

### Apple in The Earth

Copyright 2014 Crystal Geraghty

Published by Crystal Geraghty at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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### Part One: Chapter 1

"The first thing you'll notice are the leaves on the trees." The optometrist offered in comfort to Sophie, whose attention was fixed on the delicate lines on her palms. They were two inches away from her face, and upon hearing the optometrist's words, she pushed her face into them and tried to breathe.

"Sophie, are you okay?" her mother, out of concern, walked over to her. Sophie was crying so hard her sobs moved inward and she could not breathe enough to speak.

"Don't baby her, she'll get used to it." Sophie's dad barked, while unbuttoning the sleeve on his shirt and looking at the gauze that wrapped his arm. Blood from his wound was pink beneath its thin surface. When the optometrist's eyes paused on it, Sophie's dad Stephen glared at him like he was road construction.

Sophie's mom moved away and looked at a row of sunglasses. She started to cough in an almost violent way, but put her hand at the top of her chest and seemed to pull herself back into her own body. The doctor looked away from Sophie and at her with concern, she nodded and they both looked back at Sophie.

"A lot of kids wear glasses. In fact, you might want to keep an eye on these, or kids will think they're cool and take them," the optometrist's hands produced a pair of silver-rimmed round glasses from a drawer in the counter he was sitting behind. Sophie looked up and pushed the loose strands of soft blonde hair behind her ears, "It's the ones you picked out last week." She reached out and took them by the bridge of the nose and put them on her face. The optometrist pulled them off again slowly, "I'll just fix frame for you, looks like one ear hangs lower than the other."

"Is that something we should be concerned about?" Sophie's mom asked.

"No, no, just have to adjust these," he worked on the frames with a set of small tools, "That's all." When they were done she pushed them back on her face. "Nobody's perfect," he said, smiling, "but you're going to see so much more of the world with these."

She was going to a new school in two months, her first public school. Earlier, she spent kindergarten and the first two grades in Montessori school, but her father thought she needed more structure in her learning. The kids at the new school would never know that she used to be normal, without glasses. "You're going to see so much more." He repeated, as if she had not heard her.

She held her mom's hand and walked out of the optometrist's office. The bright summer sun caused her eyes to squint, but as soon as she adjusted to the light her eyes moved instinctively to the sound of rustling leaves in the trees. She could see the individual life of each leaf, each wiry nutritive system. She looked down at a newspaper vending machine that was chained to a bolt in the sidewalk. She could read the headline and first paragraph of the local observer as if it were inches from her face. They story was about a soldier who lived in the area but died in a helicopter accident when their radio went out and they took on friendly fire. He left behind a wife and a-

"Hurry up!" her dad barked at her. She had let go of her mother's hand and was trailing behind them. "It's already past dinner time, I'm hungry!" Without trying to complete the story, she turned away and followed them.

Chapter 2

James' scrawny neck seemed like it had tightness within itself. This tightness was a vortex that sucked the goo made from rainbow rings of sweet dry cereal, whole milk, and spit in an uncomfortable-looking way. This tightness propelled the browning goo to his stomach with a force that almost shook him, like an old machine. He was looking out of the window from an angle that led the white morning light to wash every fleck of blue out of his eyes. His story would have remained silent and untold if it were not for the sun's echo on the clouds that day. The beauty of the lights outside reached into the eight years of his life and lit the core of his existence.

To James, the sun on this day appeared no different that the sun every day before. Though, it was different this day. It illuminated the undercurrent of his humanity that lives in everyone, but is veiled by age. There was brightness that rose with him during the sun's ascent that placed him under the watching eyes of those who lived before him. Death is a great mystery, and though all men go through times of fearing it, many men find immortality through their sons. What happened to James was important because he was all that was left of his father. James was living memory of his parent's love. Also, like all future generations of immigrant children, he was getting closer to their dream of what their afterlife could be. Of course he would own property, of course he would read. All their eyes tracked the light inside him from that morning on.

James was in a constant state of motion at this point in his life, his legs were always swinging in chairs that were too big for him, and he would pick at the ends of his scruff-brown hair, smooth at the iron lines of his clothes, or scrape under his fingernails to expose clumps of sticky dirt from a thousand sources. While the bright light of the coming winter day struck through the kitchen window, the house itself radiated with warmth of its own. James began to slurp at the browning milk in his cereal bowl.

He heard his mother's wedding and engagement rings clinking against one another on a gold chain around her neck before he heard her voice that day. The hum of her voice was muted like the light in the corners of the kitchen where the window could not fully reach. He was sitting at the kitchen table looking at the grey world in the morning light. It had not snowed yet that year. The air outside was growing colder, and the weatherman on television warned of its approach. Where they lived, it would only snow twice a year at most, but school would always be canceled for it.

She put her left hand on his shoulder. Before looking at her face, he looked at the tan wrinkles across her knuckles and all five ring-less fingers. He watched them move down and loop gently around his arm. She used his arm to pivot him gently away from the window towards her, and he smiled at her.

"I don't want you to wear your red coat today, I had a dream that you wore your red coat to school, but slammed your hand in the door on the way out- and I came to help you but there was so much blood everywhere, and all your fingers just fell off and you were screaming so loud I couldn't help you." James blinked.

"That's a really bad dream- I don't need to wear a coat today, it isn't even snowing," James' eyes were still blanched out. He tried not to look afraid when he talked to his mother.

"It's cold enough to. It's going to snow a lot tomorrow, I can smell it,"

"Maybe I'll get off school, Fridays are the worst,"

"What do you mean? Are your friends picking on you, again?" She let go of his arm and bent back up, placing her hands on her hips. He remembered the last time he answered yes to this question, how even the gentlest of nudging from his mom to the other parents only increased the meanness of the other kids. She had a way of coming back from PTA meetings in tears for the past few months which caused furious taunts the next school day for James. The frizz of brown hair at her shoulders gave way to scraps of white that collected behind her ears. James' mother had not colored her hair in months. She looked into his eyes,

"The other boys are so much bigger than you are, don't you ever fight them, or anyone, even if they say something about-"

"No Mom. No. I'm eight, I know how to deal with anyone being mean to me, I'd just go to the teacher like you told me. We're all getting along really well after you talked to their parents- it's just that I... I get so bored on Fridays."

"Well, just think about where what you are learning can get you- and it'll snow by the weekend, that should be fun."

"Do you think I'll get off school tomorrow, do you think it'll snow that much?"

"Wear your dad's coat today, not his work coat- the one he used to wear while shoveling the walk,"

James nodded and looked down at his empty bowl. There was a chip on the lip of it, and he ran his thumb over the exposed ceramic. The chip felt like the way teeth sounded when they were accidently ground together.

"It'll snow." She looked out of the window. "It will snow more than you want," she tightened her robe, ignoring the blooms of coffee stains that began at the neck. She walked to her bedroom to lie back down. The coffee she drank made her move like she was haunted and did nothing to quiet the circles under her eyes. James knew she was tired, even though she did not do any more work around the house than before it happened. It weighed more upon her than it did before. Everything pushed her father into the ground. His mother reminded him of the stories of people who were frostbitten and had to carry around a part of their body they knew they would lose.

James put his bowl in the sink and ran water on it. He walked out of the kitchen and into the front hall. This was the best part of his day. He shuffled his dirty white socks across the blue carpet to get enough charge to-

"Ow!" He could see the static leap from his fingers to the metal door knob of the front hall closet. Sparks and static electricity are considered lucky in many cultures, and for James they did bring him a dose of strange good fortune that day. James was never aware of it. He laughed while opening the door. James did not know he was lucky. He reached for his red coat and then remembered what his mother told him. James let go and scooped it over to the right on the pole that held the hangers, then he did the same with his mother's blue coat, and her faux fur coat she used to wear to Military Balls with his father. James remembered the way they looked like living fairytales when they left for those formals, driving off into the starlight, leaving plumes of steam and smiles as they accelerated into their romantic evening. James always thought his mom looked like a Disney princess who got married and started wearing jeans. He thought she looked that way before she started looking the way she did now- so tired. The other coats were in a clear zip-up bag, and hung to the very left of the other coats.

James unzipped it to the lapel, where he saw his own last name stitched in tight black thread on a green canvas backing. He ran his fingers over the black loops of the J-A-N-S-E-N. He finished unzipping it and reached behind to pull out a thick green plaid coat. He zipped it back up and put the coat on.

The coat slipped down past his knees and he began to sweat while he found his shoes, his lunch, and his back pack. He could smell his father's stale pipe smoke rustling off into his clothes all the way to school.

James' breath showed up opaque against the grey sky. The sky looked fuzzy like gauze over a scab. It looked like there was something dark behind it. He brought his ungloved hand to his mouth like he was holding a pipe and drew in a cold breath that pinched the base of his lungs.

He held it in like the naked trees along the street stubbornly held onto the grandest and proudest of their leaves even as the threat of snow protruded, and then he purposely blew hot air from the deep of his lungs. He curled his mouth to form an 'O' while doing this, but the structure of his breath was only as thick as the air around it. His staccato puffs outward collapsed into nothing and shattered upwards before becoming part of the grey sky itself.

He wondered if when people prayed out loud at church if their words became some invisible solid, intangible to those looking at their eyelids. James wondered if when he spoke, if his words would become part of God. He thought about how everyone closed their eyes to pray, and if everyone was good and did not peek, maybe God was standing right there with them. It would be like a refrigerator door was closed and small penguins got to work on the slick, dried, frozen juice spills on the highest shelf.

His mom was never that religious, but she still went to the church across town even after James' father died. The church was called The Garage, was housed in an old auto shop, and had clever flyers pinned up on every community board in town. They were evangelical. It only took them weeks to disable the garage doors and put boards over the floor. They also removed the mechanism that would have lifted worshipers up to the ceiling like cars that needed their brakes checked out. They always kept the neon sign that blared 'open,' on 24 hours a day, he wondered if there was always somebody there, or if it was just for show.

Even after his father died, his mother still stuck her miserly frame in a puffed coat every Sunday and spent the morning opening and closing her eyes in that garage. When James' dad was still alive, James would sometimes go to church with his mother, and sometimes stay home with his dad. He split it up evenly, so that neither of his parents would think he loved the other one more. He was always surprised by the firm grip of his mother's pastor and how he never failed to say We missed you last week. The pastor's tone made James feel accused. He could not feel bad because his mom let him stay home with his dad whenever he wanted. James felt sorry for the desperate hand shake each week from the pastor. It felt like the man was trying to reach in and grab something from out of James. After the greeting, he would walk gently boards that lay a foot or so above the cement work. The hollow noise seemed old; as the boards were reclaimed from an old church when it was remodeled and nobody else wanted the one hundred-year-old wood. During the service, James stared at the pastor and smiled if he smiled, frowned if he frowned. He would think about the windows on the garage doors surrounding them, how they were painted to look like stained glass but they were not, not really.

Other times, he would stay home with his father. On these mornings, James would play with minuscule toy soldiers that were olive drab from their identically parted hair, to their wrinkled outfits, to their twistable guns. James had hundreds of toy soldiers in only a few poses. He would line up the opposing identical regiments under the great canopy of his dining room table. His father would sometimes knock one regiment over with his nodding foot on accident. He would always lean under the table, sure to keep his pipe upright, and say with smoke pouring out of his mouth;

"Sorry about that, just a casualty of war, I suppose," and they would both laugh. Through battle, James could hear his father rustling his newspaper, occasionally saying 'hmm,' and refilling his pipe with sweet-smelling house tobacco he bought from the smoke shop downtown. When he got to the crosswords, it meant James' mom was returning from church soon.

"What's a nine letter word for something precious offered to a deity?" James never knew the answers to the questions his father asked. He would shrug his shoulders under the table, say he did not know, and begin spelling half the words he did know in his head to counteract feeling stupid.

Walking to school, James felt an aligned comfort in his father's jacket and knowing that there would always be some things that neither of them knew. He pulled his arms tighter to the sides of his body and thought about the coat he was wearing. It went down to his knees, but fit his father as well as his army coat. His father could wear both coats, and the things he would do in each were different. The coat James was wearing held his father when he shoveled the snow, drove to the store, and played hockey with his buddies from high school down at the rink. James only saw his dad wearing his army coat in the mornings and evenings, and he could not imagine what his father did while he wore that coat. To the world, James thought, you were one person. When his dad was deployed, James would go to church with his mom every Sunday. Since he heard the news, he spent his Sunday mornings laying under the kitchen table and tracing the wood canopy above him with his eyes.

"Your mom talks to her God, I talk to mine," his father would say while releasing the delicious smoke from his lungs and letting it settle on the walls and in the carpet. He chuckled.

The walk to school was not far, and the boxed-brick building rose unimpressively from the hill he was traversing. James inhaled the specific smell of school on a cold morning. The diesel of the school bus collided with the fermenting leaves he crushed beneath his feet. It was palatable; he pulled it into himself and expelled the warmth of his lungs to God.

Chapter 3

In class that day, James was in a group with Sophie, and Paul- they were trying to find the definitions of their weekly vocabulary in a dusty copy of Webster's dictionary.

"Astonished... A-S-T-O-N," Sophie read off of the worksheet. She was the prettiest girl in class, but nobody knew because she wore glasses.

James found it before she finished spelling it aloud, and began to move his index finger over the word,

"Oh, here it is, it means: to fill with sudden wonder or amazement, oh like a surprise." James looked met eyes with Sophie and smiled, "I like surprises,"

"I don't, because sometimes they are bad, like when my cousin buried all my dolls and didn't tell me about it- they were just gone and I had to find out from my dog that dug one up."

"I'll write that down, what's the next one?" asked Phil.

"Tardy," Sophie looked at James, who was fastest at finding words out of the whole group, "T-A-R-D-Y"

"It means late, behind time," James looked at the clock,

"I heard it's going to snow so much tomorrow that they are going to cancel school!" Sophie nearly chirped these words.

"Really, that would be great, I just have a feeling that I don't want to be here tomorrow." James said.

"I don't think anyone does, you know, on a Friday," Sophie added. James did not nod, but he ran his fingers over the dips on the edge of the heavy dictionary in front of him, the letters had the edges of the pages scooped out in front of them so they looked like half-bowls that contained each letter of the alphabet.

