulterior motive.  Fearing this tree task would eat up too much playtime, beforehand he’d tied plastic grocery bags to the backs of G.I. Joe action figures.  He was trying to get them to epically air raid Jim’s shoulders as he worked with Pops on the trunk.  Periodically he’d toss one and hope the bag unfolded, catch the wind, and make for a perfect paratrooper.  Gungho, Alpine, and Bazooka had fallen like stones, but Tibby had high hopes for Nemesis Enforcer.

             “Don’t do that until Tibby gets down!” Mother shouted from across the pond.  It was directed at Pops, who’d run out of meaningless organizational tasks to do and decided he no longer could wait on the main chainsawing.

             “Just starting wedges,” he said, but over the roar of the zombie weapon in his hands, only Ray could hear him, and whatever horrifying real meaning those three words had, Ray kept it to himself.  Pops gave an aggressive nod so Ray and Jim pulled their ropes taught, then he cut another slice of wood from the base.  Nemesis Enforcer commando floated onto Pops’s head, but he mistook it for a twig and didn’t bother to do anything but sweep a hand across his scalp.

             Tibby then had to decide whether it was worth trusting his father’s judgment on the structural integrity of a tree with two-fifths of its trunk missing, stay and finish his job, which was only dubiously beneficial anyway, or flee.  Inspired by Nemesis Enforcer, he leapt from his V-support branch to a flimsier arm farther out and held it as gravity yanked him toward his brothers.  Three of the four Milde men spoke simultaneously.

             “Oh, down, back-”

             “Raaaaarrrgh!”

             “I don’t think this tree is entirely stable.”

             The cracks of wood reached a horrifying decibel level.  Ray, Jim, and their father were able to slip free before the real “TIMBER!” moment came, but Tibby’s feet were late touching grass and the trunk was right behind him.  He glanced over his shoulder and saw two-thousand pounds of elm tipping his way.  He had enough time to think: other kids build houses in these? and then bolted for the pond.  He ran in the same straight line as the falling tower of a plant, speeding up his skinny legs just enough so that the canopy created a whoosh of air that tickled his back as he outdistanced it.  When he felt that, he dropped to the ground and rolled because doing so seemed heroic.

             “Tibby, next time you should run right or left, not parallel with the large falling object,” Ray said.

             Jim jogged up and threw Alpine in his lap.  “Mission accomplished.”

             Mother shouted, “I told you to wait!”

             Pops seemed to have hardly noticed any of it.  He’d moved on.  “Okay good so now-”