"What's next?" Paul asked.

"Maybe we should skip to the end and work up- you know, to make it go faster," Sophie suggested,

"No, we can just keep going, we're a few ahead of all the other groups-" Paul said,

"Soldiers," Sophie said without looking up from the worksheet. "S-O-L-D-I-"

James found it, "One who serves in the Army," he continued "My dad is a soldier!"

Paul stopped writing and looked at James, "No he isn't!"

"He is, we have the uniform and the ID and everything,"

"Your dad is dead, Ms. Hopcke told us. He can't be a soldier. He's dead."

"So- That doesn't mean he can't be a soldier, don't be so stupid. You're just saying that because you're jealous that James' dad is a hero." Sophie crossed her arms at Paul, "and you're mean."

Paul and Sophie stared at each other. Sophie wrinkled her nose and eyebrows as close together as she could before James asked:

"Sophie, what's the next one?"

"She uncrossed her arms and smiled, it's interrupted," she smiled at James "It's spelled I-N-T-E-R-R-U-P-T-E-D. You are so fast at finding these, James"

James began to page through the dictionary, "Thanks, it means discontinued tempor-"

Sonny Parker slammed the orange steel door to the classroom behind him and walked to the teacher and handed her a note.

"Discontinued temporarily," he finished.

James, Sophie, Paul, and the entire classroom quieted and hoped that he wouldn't be in their group. Ms. Hopcke pointed directly at James and Sonny made his way over.

"I hate being late," Sonny continued, "all you stupid kids look at me-"

"So, you were tardy?" asked James, looking at Sophie.

"You just said I was retarded, I'm not retarded- you're retarded for saying that because now you're gonna to get hurt," Sonny glared, he was bigger than anyone else in the grade because he was held back the year before.

"No, I didn't call you retarded- I just said-"

"I just heard you call me retarded, Paul, didn't he just call me retarded,"

"That's what I heard," a sly smile stretched across Paul's face.

"No, I said Tardy- it means late, behind sch-"

"Stop calling me retarded-" Sonny growled.

"No, he didn't call you retarded!" said Sophie.

"Shut up, Sophie, that's it Jansen, I'm going to knock you out at recess tomorrow, you'd better not call me retarded again, or I'll do it right now and deal with the detention,"

"No, I didn't say you were re-,

"Just shut up, Jansen, I'll beat you up behind the slide tomorrow- that's it, you'll learn better." Sonny smiled.

"Sophie, what's the next word," demanded Paul,

"Struggles," she said, wiping her eyes, "S-T-R-U-G-G-L-E-S."

Chapter 4

James held onto his own hands under his covers that night and prayed to God for it to snow. So much snow that he couldn't go to school the next day. So much snow that he couldn't leave his house for three weeks. So much snow that Sonny would forget about what happened in the fun of the weekend. Then, to himself, he started asking his dad for snow.

I know I'm not like you, you said I was a lot like mom, but you said you were proud of me. He thought about Sonny's tardy fists, a year older than his. I really need it to snow tomorrow, a lot, so I don't have to go to school. He remembered how strong his father was whenever he shoveled the walk. I'll shovel for mom, she won't even have to get out of bed. I can't fight anyone; it's not right for me. He thought about how big Sonny was and how fighting back would just make him angrier. You said you were proud of me, if you are proud of me, send snow.

He turned again in his bed, closed his eyes, and listened to the wind stealth across his bedroom window.

Chapter 5

She was too young to have white hair, James' mom thought to herself as she peered from the wrinkles around her glazed eyes at her hollow frame in her nightgown. She looked over at the coral pink house robe that became her outfit, her uniform, her death garb. She was dead, sure of it, during the nights. Since it happened, all of her outfits seemed to sprout coffee stains on them. There was one on the near-sheer yellow housecoat she was wearing. It spread out from the collar and curled around her left breast and ended in the shape of an anchor. She could not remember spilling that. She felt strange because she always drank her coffee so hot so it would feel like it lit her up inside, and it should have hurt to spill that much. It should have hurt.

She shivered and the housecoat pulled her in as much as she pulled it onto her. She lifted the collar around her neck and she felt as protected as a tortoise. Looking down, she could see her name stitched in contrasting royal blue. The regal letters curled around themselves, 'Karen,' that was her name. She could not seem to make her face move right anymore. When she was trying to seem happy, she could not smile, when she was trying to look like she was not breaking apart, people still noticed. Her husband bought her that housecoat, but she never wore it when he was alive. Now that he was dead, she wore it all the time. She shut the door so the only person who could see what she was about to do was him. She moved to the corner of the room. His dresser was there, not yet with dust.

The first drawer slid open in a bumpy disgrace. There were pictures that slid together to the brim. It was a cornucopia of memories. She had given most of his clothes away. The next drawer held his letters; he called and wrote so often when he was away. During cracking conversations sent from around the world, he would talk about the humor and confusion of daily events. In his letters, which he hand wrote, his words and thoughts were clear. He hardly alluded to his surroundings- but instead expounded on complex ideas and ideals like love, family, war, and time. He wrote as if he really knew the answers. Week to week his epiphanies would flip around and he would believe the opposite. Many of his letters ended with: I wish I could just believe in something, like you do.

She was on the floor before she could look even further or read his words. She whispered:

"His name was James," she put her hand above her, "I loved him," she slid the drawer closed, "his name was James," she covered her face with her hands, "and now it's not." This happened every night for her, sometimes several times a day also. A pull to the drawers would compulsively take her in, she was convinced her life was in there.

As she was lying on her back, she stopped breathing out of surrender. She felt like her empty stomach was being pulled downward by threads into the ground. Without breath, she could hear the wrist watch collection she was too afraid to see. They, in themselves, held so much time. It was as if he was right there.

Chapter 6

That night, James, had a dream that it snowed, and icicles formed all around his house and dripped down long past the window like rippled glass bars. In the dream he felt trapped instead of protected by the icicles, and he helped his mom knock them down with a broom and a shovel.

His mother did not dream anymore.

He woke up before his alarm and his room was lit by the white light peeking through the windows.

James leaped towards the window, threw the curtains aside, and was filled with the pulsing white from outside. All he saw was a blurry white morning. It snowed, I'm going to be okay, Sonny is going to forget about me and I'm going to be okay. He ran downstairs-

"Mom, Mom! Did you see? Do you know if school is canceled?" His words and body stopped like he ran into a wall when he saw his mother sitting at the kitchen table, crying. She tried to hide it by coughing when she saw that he was in the room.

"Oh, sweetie- it's okay, you don't have to stay home to help me clean up, and I didn't have anything else planned for today. It'll be gone by the time . . . by the time you get back. Don't worry; I'll talk to the parents at the next PTA meeting to figure out who did it."

James rubbed his eyes and looked past his mother and at the oak tree. It was white, but not with snow. It was covered with layers and layers of toilet paper. He walked closer to the window and saw more toilet paper laced through his fence, rolled out on the yard, and wrapped like bandages around every tree and bush. There was more toilet paper in his front yard than he ever saw before in his entire life. The rest of the neighborhood autumn grey, it looked like a cotton blizzard hit only his front yard.

James hugged his mother.

"Can you get breakfast at school today? I want to get started soon."

He walked to the closet and put his red coat on. He did not look up from his feet the entire way to school.

Karen pulled her coral bathrobe tighter and shuffled, bony bare feet hardly lifting from the carpet, to the kitchen window. She pulled the blinds closed and stood in the kitchen. She did not give him money for breakfast at school. The thin light from the windows echoed her stringy thin hair. She lifted her dry hand to the trash and threw the tissue away. She did not think of them as tears anymore She thought of them as a part of her falling away. It was nothing anymore to cry. Anything would tip her over since her husband died. Any time she saw a stray cat dead at the side of the road, she would have to pull over to collect herself. Rotting meat in the refrigerator once drove her not to eat for three days, James found out it was bothering her and he threw it away and made her oatmeal. Nights, she would cry into her pillow and from time to time bend over to the other side of the bed. She would press her face to the pillow and breathe deep five or six times as if the layers of smell would allow her to smell him again.

Karen went upstairs and put on long johns so her yard work jeans would not fall off of her shrunken frame and so she might be able to generate the warmth of life inside herself again. She put on her jacket and some work gloves and brought a ladder from the garage and set it against the oak tree out front. It was broken like a giant bonsai from a storm that nearly killed it three years ago, so she felt even more diminutive alongside it. She remembered hiding at the lowest spot in her house with her family. The power went out during the storm so they played scrabble by candlelight. Her husband won the game. They woke to find half of the tree in splinters only feet away from their house. She felt lucky that morning.

Now, she picked the toilet paper from every corner of the yard for the rest of the morning, and tried not to notice her neighbors looking away from her while they walked to their cars on their way to work.

She did not think that she would ever get married before she met James. Karen's dad took off before she was born, and her mom died while she was in college. Karen went to school so she could become an accountant. Between the money her mom left her and her budding tax career, Karen was more concerned with saving up money for travel than meeting men.

He was a friend of a friend of a friend, and they met on Halloween night. She was dressed as a nurse, and he was wearing jeans and a faded blue sweatshirt. She asked loudly, to overcome the haze of music and smoke;

"What are you supposed to be?"

"Just a regular guy." She could tell by the arched lines on his face that he must have been older than his thick brown hair suggested.

She went on to dance with her friends and did not think much of him until she woke up the next morning with a message on her phone. He must have spent the night talking to everyone to get a hold of her number.

She smiled sadly at the pile of toilet paper on the sidewalk, and was disappointed in herself that she had not taken a lot of notice of him right away. That was the way memory worked.

Karen's memory of meeting her husband was not one event, it was all the events that have ever happened to her. It was all the events that have ever happened to her parents, and to their parents before them. It was also all of the events that have happened to every other person involved in that memory, and to their parents, and to their parents, and to their parents.

Her memory was a gift. She could not remember the pain, but the kind stranger who asked if she was okay, and the way the moon cut through the brown autumn leaves while the Karen experienced that pain. She remembered that there was pain. She knew it was pain she felt because she linked that the pain to another pain, and another pain, and another pain.

Her memory had become a curse. Each of her memories of her husband became one true moment with the meaning hidden. It was plucked from her life and stitched across her tattered daily routine. Since her husband passed, she used her memory to cover herself more and more from whatever was visible beyond her days. Her memory was what really made her blind to the way she was living.

Karen's memory gave her sight, also. Each event was not a false light but a light that had become a part of her. Karen's pain when it was happening was pain. When it was remembered it became a part of her, just as her parents were a part of her, and their parents, and her second grade teacher, and her first kiss, and a waitress she had one time they stopped for grilled cheese at a diner with two of her best friends when they were halfway home from a vacation.

Her memory was herself, and she was a basket to hold everything that happened. She could not describe, even to herself, what pain was. She could describe the sweat pooling at her shirt line, she could describe the way the moon cut through the trees that autumn evening and the trees made the pavement look like cracked glass, she could describe the kind stranger's clothes, their concerned smile, maybe the color of their eyes. She could not remember an exact pain, or an exact pleasure, or an exact external numbing growl of hunger. She could still feel the sudden fear when an unexpected occurred, she could feel the beauty of the person upon meeting them, and she could feel the dizziness of that night. Karen could feel these things because she was under the veil of her own experience, not the meaning of the experience. These were never put to use in patching her up. She could feel everything she only felt inside of herself. She could feel it every day for the rest of her life.

The memory was stitched to her the moment the event was over. Out of longing, out of embarrassment, out of grieving, she had been taking the fingers of her mind and rubbing down the fabric of her memories until there was nothing more than a collection of facial expressions and a subtle hatred of the feeling of her bare knees on concrete.

So, this is why Karen remembered the night she met her husband while she picked the bully's toilet paper out of the arching limbs of the oak tree. The oak tree in her front yard would have made shadows on the pavement that looked like broken glass if only there were enough sun peeking out of the low dark stratus clouds that hung numbly like hunger above her.

She remembered slipping out of her high heels that were borrowed from a friend, and falling to the ground outside the house party. She could still feel the un-enthused faces peering through the window, checking, reassured, before continuing what they were doing. She could feel that a stranger lifted her, and carried her to the bathroom. She could feel the sound the toilet paper made while it was being wrapped around her skinned knee, the sight of steam coming from the sink where her scraped up hands were being washed. She could feel the color of his eyes.

She could feel the way her stomach moved while she laughed it off with him, stumbling out of the bathroom, taking a shot of cheap vodka that was poured from a plastic bottle. She could almost paraphrase a joke about how coincidental it was that she dressed as nurse that night, and was injured before she drank, before she got to the party.

As they danced, and she remembered asking him:

"What are you supposed to be?"

"Just a regular guy."

She felt this event, and her parents felt this event, and their parents, and their parents, and everyone at the party, and the old couple across the street aching to tattle the loud music to the police, and every tree in the yard, and the construction workers who built the house that the house party was held in, and the host, and their parents, and their parents, and their parents. She felt the entire moment while pulling toilet paper from a tree.

Chapter 7

At recess, James started walking towards the bathrooms. Three of Sonny's friends walked towards him and spun him around. They started walking so close to him that the only way he could keep from falling was to walk towards the slide.

The pain from Sonny's first punch spread out from his abdomen like a blooming flower. James bent over; the pain from the second punch threw him back onto the cold dirt. James moved his hand to his face and saw it turn red.

He heard some strange sobbing echo, but before he could figure out where it came from, Sonny had his full weight on him and was punching James' arms and back.

"Are you ever going to talk about me again?" Sonny's words shot out of him and rose as steam into the air between them.

"No!" James' muffled voice crept from under his arms.

"I asked if you were ever going to talk about me again!"

James moved his arms down and said, "No, I'm never going to talk about you again!" Sonny punched him in the face, got up, and then kicked James in the back.

"You'd better not," Sonny spit on the curled up version of James and walked away. The other kids around laughed, jumped, and followed Sonny towards the kick ball field.

James wiped his face in his coat after righting himself, and looked for Ms. Hopcke. He saw that she was at the other end of the playground talking to another teacher. He started walking, back carefully facing her, towards the boys' bathroom.

While passing the orange plastic tube slide, he heard that strange echo again. He bent over and looked up. Sophie was crying in the slide. Her white coat glowed with the orange that radiated from the inside of the tube and the ends of her long blonde hair stuck to the inside of the slide because of static electricity.

"It's okay- don't cry." He said, she looked up, "It doesn't even hurt that bad, and it's over, so it's okay." James continued. Sophie's glasses were fogged up. She hid her red face in her hands and let out another echoing sob in the slide. "I'm just going to clean up, and then I'll be okay," James smiled. Sophie looked at him and saw red between his teeth.

The bathroom floor was smeared with mud, and it the smell of his classmates' piss stuck to the inside of his nostrils. James walked into the second stall and grabbed a bunch of toilet paper, putting some in his jacket pocket. He brought more to the sink and looked at himself in the mirror. There was not that much blood and the black eye did not look like it would be too bad. James spit into the sink and Paul came in the bathroom after him.

"Are you okay?" he asked

"Yeah, I'll be fine, I just can't let Ms. Hopcke see."

"I want to help you get him after school," Paul said. James thought about it, Sonny could plunder any kid in class, but more than one would be able to get him pretty badly.

I can't fight anyone, it's not right for me.

"No, that's okay- this isn't so bad," James said.

"We can take him, really, after school- Sonny has been messing with us for too long," Paul continued, "and I feel bad about what I said yesterday, your dad is a soldier- I'm sure he was really cool. He died keeping people like Sonny from-"

"Thanks, but really, I'm fine- it's over, I'm just going to go home." James smiled, "I'm just going to go. If you want to help, make sure Ms. Hopcke doesn't know what happened- tell her I got sick and my mom picked me up."

"Really, I can-"

"No. Just tell her, Okay?"

"Yeah, I'll tell her," Paul started walking out, "Thanks, though," James yelled after.

James slipped past the teachers in the playground and cut through the back yards behind the playground to get away from anyone who could see him and send him back. He rubbed his face and still saw thin streaks of mucus and blood from his nose. James pulled toilet paper out of his jacket, balled it up, and held it to his face.

If you are proud of me, send snow.

He pulled it away every few steps to see more blood accumulating on the toilet paper. James dropped his tissue and ran for three blocks. When he stopped running he bent over again, and looked at his feet to catch his breath.

He sat down on the curb, pinched the end of his nose, and tilted his head back. All he could see was the bright grey sky.

It was then that the heart of the sky opened up, and it began to snow.

Chapter 8

He went to reach for his backpack on the cement behind him, but James remembered that he left it in his cubby at school. He kept one of his father's watches in the front zipper. James would pull it out four or five times a day during class and glance at its red and white face to see how much time was left before lunch, recess, and going home.

His father had over a dozen watches, and left most of them at home when he left. Before his father died, James asked his mother if he could get a watch of his own. She told him he could wear one of his father's watches.

"Wait, wait!" she interrupted herself, "I'll ask him, just to make sure-" That night when James' father called, she told him about the watch and asked if James could wear one.

"Of course!" his mom had the phone turned up loud enough for James to hear his father's voice, which was muffled through half a dozen satellites, "He can use the red one, I think he'll like the colors, Karen." James walked around the corner and he heard his mother say between chuckles,

"He's just like you, so concerned with time, the letter I got from you this past Thursday was all about time. I'm worried. Are you okay?"

"I don't know what I was getting at, honey, don't worry- I shouldn't stay up so late and write letters. I should write them with a fresh mind."

His mother paused before saying, "Well, while we're on the subject of time- it's only a few months before you come home."

"It's all I think about. Well, I think about what we'll do when I get back" he said in a faux-suave manner, causing them both to chuckle. "They aren't going to send me back before I retire."

"It'll be wonderful to have you around all the time, getting in my way, worrying about time, stinking up my house with your pipe." This caused them both to laugh in unison. The sudden change of volume caused the phone to crackle.

James' father remembered something about the watch, "Oh, that watch isn't going to fit his wrist, but he can put it in his pocket or his backpack until I get back and I'll buy him one of his own." That was the last time they talked before it happened.

Karen had not looked in the drawer where he kept the watches since James' father died. Or, at least she had not moved them around. James knew this because he left the room when his mother told him about his father being dead, and he stared at the faces and hands of the watches moving in unison for an hour before going back into the living room. He memorized the pattern his father put the watches in the drawer. Every few days, when his mom was downstairs, James would open the drawer and look at the clocks again.

A snowflake hit James' eye and he let the thoughts of the watch and his father dissolve like the melting flakes on the sidewalk. They kept melting because it was not cold enough for them to pile up on one another. Not yet.

He started to worry about what time he should get back to his house. James did not want to show up at his house and start to eat his afternoon snack before three in the afternoon, when he usually did. His mom would realize that right away and know that his ruffled appearance did not occur from some legitimate source.

The kids in his class were probably still at recess, they probably dropped their sticks, stopped their swings, stilled their jump ropes, and looked to the sky when it began snowing. After that, they probably started to squeal with delight, and talk about what they would do in the snow over the weekend.

He could not imagine them to be much different than a bunch of dwarfed farmers, clothes suddenly brown and threadbare, dropping their scythes, unhanding their plow, and running toward the second coming the way the pastor talked about in The Garage. He could not imagine the looks on the faces of his classmates being any less excited about the snow as the farmers would be about the end of all their work. That was the difference, he thought. Kids were happy when things started, and adults liked it when things ended. He got a chill when he thought that he might understand why someday.

Sophie probably heard the fifty kids on the playground stop everything and start laughing and talking. She was probably shocked into not crying anymore. With curiosity, Sophie must have put her legs out in front of her and let her hands lay on her lap in order to slide down the orange tube-slide into the snowing playground. James hoped she smiled. Phil always had to pick sides even if there was no need for them. He was probably with Sonny and Sonny's friends, and stopped laughing when it began to snow. The laughter would begin again because of the pure delight of the snow falling heavier and heavier like fallen wheat to the ground. One of the teachers was probably blowing a whistle to go back inside about now. The snow by James was starting to fall so thickly it began to stick to the grass.

James tried to think about how to know when to go home, he started walking down the street towards a gas station. There was a clock in there, but he could not wait around that long staring at it, the clerk would think he was shoplifting and call his mom.

After school every day, James took the long way home- and as soon as he left the school yard, his stomach would begin to growl for a snack. That was when he figured it out; he was going to go home around the time that his stomach started to ache.

When James went into the gas station, he heard the bell chime above his head from opening the door, and he saw that he still had a couple of hours before school let out. James walked to the bathroom with his head down. When the clerk, a guy a few years out of high school, saw James, he said,

"That started up pretty fast!" James walked faster and replied,

"It sure did! It will probably go all weekend."

The guy worked got the job at the gas station a few weeks after graduation and it seemed like he was there all day, working odd shifts and regular shifts. Other than the owner, James was pretty sure that guy was the only one who worked there.

James got into the bathroom and twisted the deadbolt to lock it. He started to wonder why the guy was so friendly all the time, and seemed happy just watching the still store for hours and hours and was so happy to talk to anyone who walked in. James would have been bored standing for that much time, listening to the same DJ's on the same radio station hours, days, weeks, months, and years.

James went over the mirror and looked at his face. With some water from the sink, he started to brush back his hair where it was messed up. James wiped away some of the dry blood he missed, and swished out his mouth with water. He tucked in his shirt where it was torn at the bottom, and turned his head to look at himself at an angle.

The only thing James could not figure out was the black eye. He would have to find a way to explain it so that his mom would not talk to the teacher or any of the students' parents.

James washed his hands and looked down at them. He did not have any bruises or scrapes on them, no war wounds. He did not mind, and he would rather have hurt everywhere else on his body than his hands.

James remembered washing his hands with his dad every evening before dinner. The steam would fog up the small window above their steel sink; they used dish soap instead of hand soap. The dish soap smelled like green apples and left their hands almost tacky with residue. One time, a few weeks before he left, James' dad was drying his own hands he stopped midway through a chuckle and said in the most serious tone that James had known at the time:

"Keep your hands clean,"

"Yeah, Dad, I know" James replied

"No." His eyebrows pulled together and he looked at his own hands, "Keep your hands clean, and don't hurt anyone unless you have to. It's rough."

"Okay, Dad." James tried to think of the source of the sudden strain in his father's voice. His father ruffled James' his hair with his wet hands.

"Rough stuff out there, kiddo." He began tickling James and roughhousing, eventually carrying him by the feet into the dining room for dinner that night.

When James left the bathroom, the clerk was reading a magazine and did not look up until the bell chimed again. Knowing the clerk heard the chime, James said,

"Have a nice day, keep warm," just loud enough so he would not have to turn around and the clerk would not have to see his face.

Chapter 9

The clerk did not even look up from the magazine he was flipping through until after James left. He looked around only after the bell above the door chimed; he turned another page, and brought his wiry fingers up to the side of his face where a colony of pimples established themselves. He was thin and his stooped shoulders that concaved inwards towards his chest like a cheap plastic swing set bowing under the weight of an adult. His pale scrawny arms lifted each page of the magazine and set it down on the opposing side, slowly.

When he knew he was alone, he looked up into the security mirror. It was round and as wide as the lid of a trash can. The fish-eye effect made most of the small convenience store visible, but pushed the clerk standing at the counter to the edge of it, squishing him nearly out of existence. He was almost invisible.

The phone rang.

"Syderski's Gas and Stop." he paused to listen. "No, Trevor isn't here- I think. . . I think you have the wrong number." The clerk hung up after the person on the other line set their phone on the cradle. No apology. He looked around the store. His eyes trekked back to the security mirror. He could hear a cooling fan turn itself on in the back, no doubt lightening the load of heat on one of the machines that kept the small desolate Syderski's Gas and Stop in business.

A car pulled up to one of the pumps outside. A career woman in her mid-thirties got out and lifted the nozzle. He pressed the intercom button near the cash register.

"You'll have to prepay," She looked confused. "I'm sorry ma'am" The woman looked at the other, empty pumps, and clicked her high heels into the store. She looked at him before digging through her purse. "Sure is nice to see snow this winter," he said. She didn't even nod. She pulled out a twenty, and a few bills, a quarter, and set it down casually on the counter between them.

"That much-" and she went back outside without ever looking at him again. He picked up the change from the counter and could almost feel the electrical warmth of the other human being who just held it. He calculated the money into the system so she could pump her gas, and sorted the money into the correct bins. He ran his forefinger and thumb over his eyebrows before returning to his magazine.

Chapter 10

James pulled the hood of his jacket over his head and stuck his hands in his pockets. He made his way to a place he knew about. In his neighborhood, there was a dark brown two story house that had a patch of woods behind it. In that patch of woods, there was an old tree house that was not used anymore. He thought he kids who used to play in it must have grown up and their parents never got around to tearing it down. James looked at the windows to make sure the old man who lived there could not see him sneak past the left side of the house and into the cover of the woods.

From time to time, James could see the man shuffle his feet down his driveway and throw away a white kitchen garbage bag, or pay a neighborhood teenager to mow his lawn when the irritatingly rebellious weeds began to peek through the earth in front of his house. He had white hair, wore glasses, and almost always dressed like he was on his way to work in an office. James knew he was a retiree of some sort. He seemed shorter than he was because he was a little rounder than most people would like to be. Not even once did James see the old man wearing a bathrobe, or jeans. It was always neatly pressed khakis and some shade of oxford. Most of the time, the old man would stay inside. Rarely would the neighbors gaze upon him squinting at the sun on while carefully sculpting his lawn or sitting on his front porch.

Today was no different. The man was tucked somewhere inside his house. There were only a few neighbors who James knew. There was a widow who always planted more and more tulips in her yard each year. Last spring, her yard looked like a festival. James wondered how long it would take before the whole yard was conquered by the troops of tulips she so meticulously set in rows. Also, there was a young couple who had their first kid together right after moving in. There were a few houses with kids in his grade, but he usually played in his backyard or in the house to avoid them. James did not think that he would like the kids much, so he never talked to them. Sophie and her family moved in a year before to a house just a few doors down from James'. He only started talking to Sophie when they began working in Vocabulary Unit Groups together. Before talking to her, he thought there was something wrong with her because of how quiet she was. After the day he just had, seeing her reaction in the slide made him wonder if he would understand how his mom acted, he thought that maybe she would. James wanted to see her outside of school. He tried not to think about the way her long blonde hair moved smoothly with her. It made him think about the way silk dresses moved on classy women when they danced.

James did not really know the owner of the yard he was walking in. He knew it was an old man who lived alone, he knew the man had not given his house another coat of brown paint since James could remember, he knew the old man bought nice candy for Halloween but left it out in a basket on the front porch with a sign affixed:

'Take only one, please,' in achingly strict block print. The basket of candy was empty whenever James got to it. He thought the adults should know there would never be enough candy to trickle down for everyone if they let the kids choose how much they wanted.

James pulled his coat tighter when he went to a good spot to enter the woods. He could tell no one was back there in a long time, because there was no trail or any sort of clearing. He found the spot that had saplings instead of thick evergreens and started walking into the woods. He pulled a branch to the side with his right arm and looked behind him at the house again. He still did not see anyone in the windows. James was always so over-cautious about things he should not have done so he would never get caught and in trouble. As soon as he stepped into the arms of the trees, they caught all the snow and he stopped to pull the hood of his coat off of his head so he could hear the small spot of wilderness better. The wind was low, and he could almost hear the snowflakes slipping off the pine needles.

Stepping further into the woods, James could feel the fallen brown pine needles matted on top of one another. He could feel the different layers, the top one was dry. Beneath that, it got soggy from last week's rain. Under that set of pine needles, there was a layer slowly decomposing from last year. Between the halfway decomposed pine needles and the dirt, he knew there were snails, worms, and other living things, each day growing less and less in strength and number as winter approached. Some could freeze over the winter and come to life with the thaw.

At one time, there was a clearing around the tree house, but the area was now so overgrown that other trees sprung up close to the tree that cradled the tree house. James never went into the tree house before, but a few times a week he would go into the woods to think. It was about fifteen feet off of the ground and the way to get up was a plastic and rope ladder that was currently swinging slightly back and forth with the winter wind. It was forgotten.

James shivered and touched a cold white plastic bar near his head. He gave the ladder a tug; he gave the ladder another tug. A few old leaves floated down and settled at his feet. He put his left foot on the lowest bar, nothing happened. He moved a bit and started jumping on the bar a few times, it creaked, and a few more leaves fell down. James ascended toward the crooked-cut wood opening to the tree house.

At the top James latched onto the wood edge, put his feet on a higher bar, and pulled himself into the tree house. Inside, the tree house floor was covered with leaves, some of which had been settled for so long they melted with age and became dirt. He was able to stand at his full height. When he lifted his arms, he could reach the highest beam and the splinter-plagued roof.

There were three plastic milk crates turned upside down, two blue, and one red. There were three windows, and the bark of the tree was part of one of the walls. James used his hands to sweep the leaves and dirt off of the floor. When he was done, he found an old pack of coated playing cards, a small bucket, and a cracked candle. He put each plastic milk crate to each window and looked out.

In the window to the left, he saw the stretch of road that went to the gas station. The snowfall slowed down so when James stuck his hand out of the window, no snowflakes rushed to it. There was some snow stuck to the road. He could see a car go past on that road every few minutes, and he heard the light whistle of the wind through the creaking woods. The wheels of the cars left long curving lines on the road that looked like dark and sure brush strokes on canvas. Each car added to the pattern that came before it. The lines were slightly off for each set of wheels, and more so around corners.

Moving to the middle window, he saw the tips of the school building. Classes must have still been in, because he was not hungry. He tried to remember what they were going to learn about that day. Friday was art day after recess, he thought about the picture he painted last week. The art teacher told the students to practice mixing paint and use their hands to paint something in nature. Each student was only given two colors. James had blue and yellow. First, he took the yellow and painted the sun, and then he took the blue and made the sun setting over a lake. After that, he mixed the two and made bushes grow on either side of the lake. It was cold the week before, too, and it made James uneasy to think about how cold the water was in the winter, and how it could just warm up again in the summer, as if winter never happened. Though James knew how the chill from winter never left the bottom of the lake where the sand gave way to sludge and the light from the brightest and hottest day could not penetrate the water enough for him to see his own hands. James would take a deep breath; kick his way down to the bottom, exhale, and listen to the subtle hiss of his breath rise to the surface of the lake.

His art teacher showed him a great deal of appreciation for listening to her five minute lecture about color mixing. She complimented his ability to tie his colors into one idea which she said captured the ideal result of the assignment. She thought James' painting of the bushes and the lake was unlike the rest of the class who had merely stamped their multi-colored paper or smeared the hollow frames of houses.

In the window to the right, he could see the beginning of the street that led to his house. James' house was too far down the road and hidden by trees and other houses, so he could not see it. A few of the kids in the neighborhood who went to high school were walking home already. There was a teenage couple walking close enough to win a three-legged-race on the sidewalk from where their bus let them off.

Behind them, there was another teenage guy who must have taken his bike home from school. The couple started goofing off by pushing one another around and James could tell that the guy on the bike was trying not to watch them, because the guy jumped the sidewalk with his bike and went to the other side of the street.

Just as the guy was passing the couple on the other side of the street, the girl was pushed onto a yard by her boyfriend. The guy on the bike heard her yelp and lost his balance, and fell sloppily on the curb.

James could not hear what they were saying but it was obvious the couple was just goofing off, and the girl's boyfriend helped her get up. They did not even see the guy on the bike fall down. He got up and sped away to his house anonymously.

The wind hit James' face and he could feel the specific spots where it was still sore. He looked down at the ladder and when he stood directly in front of the hole, he could lean over and see how the ladder looked like it was in a pile because of the angle he was at. When James started going back down the ladder, he was looking down and saw a maple leaf that was sticking out among all of the pine needles. He watched it get bigger as he descended, and put it in his pocket when he reached the bottom. For luck, he thought.

James put his hood back on, and while leaving the woods, he heard a creak. He looked over to his right and saw that there was a shed, painted light blue, with a dusting of snow on the roof. He heard the noise again, and saw that the latch was unlocked, and the door swung open two inches with the wind. He looked back at the house again, and scanned all the windows for faces. When James did not see any, he walked to the shed, wedged his hand in the door, and opened it. James stepped in immediately and closed the door behind him.

The shed was completely dark when the door was closed. When the wind blew it open, the sliver of light revealed a swinging cord in front of James' face. James pulled it and winced from the sudden burst of light from the dusty light bulb.

When he pulled his arm from his face, James saw white. There were white sheets over whatever was against the walls and on the tables in the shed. There were white sheets on the floor, too. James moved to the back corner of the shed, minding the parts of the sheets that bunched up so he did not trip. There was a spot on the counter that had a pile of tools placed haphazardly on top of one of the glimmering white sheets.

James picked up a hammer with his left hand; he picked up a mallet with his right. He held both to his face and then put them down. He turned around, pulled the cord to shut off the light, and ran out of his neighbor's yard toward his house.

When he got close to his house, he cut around back to the garage. All of the toilet paper was gone from the yard, but he could see a few tufts of it sticking out from the green city-issued trash bins at the end of his driveway. He got his bike from the garage and rode back to his neighbor's shed. This time he passed through the woods in the back to make sure his neighbor did not see him when he slipped into the unlocked shed.

James pulled the light on, put the bike down on its side, and walked towards the tools. He grabbed the hammer, the mallet, and some pliers. He went to the bike and knelt down at the front of it. James put the tools down to the side and ran his hands over the handlebars of the bike. He felt the way a cowboy must when it came time to say good bye to a good horse. James picked up the pliers and drove the dull point into the tire. James took it out and pushed the pliers in again, harder.

When he heard a pffft come from the front tire, he used the pliers to pull the hole bigger. After that, James took the hammer and broke some of the spokes near the hole on the front tire. Three or four spokes let go of the rim with only one solid hit. James took the mallet and broke the plastic casing off of the front right handle bar. He put the tools down and put his cold hand to his right eye where the bruise was. James put the tools back in the exact way he picked them up, so the neighbor would not suspect anything.

After he turned off the light and peeked outside to make sure nobody was looking, James went back into the woods and threw the handle bar casing under some bushes before sitting down on the sidewalk to tie his shoe.

James' stomach started rumbling, so he began walking slowly towards his house. When he got there, he left his bike on the front porch and walked inside the warm foyer.

When he was inside, James saw his mother looking at a photo album in the kitchen. He closed the door behind him and noticed she was sitting at the counter in her bathrobe, one slipper dangling from her crossed legs. James could smell cookies in the oven,

"Your snack is almost done," she said while swiveling around in the stool to see him. James knew the exact second when she saw his black eye because she dropped her hands and her jaw.

"Did you get into a fight?" she said while standing up and walking towards him. Her hand already was nearly touching his face.

"You should see the other guy," James smiled,

"I told you not to fi-"

"The bike, Mom," James paused her, "It snowed today and I was taking that curve way too fast by the school on the way home and I slipped,"

She was hugging him when she said "I didn't know you took your bike in today." She wanted to believe him. She continued, "You really have to be careful with this weather," Karen said as she pulled back, still holding him in her arms, and looked at him in the face, "I told you not to wear your red coat today."

"You told me not to wear my red coat yesterday, you didn't say anything about today," James said turning the right side of his face away from his mother and looking out of the window so she would not see his black eye again.

"We'll have to get you a new one, that coat is no good" The timer for the oven chimed, and she let him go to put his coat in the closet while she pulled the cookies out and poured her and James a glass of milk.

When James sat down on the stool next to his mother, she closed the photo album and told him, "Well, this weekend, you can just heal up- no body at school can make fun of you for being clumsy if you're at home all weekend having a good time in the snow, and they won't even see your eye!"

James' mother picked up one of the hot oatmeal cookies, took a bite of it, and chewed it slowly in the back of her mouth.

"I practically flew!"James said kicking his legs back and forth on the stool while Karen looked out the window and slowed her chewing. She swallowed and said,

"I'm going to go lay down now," she looked down at the floor and then at James, "can you clean this up for me?"

"Yeah, Mom, aren't you going to finish your cookie?" She put it back down on the plate, took a sip of milk and smiled at him before leaving the kitchen. She looked the way a plastic bag from the grocery store looked when it only held one can of soup.

James swirled in the chair and bounced his legs manically while eating all three cookies on the plate and drinking his milk. He brought the plates to the sink, and rinsed out his mother's glass of milk. He went back to the stools, and pushed in his mother's. James saw the photo album. The cover was a reddish-brown mock-leather plastic. The color reminded him of the wrapping of a chocolate candy bar. The album was about four inches high. He sat back down on the stool and slid it towards himself. It had a gold inlay border of two simple lines circling each other. Embossed in large, shining letters it read:

Our Family.

He tapped the edge of it with his fingers before reaching under the cover and pulling it open to the first page. In the middle of the page, there was a picture of his parents when they were dating. They were at a pub with smoke swirling around them. James could only see the side of his father's face where his mother had her hand resting gently on it. His father was turned towards his mother- and he could tell they were looking into each other's eyes because his mom's face was flushed like it always was when his father looked at her for a long time. She had the strangest curl in her mouth and her blue eyes almost looked watery. Her smiling like that, it made her look so young. James knew that it was about this time when they were dating that his father asked his mother to marry him.

The next picture was also in the middle of the page, opposite of a wedding invitation. His father was dressed like he was when he went to military balls, but his mom was wearing a high-necked white dress and they were both laughing. James picked up a spoon from the counter and looked at his face upside down in the swoop of it. He spun it around and turned his face to the side, tilting the spoon so the black eye was the most prominent thing reflected. He looked at the picture of his father and did not see much of himself like him unless he tilted his head up to make his jaw bigger. No, James thought, my cheeks are so much puffier than his. James put the spoon down and flipped a few pages to where his ultrasound. His mom scrawled on a piece of paper under it:

It's a boy!

On the next few pages it was a series of pictures of James' father and his father's friends building a new edition on the house they used to live in. That was James' bedroom when he was born. Midway through the group, James found a picture of his father pulling up his left sleeve and flexing his biceps for the camera. James looked closer, and next to his father's pointer finger there was a dark spot on his skin about the size of a dime. James pulled up his left sleeve and looked at his skin, and saw the same dark spot in the same area. In the summertime, the sun would darken it more than the surrounding skin and it would be as visible as his father's was in the picture. James never noticed his dad had the same mark.

The next group of the pictures came from when he was born. The one he liked the most was of his mother in the hospital bed holding him, and his parents looking at each other. They both had that look his mom had in the dating picture in their eyes, and they were both smiling. They smiled so much.

James kept looking through the book and saw himself as a baby growing up. He did not recognize himself in any of the pictures of him during Christmases, Easters, Fourth of Julys, Birthdays, or Barbeques until the album was a couple dozen pages in and he was almost the age he was at the time. James flipped a page and then there was nothing. There was nothing else for the rest of the book.

James ran his hands over each of the blank pages and wonder what pictures would have been there if his father was not dead. He went back to the last page that had a picture on it. It was a portrait of his father, a head shot of him in uniform. It was the last picture his family had of him before what happened.

James recognized his father, but he did not recognize the face his father was making. It must have been the face he went into battle with, the face his father had on when he was on patrol. When his father died, James tried not to think of that picture.

James' father never looked at him like that, his father smiled at him, taught him to ride a bike, tie his shoes, and open the door for his mother whenever he could. That portrait was the picture the newspaper used to announce his death. James wondered about all the people who looked at that picture and wondered if they thought his father was mean.

When James remembered his father, he thought about the time they went fishing and he taught him how to bait a line. He did not think about not about his father's uniform. James thought about his dad sticking out his tongue, full of ice cream, and the laughter of his mother. The sun was so bright that day they got ice cream it was almost audible. Winter had now set in and the sun was no longer apparent. It was only a ghost of light that bounced off the grey clouds and lit their days.

James must have sat at the table for a long time looking at the picture of his father. He was looking in his father's eyes and trying to see if any part of him was happy or if any part of him wanted to unclench his jaw and smile for the camera. James wanted to know if his father wanted to take off his hat and let James' mother run her hands through his hair. James heard his mother's alarm clock go off upstairs, and he looked outside. The weak winter sun was setting so James closed the album, and put it away under the coffee table.

Chapter 11

"I don't see any decay-" James said in a serious tone while leaning over Sophie. He moved his coat sleeve up and peered into the depths of her mouth. Sophie opened her mouth wider while looking out of the window of the tree house. She noticed a lot of cars in the parking lot of the gas station.

"What about the candy?" She asked, mouth still ajar.

"What?" James leaned back so she could close her mouth

"Should I eat so much candy?"

"Just make sure you brush after, it can't be that bad for you."

"James! You're not really pretending."

They were soon both sitting on the milk crates facing one another in the tree house. After James' black eye healed up, Sophie started walking home with him from school. On the third time they were walking home, James told her about the tree house.

"It's old, but it's still solid, it'll last. As long as I look in the windows to make sure the guy who lives there isn't watching, it should be fine,"

"I don't know," said Sophie, "why can't we just ask him? Do you think He'd mind?"

"Well, whenever I do something bad, I get punished for it- but if I ask to do something I'm not supposed to do, and I do it anyway- it gets worse."

"Why don't you just not go in the tree house if he says you can't after you ask him?"

James often felt as if he was being watched but not seeing who was watching him. Sometimes it scared him, and he would pull the thick covers on his bed over him completely. But still, eyes fell on him. There were other times when James was walking around town or in some woods nearby and he felt like everything around him was peering inside of him, like he was a show. When he was in the tree house, James believed he could truly be himself. He was not scared during those times. "It wouldn't be as fun! Trust me, the tree house is great. No one can see you and it has a great view of the neighborhood!"

When they first arrived at the tree house, James showed Sophie the playing cards, the milk crates, and the view. She noticed a notebook in a Ziploc bag in the corner that James did not mention during his tour.

"What's that?" She reached over. James reached out to stop her hand but stopped before he touched her.

"Just some stuff I drew, you don't want to look at it."

"You drew it in art class?"

"Not exactly," he turned from her and pretended to look out the window when he was really just looking at the grain in the wood around the window. "I got some of the ideas in art class." There was silence.

"Then, what is it? Can I see?"

"I guess," James told the window. He did not look away, but could hear Sophie carefully opening the bag and slowly separating the pages.

"Did you really draw these?" She asked. James nodded without looking away from the window. "This is really good- do you know these are good?" She kept flipping through the pages. "Are these those guys digging up Main Street? I remember that, it was when the pipe burst and water ran all the way down to the- Woah! You drew all the churches in the town. How did you do those lights?" James still wasn't looking at her

"I don't really like to show those to people." Sophie closed the book and sealed it apologetically in the Ziploc bag.

"Let's play dentist again," she suggested.

"Can't we just look out the windows, this is too cold to be a dentist's office."

"We can pretend we're at the North Pole."

James relented, but he got bored and was not even trying. Whenever anyone complimented him on his drawings, his reality seemed blurred. He was troubled just knowing someone looked at them. Sophie was upset that he was not paying attention. He could not pretend that day. When they stopped playing dentist, Sophie asked,

"Do you want to go over to my house?"

"Really, would your parents be okay with that?"

"Yeah, I told them about you, they say you sound nice," Sophie said while looking down and allowing her hair to fall in her face.

"I guess so, do you have snacks? I'm getting hungry." Sophie nodded.

They started walking through the woods again. James heard a steady repeating scrape and crunch. He reached out his arm and stopped Sophie before they walked out of the woods.

"Listen," Sophie stopped humming the quiet song she was thinking of and looked around.

"I don't hear it." There was another scrape and another crunch. Sophie's eyes brightened and she looked at the windows.

"I think it is the guy who lives here, it sounds like he is shoveling the driveway," James began turning back into the woods.

"What are we going to do?" Sophie whispered.

"We'll just go out the other way. It's shorter to your house, anyway." After walking through the woods they started laughing. James looked at Sophie and moved closer, he picked a twig out of her hair.

"Looks like you've got a hitchhiker, there, ma'am." They started laughing and Sophie began running towards her house while James chased her. He started waving his arms and yelled, "What are you kids doing in my tree house? You think you can just go up there and play boring

dentist games without asking?"

"Hey! They aren't boring! Dentists are interesting."

"Yeah. Okay Soph. So are math games. And church."

"No, it is interesting," they were walking again at this point "it's no more boring than sitting and looking out windows," she sighed and crunched forward. "Here we are!"

Sophie's house was painted red like a barn, but without the white support beams. It sat low to the ground and was only one level with a basement. In the spring the yard grew sunflowers in the flowerbeds by the mailbox and the windows, and dandelions in the patch-less green yard. Right now, the curved cement and gravel walk was the only part of her yard that was not covered in snow. A dark brown carcass of a sunflower peeked out of the snow, frozen mid-rot.

James could see her father in the kitchen window drinking something warm from a mug and looking at a television that was set in the corner of the kitchen. They walked up to the door; The doorknob looked like it was antique copper and had etchings of lilies around its curve.

"Dad! James is here!"

"Hi, Sweetie! Just in the kitchen." Sophie's dad said. Sophie and James went into the kitchen, "How was school, you aren't too cold, are you?"

"It was daunting, I'm not too cold. It looks colder than it is out there."

"Daunting!" Sophie's father repeated, "That's a new one." He turned to James "How is school going for you?"

"Good, but I'm looking forward to Christmas break."

"Oh yeah? Is this the first Christmas without your, uh-"

"My dad. Yeah." James looked down at his hands. The whole town knew since it happened, and all of his neighbors had begun to realize the shards his mother was in. James hoped Sophie's dad would not ask about his mom.

"I'm sorry. It's just another family this government is throwing-" Sophie's dad stopped himself, "If you need anything, you let me know." He placed his hand awkwardly on James' shoulder. James Nodded. "Sophie, do you want to give James a tour of the house, wouldn't that be fun?"

Sophie turned to James and smiled, "Yeah, James, I'll show you the creepy basement!" They passed the living room and started going down the stairs when James heard Sophie's dad cursing and grumbling about something.

The floor in the basement was smoothed-over cement painted grey. The walls were decorated with wood paneling. The entire basement was one big room, with different areas sanctioned off by couches and other furniture. There was a spot with the television, the windows that were behind the couch were covered with thick black curtains. The corner that held the computer had a window at the very top of the wall, and there was dust and cobwebs in the window. There was a section that had an indent into the basement, and that was the bathroom.

James walked toward the bathroom door, and tapped on it. The door was not solid wood, but hollow inside and plastic sounding. Looking down, he saw the glint of a penny, and he picked it up.

"Neat!"

"What is it?" asked Sophie, from across the room

"I found a penny,"

"It's mine, because it's my basement- and you found it here,"

"Well, finders keepers, but I would have given it to you anyway, if you wanted it,"

"Thank you," Sophie said when James handed it to her.

"What's that?" James was looking at the corner of the basement, opposite of where the two came in, where steps led up. They were cement rather than carpeted, and there was no light coming from them. The darkness of the opposite stairs seemed to suck a small amount of light from the room.

"Oh, that! Those stairs are the back entrance to the house."

"Can we go up?"

Sophie sat down on the couch and looked at her hands before answering, "last time I went up there, I got yelled at- we can go outside and I'll show you where it comes in." A tumbling cough was muffled through the first story of the house. It was Sophie's mother.

It was warmer on the stairs than in the basement. Both of them shuffled back into their winter coats and closed the door with a flurry of snow behind them.

They walked along the side of the house and Sophie talked about the neighbors;

"Those neighbors are really nice. They let me play with their dog sometimes,"

"What kind of dog is it?"

"A Golden Retriever,"

"Are they really golden?"

"Well, I think they are good at getting dead ducks when people are hunting, they watch out better than the hunter do to where they fall near the lakes. And it's called golden because it has golden brown fur-"

"Is it like your hair?"

"Yeah, mine is a little bit lighter." Sophie looked up from where she was crunching down the snow while walking and pointed as they turned along the side of the house and started walking parallel with the back, "There it is!"

She was pointing at an old, thick red door. It had chipped paint and when James put his palm against the wood, the paint seemed like it was just an afterthought and not really connected with the door at all. When James touched the handle, it was so cold that he could feel a shock at the base of his spine.

"Touch it, Soph! It's so cold!" James said as he jumped back. Laughing, she said,

"I don't think so, you don't look like you had that much fun with it."

"Maybe some other time. . ." James started laughing and then stopped-

"Wait, what time is it?"

"I don't know- I think around four o'clock." James' eyes got a lot wider.

"Really?" he looked away, "I have to be home soon for an early dinner, there's that PTA meeting soon."

"Yeah, yeah, my dad is going to that, too!"

"See you there!" James turned to go home before he remembered something.

"Where's your mom, Soph?" James asked.

"She's upstairs, I think she's sleeping, it's really not good to bug her."

"Oh, okay." James noticed that there was coldness within her house, a level of sanitization. It did not seem like anyone really lived there. The furnace itself was overcome by a beating cold coming from the house itself. It was not a physical cold. Although outside the house was significantly colder than inside, he was more comfortable with the kind of cold he felt on his skin rather than the cold that felt like something icy and sharp was growing out of his stomach.

Chapter 12

When James got back to his house he closed the door as quickly as he ran there, so not much cold was let in. James' mom still shivered when she hugged him hello.

"I made macaroni and cheese with mini-hotdogs,"

"MMM. That's good- can I help you with anything?"

"You can set the table," she started walking toward her room, "I'll just wash up,"

James stepped on a chair to reach the dishes, grabbed the silverware from the drawer and moved to the dining room. He set up his plate and silverware at the end of the table. Then, he set up his mom's plate with the silverware next to his. James was still holding a plate, and a fork. He stopped smiling, went to the kitchen, stepped up on the chair, and put it back in the cabinet.

James sat down at the table, and looked down into the clear glass lid that held the food, watching it fog up with steam. The kitchen window was fogged up whenever his mom cooked using boiling water, and he thought about how living in a house is a lot like being cooked.

"Do you want something to drink?" James heard his mother say from the kitchen.

"Can I have some Dr. Pepper?" James asked, sitting back in his chair.

"Ehhh, try again,"

"Kool-aide?"

"One more time?"

"How about milk?"

"Milk, we can do." James heard his mother slide the gallon of milk out of the refrigerator shelf and put it on the counter. He heard her put the chair he used to get the plates out with. She grabbed two glasses and James could hear the swish of milk splash against the walls of glass. His mother put the milk jug back and carried two glasses to the table.

"So, are you a peasant, prince, or king tonight?"

"Prince, but I might be a king, I just don't want to get more than I can eat."

"Fair enough," she scooped out two serving spoon-fulls of the orange, noodly, hot-dog concoction. She took the same amount for herself, and put the lid back on the dish.

"I think God understands that we appreciate the food, right?" she smiled at James,

"Yep! Let's chow down!" She took a bite and said under her breath,

"I think he knows we wish there was more people for it to go around to." James pretended he did not hear her. They didn't pray at the table after what happened to his father. Even when his dad was home, they would all lower their eyes and James' mom would say something nice.

"I met Sophie's parents today, after we were playing in the school playground for a while, she invited me to her house to warm up."

"That's nice, are they good people?" she took a big bite of a hotdog bit.

"I think so, they seem very nice." James took a sip of his milk, he squinted when he thought about the thick slabs of coughing Sophie's mom sent down the stairs. It sounded so painful to him, "thank you for making dinner, I can do the dishes."

"What a good kid, no wonder my sisters are jealous, your cousins don't do anything but complain and make trouble- you're pretty good at staying out of trouble, considering." She finished up her plate, "You just get this into the sink for now, you won't have time before the meeting to wash all of them, just get the dishes and silverware into the sink, and put the leftovers in the fridge- just in the pan, we can eat it for lunch tomorrow." she put her fork on the plate and sipped a miniscule amount of her milk, "I'm just going to get dressed and try to look a little more like the living," she chuckled and walked off. His mom left most of her dinner on her plate.

James scooped the rest of his food into the dish when he saw she was out of the room, and drank his milk. He brought all the dishes into the sink, put the platter into the fridge, and used a sponge to mop up the mess by his plate. James never had to clean up the table where his mom ate, but he remembered how his father usually made about the same amount of mess that he did.

When James' mom came down, she was wearing nice black pants and a nice black blouse. Her hair was pulled back for the first time in a month, and her eyes did not look so puffy because she put on eye makeup. She smiled and James saw how much whiter her teeth seemed because of how red her lips were with the lipstick.

They both bundled up in their coats and decided to walk to the parent teacher association meeting. James' mother wore the scarf that had his school colors on it, even though it clashed with her jacket. James blushed and hoped none of the other kids would notice, but his mom could not see him blush because it was dark outside already.

She walked him to the classroom where the kids were going to wait while the parents and teachers met in the gym. Sophie was not there yet, so after James' mother hugged him, he went to the section of books and opened on up that had a picture of some kids in the forest on the cover.

There were a few kids from different classes, but nobody who he really wanted to talk to. He started to look at all the different books, and wondered which one was read more, wondered where the kids were who first read that copy of the book.

"They want to turn the kick ball field into a parking lot!" James heard Sophie say behind him. James turned around, and waved to her father who just finished putting her coat into a cubby for her. Sophie turned around and then turned back when they left,

"My dad is going to fight it," she stepped closer to James, "What does your mom think about it?"

"I don't know, she didn't tell me about it- it must have been in the newsletter, she never lets me read the newsletter."

"Do you think your mom will talk to the other kids' parents again about how mean they are?"

"I hope not," James said, "Let's go talk over there," James motioned to the corner, where there were fewer kids and more toys.

When they got to the corner, Sophie said, "I wish they would let us listen and talk about these things, too. They don't ask us about anything."

"That's for sure, do you know what is so funny," James said looking at the alphabet in animals on the wall. Sophie looked at him and smiled for him to continue, "A few years ago, I never thought I'd learn the alphabet, and now it's really easy." They sat down in chairs.

"Yeah?"

"Well, right now, it's really hard for me to get along with people-"

"You get along with me!" James smiled,

"You know what I mean," he continued, "In a few years, I think we'll figure it out, I think we'll all figure out how to get along and just have fun."

"But James-"

"Yeah, Soph?"

"It's just that..." she looked away, "a bunch of grownups can't decide whether or not to have a parking lot or a kick ball field," she sat down and put her hands on her lap, peering into them, "and even more grownups can't decide if they should be friends or not with the people we're at war with- and..."

"That's a good point, Soph, I didn't think about that." They were quiet for a while.

"Do you want to play dentist?" Sophie asked to break the silence,

"Let's play something else,"

"Like what?"

"We can play lost in the jungle."

"How do you play that?"

"Oh, we got lost from our jungle tour, and we have to survive until they find us."

"Who finds us?"

"The search party."

"Who is playing the search party?"

"Our parents, when our parents pick us up, we won't be lost anymore."

"Okay, let's try-"

They started crawling on the ground, looking for ants to eat, and water to drink.

"We can drink from the cups of the leaves," James suggested.

"Yeah, it's nice and warm here in the jungle, can there be a lake somewhere we can go swimming,"

"Oh yeah, over there," they walked to the clearing in the desks.

"Watch out, it's an alligator-" James warned.

"No, don't worry, it's friendly." Sophie replied, causing James to look at Sophie sideways, "He's just lonely, he won't eat us because he can talk to us."

"He can talk?"

"Yeah, but only I know his language, I'll translate," She was quiet for a bit before saying "He wants to tell us about his family." Sophie warbled words and then came out with sentences telling James about the alligator's family for a long while until the rescue crew found them, trickling into the playroom one by one.

Sophie's dad was one of the first to pick her up. They smiled at James, who was still sitting on the floor, and put Sophie's coat on. After they left, a few more sets of parents came and took their kids. Last was James' mother, who lost some of the makeup under her eyes and was sniffling from what James thought must have been a cold. She pulled her mouth to the sides of her face and tilted her head like she was smiling, then she reached out her hand to lead James home.

"How was the meeting,"

"It went pretty well, James, they wanted to talk a lot about the kick ball field."

"What did you think about the kick ball field to parking lot idea?"

"I'd say I didn't care- I told the PTA about the toilet paper, but they all started grumbling," they were leaving the school building and she passed some chatting parents so she lowered her voice, "one person raised their hand and said outright that it was unimportant,"

"I wonder how they would feel if it happened to them?" James asked.

"Exactly, I told them that," James' mother started getting worked up again, "another person told me it was your fault, they said-" she stifled a sob while James squeezed her hand tighter to encourage her to go on, "They said that if you had a father, he would teach you to deal with these kids, and the toilet-papering wouldn't have happened-"

James looked at the ground in front of them as they got closer to their house. The wind cut through his jacket and he shivered. His mother kept telling the story,

"I told them you had a father, he passed away, most of the parents were quiet- but there were a few," she was beginning to get really worked up, "they just kept saying 'that boy needs a father,' they said it over and over again until I just sat down and couldn't take it anymore," the two were quiet for a long time until they walked into the house and closed the door.

"How did the kick ball field end up?"

"They'll be paving it over when it gets warmer out," she put their coats up, "sorry James- go ahead and get some sleep," and she walked upstairs to go to her room.

Chapter 13

The next day after school, James was in the tree house again. He was alone this time because Sophie's grandparents were in town and her parents wanted her to be home right after school. He was wondering what he would do over winter break. It was three weeks long and was going to begin soon. James ran his fingers over the uneven boards around the window of the tree house. School had become a mild escape for James. It was not that he did not want to be around his mother, but that it was sometimes unbearable for him to carry her grief along with his own. James was unsure that he could salvage even a single day of his vacation and bring happiness to his mother.

James suddenly jumped back and wrapped his hands into his arms, and looked up at the ceiling of the tree house. He looked down and grimaced as he pulled his right pointer finger out of his coat and looked at it. James had a splinter. It was a big one, like part of a broken baseball bat- he thought. Well, maybe not that big. He was able to pick most of it out with his other hand, but had to go home to have his mom to get the rest out.

Descending the rope ladder, James was careful not to use his pointer finger. While thinking about the story he would make up to cover up the fact that he was in the tree house, he forgot about his finger. Only a few steps down, he grabbed a plastic step with all the force of his hand, and yelped while unintentionally letting go.

James felt himself being pulled back, and he reached out with his other hand, the one that was not throbbing, and tried to grab back onto the rope. James smiled a little bit when he was able to grab it, because he did not honestly think he could. The rope was not expecting the sudden re-emergence of his weight, so it snapped and he was only paused momentarily midair before falling again.

James let out a sturdy yelp when his ankle caught the ground, and the rope fell a bit on him as well as a bit of snow that was loosened in the commotion.

He must have passed out because when he woke up he was indoors and his coat was on the floor. There was a bag full of ice on his ankle that was elevated by pillows while he was lying on the couch. A lot of white light was coming from the windows and everything in the room looked old. The walls were painted a khaki color and there were picture frames dotting the entire interior of the room. There was an afghan folded over the top of the couch, and doilies on the coffee table. There was an old piano with the cover concealing the keys and a still metronome.

Suddenly, James heard someone talking from the other room,

"If I knew some kid was sneaking up in the tree house for solitude, I would have replaced the ladder." Out of the side room the old man who lived in the house calmly walked towards James. He had a round silhouette and a bit of a slouch, and was carrying some big box to the living room. James moved up a bit and winced when he moved his ankle.

"No, don't move, it's okay-"

"Sorry, sorry,"

"Don't worry; it's a tree house, what's the point of having a tree house if there aren't any kids to climb in it?"

"Is my ankle broken?" The old man smiled at James,

"No, just sprained, try moving it" James did and he winced, "are you nauseous at all?"

"What?"

"Sick- do you feel sick at all?" James scratched his head,

"No, not really-"

"Just sprained, we're good- and you won't even have a limp after I-" the old man pulled out a strange contraption that was essentially two blocks of wood and a rope, "just get it stretched the right way."

The old man noticed James' eyes widen, "don't worry, my son used to pull his ankle all the time in soccer, that's why I invented this-" he put one board on James' bare foot, and the other he held onto. There was a dial on one of the boards and the old man began fiddling with it while humming to himself.

"What do you call it?" James asked.

"What?"

"The invention, what do you call it?"

The old man smiled and his ears perked up under his white hair,

"The thing about inventions is you don't really have to name them, it's silly, really, to catalogue them in that way- numbers and codes work much more efficiently."

James nodded, the old man continued "You fall a lot, kiddo-"

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, I just saw you fall from your bike last week, the hammer took it awful hard- "

James opened his mouth, and then jumped a bit when he realized the man just pulled on the rope and did something with his ankle.

"What just happened?" James asked.

"Move your ankle," James did so and smiled,

"It doesn't hurt anymore!"

"Another successful usage of S-nine-eight-two-four-b!" the old man exclaimed, "I'd better chart this!"

James started to move and get up, but the old man told him,

"Don't move, not yet!" and James eased back onto the arm of the couch. The old man walked behind James and looked over him,

"Did you know that when we look at things, we really see them upside down? Like now, when I'm looking at you-" he smiled, "the brain is an amazing thing, our brains flips everything back around for us, and that's what we perceive." he put the contraption back in its box, "you can get up now!"

When James stood up, the man was back from putting the box away, and he extended his left hand,

"Hey there, my name is Mr. Heckerman you can call me," he paused in thought and lowered his hand again, before brightening up when he remembered, "you can call me Mr. Heckerman!"

"That's your left hand,"

"Yes, you're good to notice. The greeting of right palms is done by humans instinctively around the world, do you know why?"

"Why?" James said as he leaned just a little further back.

"They extend their right hand to show that they don't have any weapons, do you have any weapons," he stood still for a while, "oh my, what's your name?"

"James," he stuck out his left hand, and as Mr. Heckerman grabbed it and shook it.

"Then it doesn't matter which hand we extend. At this point, it's really preference. A right hand can shake a right hand, a left hand can shake a left hand, a right and left hand can even shake a left hand!"

"How's that?" James said while letting go,

"The right just needs to stick the elbow up a bit."

"Oh,"

"Want to help?"

"Help with what?"

"Help to get a new ladder for the tree house!"

"Okay," James smiled and followed Mr. Heckerman.

Chapter 14

It was a knowing world that both saw them together, and did not see them together. The neighborhood revolved around nothing, as each individual house was a world in itself and only had brief suspicions about the oddities that could or could not happen next door.

Every evening around five o'clock, Danielle would cease her experiments with composting and fertilizers to take a shower. The way she rinsed her aging white limbs reminded her of how she would wash the shorn stems each day in the flower shop she owned for the majority of her life. She sold her shop the year before so she could enter into something similar to retirement. Her graying and blonde hair lost its thick wave in the shower and fell nearly to her breasts. The way the rippling water moved the bunches of strands reminded her of yellow ribbons. She could see streams of dirt swirl around her toes and down the drain. She picked up a lot of dirt on the days she gardened and developed her compost pile. It amazed her how doing anything, even digging a hole with a hand-sized shovel would leave traces of itself on her. She wondered if life left traces of what the person went through on their soul, immortal messes.

When the 5-minute egg-timer that she set went off, she turned off the water and thought about saving the world.

All the world is yellow ribbons. She patted her frame down with a towel that she would use to dry herself for a week then use to clean the kitchen before she would wash it. She wanted to save the world.

Danielle could not help thinking about the dirt she picked up through her life, the kind carried from life to death. Some days, she would hardly think of death. Others, she would wake up in the middle of the night to her own head saying in a hundred years, I won't be alive. The oncoming morning, in particular, she woke up thinking about the inevitability of it. It was days like this that she wished she had children, grandchildren, increasingly diluted versions of her that would carry her nose for five generations, her love of olives for ten.

Most of the time, she did not regret it, the children. All the neighborhood children loved Danielle, it was her friends first, and then when she lost all of her friends her neighbors who would ask her why she did not have any children. You'd be a great mother! They stopped asking when they found out about candles and the fact that she would ask any question any child asked her during their visits across the street. Danielle had no fear of fire, and no fear of teaching children whatever she could. In her life, Danielle went to college, she owned a flower shop, she was no divorcee. She was no man's widow. But, there it was, only when she was alone, only late at night or early in the morning. In five-hundred years. . . she would think.

She would visit Mr. Heckerman most days. She made more of an effort to visit him on days when she started to think about her incredible problem of nothing.

And when the moonlight lit her descent across the street to Mr. Heckerman's house, anyone who saw her would forget her age and think that she was beautiful, and hope she was happy.

"That kid who used my tools last week fell out of the tree house today," Mr. Heckerman said as he took off her coat.

"Was he okay?" She thought about James, whose house was not far from hers. James never visited like the other children in the neighborhood. She did not remember seeing him around much anywhere in the neighborhood except when he shuffled to and from school.

"Just a sprain." he rubbed the small of her back, she leaned in to kiss him "I made popcorn, we could watch some movies."

"That sounds nice," she was glowing.

Chapter 15

There were just enough clouds in the sky to coax the sun into the town. The sun itself beat down strong, cutting through the ice in the air. When James and Sophie stood in the sun, it was almost warm. They were in the more populated part of town, where there were shops, grocery stores, barbers, bars, and every building was three stories. James was standing with this arms in front of him like he was holding onto something, and Sophie was to his right, had her arm up like it was resting on something, and looked off into the storefronts. Both of their knees were bent a little. When the light turned green, it was so quiet at the intersection that they could both hear the click of the light as it transferred.

"Here we go!" James said as they looked both ways and shuffled forward, through the stoplight.

"Can I drive soon?" Sophie asked, "you're going to crash us!"

"I won't!" James smiled and saw the red glimmer of a stop sign, "we can change places at that stop sign," they shuffled forward, "He's really nice-"

"Really? I thought he'd be mad that you snuck into his tree house,"

"No, I broke the ladder, and he just had me help build a new one, he said I can go up there whenever I want-"

"That's really nice," Sophie smiled, "Here we are!"

James made a screech noise with his mouth and reached to his right and moved an imagined lever. Sophie opened an imagined door and began walking around the back of the imaginary car while James walked around the front. They both leaned back into the imagined car like mimes, using their arms to slam the 'doors' shut.

"Okay, let's go this way!" Sophie moved the imaginary stick back to drive, and they moved to the right, she made whirring noises with her mouth, and they began moving faster. When she said

"SCREECH!" They both stopped running, but Sophie's glasses flew five feet ahead of them with a gentle crunch. They were quiet for a few seconds before Sophie realized what happened,

'No! Not my glasses!" her face turned red as she ran over to them and sat down on the pavement, with them in her hands. James went over to her and gave her a hug when she started crying,

"It's okay- you can just get new ones, I have to get the prescription changed a lot anyway." Sophie sobbed in response.

Later, James ached to leave the corner of the room when Sophie's dad started yelling at her.

"Do you think these are toys?" he held tight in his fist the broken lenses, "the optometrist is on vacation for another week," she looked away from him, "You'll just have to go without."

Sophie's father left the room and went down into the basement. James held Sophie while she cried for a while.

"We were just playing, I was running and I stopped- then they flew off. They broke."

James slipped out of the door and made his way to the tree house. Each cloud followed another out of the sky, so none of the warm air from the setting sun stayed in the town. James pulled his coat tighter around him and tried to remember where all the stains on his sleeve came from while he made his way through the woods. The wooden ladder was still where it was before, leaning against the tree. James pulled himself into the tree house and sat down on the floor of it. It was not long before he leaned back and looked at the tree branches through the cracks in the tree house boards.

James imagined Sophie's vision being returned, like a miracle, overnight. James replayed her sudden stop and imagined himself jumping in front of her in just enough time to grab the- James heard rustling. There was a sheet of paper under a brick by his head. When he read it, the paper said in Mr. Heckerman's handwriting:

Apparently, you are growing millions of new cells everyday. If you ever want food to help you grow, you can just come in to the house and grab some.

Chapter 16

After school let out, Sonny would haunt the hallways. The hall monitors stayed an hour after, and looked away whenever he walked by. They were the only students besides the ones who were to be in after school art or music programs who were supposed to be there. It usually took him about half an hour of tearing pages out of library books, scratching paint off of walls, or stealing dessert bars from the cafeteria before he was kicked out.

This day, a custodian in a faded blue jumpsuit told him to get out of school,

"Go where you are supposed to be,"

"Whatever," Sonny replied, "I don't need to listen to you." the man lifted his mop out of the grimy water in a way that was menacing enough to push Sonny's confidence out of the front double-doors like he was a stray.

He was supposed to take the bus home because he lived on the edge of town. Sonny instead crunched his way to the kick ball field that had a few inches of snow over its smooth surface. With his bare hands, he sifted the white to the side, and dug with his sneakers a good foot into the line of dirt where the runners would pass after the snow settled down. He replaced the field's hollow scab with fluffy white snow, looked around, and pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his ears.

He walked sloppily as to destroy the pristine beauty of the snow on the edge of the sidewalk before him all the way to the gas station where that fruit worked.

When he barged in, the pimply creep hardly even looked up at him. Sonny was a little disappointed that the attendant only sighed and flipped the page of his magazine instead of sending him a cheery greeting that he could shoot down with mockery.

Walking directly to the snack isle, Sonny stuck three king sized candy bars in the shared pocket of his hoodie. Sam looked up at him and could see everything from the curved mirror on the ceiling. Whenever Sonny looked around him to clear his crime scene, Sam would look away. When the door chimed upon Sonny's exit, Sam got up the courage to yelp-

"Hey you!" this caused Sonny to stop immediately, hand as frozen on the glass of the convenience store door as if it were the cold itself sticking it there. Without moving anything but his mouth, he replied,

"What?" Sonny said in the most forceful way a ten year old baby face could.

"Aren't you going to buy anything?" but that was not what Sam was asking- he meant I just saw you steal something, if there were a tape on I'd call the cops. The convenience store relied on honesty to operate. Most people in town were honest, at least with what they bought.

"You know what," Sonny paused, wondering if he could pull this off, "I wouldn't buy anything from you," there was a pause between the two people standing in the store. They were no longer Sonny and Sam, they were movies, the news, church gossip, angry words from old drunk men. Sam knew exactly what Sonny was going to say. Sonny looked at Sam's face, already molded into that of self-consciousness and disappointment, "because you're a fag." The door closed behind Sunny with an especially loud chime, and the song on the radio gave way to a used car commercial before Sam pulled out his wallet and took three of his five dollars and put them into the cash register.

Sonny tore into his first candy bar before even leaving the solitary parking lot. Nobody ever just drove around in their town. The most activity was seen in the summer, when people would mow their laws at an angle from the street to help the grass grow better. Winter seemed to push everyone indoors. Sonny himself wanted to be inside. He dropped the empty wrapper on the snow and pulled his arms closer to his body. The wind trickled through his sweatshirt, and he was glad it would not get any colder that year because he was not going to get a coat.

He thought about stealing one, but the nearest department store was in the next town over. If he got one from the stupid church in the old garage where his family got their bread, or his mom gave him twenty dollars for one, it would look cheap and everyone would know it was the best he could do. It was better being cold.

He walked for half an hour as fast as he could, and he got to the lonely stretch of dirt road that led to his house. The muck under the snow was undeniable on the single pair of tire tracks his dad and all his neighbors used to get to town each morning. The sun was going further away that he was by this time. The slush was audible between the seams of his gym shoes. He could feel his soaked and freezing pant legs saturate his mismatched socks to the point that it began to sting.

While walking over the cement bridge that carried him and several cars a day over the creek that even in cold weather sped past he was able to concentrate on his feet again and the lack of grey cold snow at his ankles was a sudden relief.

His family moved into their trailer a few years before. It was during the summer when the sound of the bubbling creek mixed with the scent of wild flowers like some sort of music. His parents thought they were lucky to buy the trailer for as much as they did. They never owned a home before, and only talked about the beautiful view from the kitchen window throughout signing the paperwork. The window itself was slid open as soon as they walked into their new home and revealed a screen that had more holes in it than screen material left.

He shared his room with his two younger brothers, and his two little sisters slept in the other room. His parents got their own room at the end of the trailer. The trailer itself was vast, before they moved into it. With each child and each child's things- the walls seemed closer to one another, and the furniture seemed to choke up the living room.

The carpet had always been worn, and his dad vowed to buy rugs for every room, but they only acquired a rotten welcome mat at their front door that his little sister Sammy brought home. It was within a month of living there that his bedroom floor became uneven. It seemed to sink to the middle and desperately pull at his triple bunk bed that his dad built. His younger brothers were the ones who were scared of it tipping over, they complained until their dad stuck two-by-fours under the offending posts of the bed.

The roof began leaking and cracking under the snow during the first winter, and his dad had to tape a black garbage bag over the minuscule kitchen window that looked out at the iced creek to secure the heat that was mostly produced by their bodies and the constant boiling of potatoes. Sonny's family, were a classic sort of poor; they relied more on the skillful handling of potatoes, rice, church bread, cauliflower, carrots, WIC cheese, milk, discount cuts of meat, butter, and eggs by his mother than the gentle arms of fast food or microwave meals. Because of this, the oven was always on, preparing something for the next meal. This was wonderful in winter, and during the summer- all windows and doors remained open.

When Sonny walked into the shaking trailer, he was greeted by the hot steam of dinner.

"Stop your complaining, Sherry. You, you stop pulling your brother's hair," his mom belted from the kitchen like it was a familiar song. The trailer was alive with small feet running back and forth. Sonny shut the door before the shrill wind his anyone and slowed them down. The trailer shuddered like a beast. The whirring from the electric can opener overcame the sound of his entrance. His mom got the can opener from her husband the year before, and she was crazy about it. Sonny started walking to his room, thinking about stashing the other two candy bars under the top bunk's mattress.

"Nuh-uh, I see you, get over here," with sunken shoulders, he slunk back to the minuscule kitchen. His mother, had wide hips that overcame half of the kitchen, which in itself was only large enough to hold a stove, refrigerator, and a sink. His mother pressed him into her side while she drained the canned peas with her other arm.

"Boy, you are as cold as death- you shouldn't be running around like that, we can't afford for you to get sick."

"I missed the bus,"

"I'll tell you what you missed- you missed those dishes," she pointed at a few bowls in the sink.

By the time the suds cleared from the sink, Sonny's dad was home from the mechanic shop. His dad looked like what Sonny would look like if he grew a few feet taller and a beard. His dad stepped sideways through the blustery door, and the other four children were on him, squealing and hugging, immediately.

They sat around two folding tables pushed together with a faded, stained, floral tablecloth. When they settled, Sonny's father looked over at the array of food and said;

"Honey, these are all vegetables," Sonny's mom lifted a lid to a blue ceramic dish and immediately filled the room with the scent of hot salt. "Oh," he corrected himself, "You've done something beautiful with that bacon," and looked at her with loving and longing eyes. She had quartered small red potatoes, diced bacon, and boiled it in a big pot until the water between them became a salty, creamy broth.

Cramped around the small table, Sonny's dad began serving the soup, stealing glances at his wife who was spooning broth into their youngest child's mouth.

"I guess we ought to bow our heads," Sonny's dad said like he always had to. Everyone stopped moving, and looked down at the gleaming white of their plates while Sonny's dad mumbled something about a harvest.

"Reverend at the church said we're promised a piece of heaven for the way we live," Sonny's mom said as she picked up the spoon.

"At the smelly church?" Sonny asked, wondering if the was talking about The Garage.

"The Garage is a very good church, it's nice we have a place to go." She looked at the meal. Half of it came from that Garage.

The trailer was dark, and the only brightness in the room came from the kerosene lamp in the middle of the table. They bought it from a thrift shop the year before to save money on electricity at night, 'we don't need all these lights on if we're all in one place,' Sonny's parents argued. So, they would gather around the small flame each night for dinner. Its light flickered on their white plates and everyone avoided one another's hungry eyes.

Chapter 17

James was pulled out of the classroom at 11 a.m. every Tuesday. He always made sure he walked through the art hall on his way to the counselor's office. He liked to look at the paintings and pottery behind the glass cases in the hallway. He took as long as he could, he would stop to tie his shoe, to count the canvases. He started thinking about how big numbers got. If he added two and two together, he got four- if he added four to four, he got eight. Eight and Eight made sixteen, sixteen and sixteen made thirty two. If he added thirty two to thirty two, he got sixty four. Sixty four and sixty four made one hundred and twenty eight. James untied and tied his left shoe while adding up one hundred and twenty eight with one hundred and twenty eight,

"Two hundred and fifty six," he whispered to himself as he entered the counselor's office. There was already a girl with dark hair that fell around her face, and a boy hopped in right after him. They sat down around the counselor, who always wore big skirts with white socks and pulled her hair back so tight her face seemed suspended by it. She had a pencil and a chart on her lap,

"How do you feel today, Sarah?" the little girl's eyes darted up- she was in James' grade, but a different class.

"I feel good."

"James, how do you feel?"

"Well, I'm a little cold- but I just came in from outside, I should feel better soon," the other boy, a year younger, chuckled, and the counselor asked again;

"But how to you feel, in here-" he pointed at her chest.

"I feel good."

"Sam, how do you feel?" the other boy smiled,

"I feel great!"

"I feel good, too," she pulled a smile across her face. "So, Sarah how do you feel about your grandfather today?" The little girl sat back in her chair and started playing with the ends of her long dark hair.

"I was coloring yesterday, and I was thinking about how much I used to like coloring with my grandpa."

"You can't color with your grandpa anymore, can you Sarah?"

"No, I can't-"

"Why not, Sarah?"

"Because he died of cancer."

"Is there anyone else you can color with?"

"Yes." she looked out the widow.

"Who?"

"My parents, my aunts, my baby brother."

"That's nice, Sarah- James how do you feel about your father today?"

"They just keep getting bigger!"

"What- the feelings James?"

"No! The numbers! If you add two and two together, it makes four," he sat up straight in his chair, "if you add four and four together, it makes eight! Eight and eight is sixteen! Sixteen and Sixteen is-"

"Thirty two!" the other boy exclaimed, "and thirty two plus thirty two is-"

"Sixty four!" the girl with dark hair said, James came back to it,

"If you add Sixty four and sixty four together, it makes one hundred and-"

"James!" the counselor stopped him, "How do you feel about your father?"

"... and twenty eight."

"James, what you are doing right now is distracting yourself," she leaned close to him, "because you're trying not to think about your father."

"You're lying."

"James-" she got stern.

"I think about him all the time, I think about him when it's snowing and when it doesn't snow- when I'm trying to go to sleep, when my mom makes dinner, when my mom cries." His hands turned into fists at his sides, "I think about him when I'm alone and when I'm in class, I think about him when I have to do dishes and I think about him when I'm outside." the counselor was sitting back in her chair and writing down everything. He continued, "I'm thinking about him right now- you can't just say I'm not thinking about him when I am." The room was quiet for a while.

"Okay," she turned to Sam.

"Sam, how do you feel about your mom today?"

"I'm angry at her."

"Why, Sam?"

"Because she made it so we were poor, then she went away."

"Where is she, Sam?" The little boy got a little hyperactive in his seat,

"She's in the hospital-"

"Why?"

"Because of drugs."

"What do you think about drugs, Sam?"

"I hate them,"

"Why,"

"Because they took my Mom away."

"Is there anyone who lives with you, who doesn't take drugs?"

"Yes,"

"Who, Sam?"

"My dad, my grandma, and Jibs" the counselor turned her chart back a few pages and looked up at him,

"Sam, who is Jibs?"

"My dog!" at this everyone laughed. She wrote 'Jibs- pet dog' in thin curving grey letters.

"Okay, James- we'll try again," she turned to him, "James, how do you feel about your dad today?"

"I feel a lot." He looked up at the counselor, and she wanted him to say more, "I mostly want to tell him what is going on, what I am doing in school."

"James, is there anyone you can talk to about what you do in school?" James thought about his mom, shuffling around the house in her bathrobe, face swollen from crying-

"No." The counselor looked at her charts a few pages back,

"What about your mom, James?"

"She's just-" he remembered he did not want the counselor or the other kids to know about his mom. "She's just-" he thought about her making his breakfast and going back to her room. He remembered having to wrap a blanket around her when she was shivering on the couch- eyes blank. "She's great, I talk to her all the time." He looked out the window.

"See," the counselor began, "The people you lost are so important to you, but there are still people left behind who are still there for you- who love you." the little girl nodded and her dark hair shimmered in the florescent lights, "They all love you, and it isn't the same as having your mom, your dad, or your grandpa around, but it's nice, isn't it." Everyone nodded.

James took a different way back to class so he would not walk past the art. He looked out the windows and stood still for a while in front of one. He could feel the warmth of the school's heating system behind him, but as he stepped closer to the glass, it emanated a cold against his face and arms.

He looked out above the tree line and saw a green helium balloon darting up. James followed it with his eyes, and wondered where it was going. It looked more like it was being pulled. He imagined his father's spirit drifting up like that, after the helicopter-

The balloon disappeared behind some of the wool winter blanket of clouds. James looked down at the crayon portrait in his other hand. He turned so the light of the window washed on it as he pulled it closer to his face. He had trouble making that 'skin,' color. He ran the orange marker over the stretch of it lightly, followed by yellow, and smeared by white. It was splotchy, the hair James grew on the top of his father's hair sat on his father's head like it was a separate creature. He used mostly brown, but tried to show that some of his dad's hair was grey with a grey crayon. The grey was overshadowed by all of the brown. James drew a blue shirt for his dad, instead of his uniform. Behind his father, he drew a desert island, with palm and coconut trees dotting the horizon. James imagined his father walking along the shore, picking up seashells. He saw him thread nets and catch fish, scale the trees for coconuts. James imagined his father collecting driftwood, imagined him starting to build a boat.

When the counselor asked the kids in the group to draw pictures of those they lost, most of them drew their whole family with stick limbs and butterflies. The girl, Sarah drew her mom in a different house. Sam drew his grandpa waving from some clouds.

The one thing James didn't get close to right in the picture was his father's eyes. He could not remember the exact color. He remembered they were blue- but not what kind of blue. He looked out the window and tried to remember if there was any grey in them, any green. James looked back at the picture. He could not get the shape right at all. He could not remember how far away from one another they were, where they sat on the face exactly, if they sloped up or down, if they were big or small. That is why when James was done with the session, he stole a black crayon. James went to the bathroom before stopping at the window, and colored his father's eyes black, from the eyebrows to nearly the nose.

In front of the window, James lifted the portrait closer to his face and his shadow fell over it,

"Hey, do you have a hall pass?" a hall monitor donning an orange sash shouted loud enough to shake James' concentration. James put the portrait under his arm,

"Yeah," he reached into his pocket and pulled out a yellow folded note, "that's it." The hall monitor grabbed the note and read it for a little bit before saying,

"Just go right back to class after your meeting, don't lounge around." James took the pass back,

"Yeah," and walked back to class.

The doorways that lined the halls that held the classrooms were steel and red. Ms. Hopke's door was lined with primary color hand prints, and had a poster about recycling stuck to it. At James' eye level, he could read the cardboard cutout of her name: Ms. Hopke. James turned the knob slowly, so as not to get too much attention. He knew that as soon as a door opened in class, everyone would turn around to find out who was there.

When James opened the door, it was free time. Not many people turned from what they were doing because it was not silent enough to hear the shudder of the door opening in the classroom. James started walking toward the corner where the books were, where he and Sophie would usually read magazines, though they would look up and talk to one another for most of the time.

When he got there, Sophie was not there. He looked out over the room, and he did not see Sophie at any of the learning stations. James heard Sophie laugh; he smiled and looked over to where the laugh came from. Sophie was surrounded by four or five girls, James walked over to her. He heard one say,

"You're so pretty," while another asked,

"Do you wear makeup?" when Sophie shook her head no, she asked, "do you have a boyfriend?" when she shook her head no, the same girl said, "you could have one-" she saw James, "but not him," pointing, "he's not cute." The girls laughed and cackled, and Sophie said,

"I'm going to go read now,"

"Can we come?" asked one of the girls. Sophie looked at James and he shrugged,

"Sure, there are enough magazines to go around." On his way back to the corner, James folded the portrait of his father and put it in his backpack. They all sat down in a circle and held magazines,

"Sophie! This one has pretty hair like you!" a girl said pointing at a drawing of a princess in one of the magazines.

"Thanks!" Sophie said, "You're pretty too!"

"Not as pretty as you are," the other girls nodded. James saw Sophie's smooth clear cheeks blush like the color of pink crayons, bubble gum, sunsets.

"No, no." she smiled. There was a ruckus on the other side of the room, a boy came bounding over. He looked at Sophie, laughed, and ran back to his group of friends. The girls in the group exploded with laughter, surprising James a little and making him jump,

"He likes you!" they squealed, Sophie blushed and kept looking at the pictures of the magazine in her lap. She was not wearing her glasses, so she could not make out the words. There was booming laughter from across the room where five or six boys, Sonny among them, were gathered around.

When Ms. Hopke called class back into session, everyone meandered back to their desks,

"Five, four, three," the kids began to scramble, James sat down right away and looked at his watch. Two more hours. "Two-" everyone was sitting down at this point, "Good." Ms. Hopke said, pushing up her glasses. "Everyone clear your desks and get out a pencil, we're going to take a test," there was a unanimous groan.

After class, James walked with Sophie towards their houses.

"Those girls are weird," James said,

"Yeah, but they're nice, they don't know any better."

"What do you think about those guys?" James asked, looking at his feet.

"Waste of time," she smiled, "my parents were so weird today, and they hovered over me all morning."

"Yeah?" James looked around, most of the snow was melted, that was probably all they would get for winter.

"Yeah, they know I only have trouble seeing things far away without my glasses, that's why I sat up front." she looked at James, "but they were both worried about my grades, started bickering about if they would change or not," she crossed her arms, "I don't understand, I only am going without glasses for this week, it isn't a big deal."

"Yeah, you can see ok, right?" She nodded,

"They said they want to talk to me after school, so I should probably go in alone-" James asked,

"Is everything okay?"

"I think so, they're just being strange," she started walking to her door, "you have to tell me how meeting with the counselor went, was she as crazy as last time?"

"Worse!" he shouted after, and they both laughed as he turned away.

Chapter 19

James let himself into Mr. Heckerman's house and heard electrical currents coming from the other room. The buildup of zaps came after bursts of light that lapped against the walls like laps of waves, spreading into the living room. He walked towards the door, and when Mr. Heckerman saw James, he turned off the machine and lifted the great steel mask over his face. He sat back in his stool and told James,

"Fruit."

"What?"

"This machine, if I perfect it, will keep fruit fresh for months at a time-" James nodded and stepped forward, "you see, if I can get the electrical current slight enough, it mocks the fruit's cycle on the plant where they do not ripen any further," Heckerman looked down at a pile of brown mush in the corner, "the thing is, if there is too much electrical current, they seem to cook and rot immediately." He looked back up at James, "So, what did you do in school today?"

"Sophie broke her glasses,"

"Oh yeah? Does she need me to build spectacles for her?" James laughed,

"No, she's buying new ones soon." James sat down on the floor and started organizing some bolts by size, "It's just that she's getting all this attention now," Mr. Heckerman smiled,

"Are you jealous of her?"

"No... it's just-"

"Ohhhhhhhh, yes, that would be a possibility," Mr. Heckerman rubbed his palms together while he thought. "Everything will be okay," he smiled, "What's the worst that could happen?"

"Well, she could not want to be my friend anymore. She might get a boyfriend who beats me up." Mr. Heckerman laughed.

"I'm sorry, I just forgot how you kids get 'boyfriends,' do you really think she'd do that?"

"I could see why,"

"Well, luckily boy, I think this girl is smarter than you know- she won't stop being your friend, not if she can help it, do you remember before you were friends with her?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Did you ever have fun?"

"All the time, yeah, why?"

"Because if she isn't your friend anymore, it can't be much worse than that, can it?" James thought a while,

"Well it might be like if she died, I would hate it if I felt like she died." Mr. Heckerman was quiet for a moment.

"Did you have your counselor's appointment today?"

"Yeah."

"How did that go?"

"The lady seemed like she was rushing me to some, some answer." James looked at his backpack, "I drew a picture."

"In the group?" Mr. Heckerman asked while tinkering with the mechanics.

"Yeah, of my father-" James reached for his backpack,

"Can I see?" James got the portrait of his father and handed it to Mr. Heckerman.

"When someone passed away in ancient Greece," he said when he looked at the portrait, "they would have two coins placed on their eyes by their loved ones," he looked up at James, "these were coins to pay the ferryman." He paused.

"What ferryman?" James asked,

"The ferryman for the river Styx, to the underworld," he looked out of the window, "so they wouldn't have to wander on the banks for one hundred years." He smiled at James, "you didn't show the counselor the eyes blacked out, did you?"

"No, how can you tell?"

"Because you would still be there, counselors would pick up on that- consider it to be something you're trying to say about your father," he looked seriously at James, "you aren't trying to say anything about your father by blacking out his eyes, are you James?"

"No, I just couldn't get the eyes right," he laughed.

"I remember when he passed away. Everyone in the whole town must have tied yellow ribbons to the limbs of the tree in the front of your house." James nodded, "My son passed, about ten years ago-" James kept looking at Mr. Heckerman as he adjusted the machine, "Lukimea, I didn't know people could get that sick," he chuckled, "I'll tell you." Mr. Heckerman grabbed wrench and turned a few bolts on the machine, "I never thought that would happen to my family, after he got sick and passed away-" he grunted while tightening a bolt, "my wife, she didn't know what to do with herself, she got sick too- but in a different way," he looked up at James, "You understand," James nodded, "I think her heart broke, and it moved on to her body. She stopped eating, got weaker and weaker and one day-" Mr. Heckerman pulled his mouth back into a sad sort of smile, "she didn't last long before she went after him." He put his mask back on, "a lot of people don't want to deal with it, don't understand loss."

The words cracked from James' throat, "I don't think I understand loss," Mr. Heckerman lifted his mask and looked at James again,

"Me either, not yet. But when I figure it out, I'll tell you."

"Same here." and they both laughed.

The balloons were mostly James' idea. After he and Mr. Heckerman worked on the fruit preservation machine for a while, they put some tools away- and he saw it.

"Is there helium in that tank?" James asked as he touched the knob.

"Well, yes, yes it is- I do believe there is some in there,"

"Do you want to try an experiment?" Mr. Heckerman lit up.

"What's the purpose?"

"To contact our family, the ones we've lost."

"Do you have a hypothesis?"

"Does that mean guess?"

"Yes, an educated one, what do you think will happen?"

"I think we'll feel better,"

"Sounds good, go on- what is the procedure, what do we do?"

"We fill up balloons. We tie letters to the strings,"

"Brilliant. I think I have balloons, string, and paper in here," he began looking through the shelves of the basement, "Go on, how do we collect data?" James thought,

"The data isn't important. I think we have to take a leap here."

"Well, I don't see why not. If we can't have our own interpretation of the scientific procedure on a Tuesday, when can we?"

"Exactly!" James laughed.

The filled up two gold balloons in the basement, James filled them up and Mr. Heckerman tied them with string. They let them float a few feet to the ceiling while they sat down in some chairs to write.

"Whatever you wish you could tell them, just write it down," James said. They both did and tied the letters tightly with the string like a package. They carried their balloons outside silently. In the back yard, they looked at each other, nodded, and released them.

"They're going right to zenith." Mr. Heckerman said, "Zenith is the direction that is directly above us, like North, South, East, or West, but that way," he pointed up. James smiled. A group of birds took off from the woods, and they could hear their wings flapping. It seemed like the balloons sped faster and faster as the birds themselves lifted off.

20

Sophie walked around her grandparent's station wagon to get into the house. She took the side entrance into the garage that she knew was unlocked. Inside, her father's SUV lingered beneath the snow shovels and bags of fertilizer stacked against the wall. The cement floor beneath her had enough dried dirt that it moved like sand and scraped as she walked. The garage smelled like cigarettes and gasoline, but something else too. Not the cold, not the sawdust, something old. The scent was something uncomfortably familiar. Gravity.

She sat down in the chair her father would lull his cigarettes in. One by one, she would watch the pack he set on the table next to him wither. Every day he emptied it like a bin of trash, like a bag of groceries. She pushed that day's pack with her pointer finger so she could see inside. Mostly gone. Sophie thought about yellow walls. Sophie thought about cancer. She always thought it was a friendly disease. Like a dog that does not know how big it is. Jumping and licking and biting and ripping and shearing. Part of your body you cannot control. Part of your body but not part of your body. Staying too long at the fair. Starship 3000 for the rest of your life. Body used against itself. Close but unfamiliar. Too much Gravity.

Her mother used to smoke everyday with her father.

The door handle was cold enough to where it penetrated her gloves and she was glad that she wore them. A smell greeted her right away that reminded her of how the world smelled when she had a cold. Her dad was sitting standing looking at something in the oven. His eyebrows were raised.

"What's cooking?" she asked.

"Lamb chops." Sophie's stomach turned. She remembered how lamb chops smelled when they cooked- like the whole house was coming down with something grave. "They're upstairs, Sophie." She nodded and went to her mother's room. While running up the stairs she kicked her knees up as high as she could. She was out of breath when she reached the summit of the second floor.

Inside, her mother was lying in bed and her grandparents were sitting in chairs her father brought up from the living room. All three of them smiled and looked at their hands when they saw her.

"Come here honey, let me put your hair up," her mom said, lifting one of her arms with too much effort. Sophie's mom reached into the top drawer in the night stand beside her bed to grab a brush and some rubber bands. Sophie sat near her mother's lap. While her mother was brushing Sophie's hair, she tried to explain things.

"You know I'm sick," she said as the brush ran through Sophie's thick golden hair. The light from the window illuminated her. Through Sophie's childhood, her mom started getting quieter. Sophie knows only a few words a day from her mother at this point. It was like her mother's voice shrank over the years. There was a point where her mother quit her job, to where she no longer left the house. Sophie remembered reaching her hands up as high as they could go to reach something on the edge of the counter. A salt shaker. Her mother was singing. It was years ago. Sophie nodded.

"I am going to stay with my parents for a little bit, just while you guys get adjusted." Sophie's mother said. When Sophie asked,

"To what?" her grandparents looked at each other and she could feel her mother shudder as she was braiding Sophie's hair.

"Your dad and I don't want to live together anymore."

"Oh."

"But I'll be right across town."

"Can I come with you?"

"No, honey, your father thinks its best that you say here, with him."

Sophie's grandmother chimed in,

"But you can visit, anytime." Her grandfather nodded.

The four of them nodded and looked down at their hands.

Chapter 20

"Does anyone need the stapler, the stapler," Ms. Hopcke repeated to the class. She wandered between the desks holding the stapler in the air and offered it to every student who was at work creating paper envelopes to hold Valentine's Day cards. James used blue construction paper, traced his hand over it, smeared the uneven edge of a glue stick over the design, and filled that up with silver glitter. After writing his name in black sharpie, he raised his hand for the stapler,

"Thank you,"

"You're welcome, don't forget the other side," Ms. Hopcke said while he finished stapling the slot. "Okay, everyone wrap up, when you are done, line up outside of the classroom."

One by one, the students slipped out, leaving their envelopes taped to the edge of their desk to receive valentines. When James was done, he went outside of the classroom to stand near Sophie in line.

"How many do you think you'll get?" James asked, running his hand along the grey cement between bricks in the wall.

"Oh, I don't know, no more than last year,"

"Yeah, do you think you'll get any candy?"

"I hope so," she smiled,

"Okay, first person in line, go in and drop off your valentines, come out when you're done," Sonny walked into the classroom with a sly smile, "and don't take too long!" Ms. Hopke called after him.

When he was done, another student went in, and another. Soon Sophie came in, and when she was done she sat down with the other kids in the hallway who already went into the classroom. James opened and closed the door. He went to his backpack, and pulled out three pink heart-shaped lollipops and a piece of notebook paper. On the paper, he wrote:

Sophie,

Thank you for being my friend,

it means a lot.

-James

He folded the notebook paper around the lollipops and walked over to her desk. He went to open her envelope, which was yellow with red lopsided hearts spelling out her name, but it was already held open. He glanced at it and it was filled with cards and candy, he stuffed his gifts in the envelope and hurried out of the room.

After three other kids went into the classroom to give their valentines cards and gifts, Ms. Hopcke called the sitting students to attention.

"You guys behaved very well, you can go ahead and get your book bags and your envelopes, and go home, we only have five minutes left." After they got their envelopes, Sophie and James walked outside together. On the way out of the front door to the building, Paul said,

"Have a great day, Sophie," she looked at him confused, created some sort of smile, and replied,

"You too."

The sun made the air almost warm, and they walked with smiles away from the school, talking about spring. When they got into the tree house, Sophie dumped out her yellow envelope onto the wood floor of the tree house. The spilling paper sounded like water, and thunks from the candy dropping out started to create a hollow rhythm.

"You do yours!" Sophie said. James did, and only one thing fell out, a box of sweethearts fell out, with a handmade Valentines' Day card after it.

"Oh-" Sophie caught herself letting out, after seeing that her card was the only one. James turned the card towards him, and opened it. On the front there was one dog, smiling through the wax of crayons. Inside, there were two dogs, paws around one another, and in Sophie's handwriting, it said:

To my true friend, be my Valentine.

Love,

Soph

James hugged Sophie and told her to start reading her cards. What followed was a mixed procession of proclamations of love as well as girlish side-splitting remarks about who was a better friend. From Sonny:

You are really pretty and I love you

They both laughed at how the tough kid was suddenly sappy, drawing hearts instead of o's throughout the note. She got one from one of the girls who was fawning over her the day before:

I know you like me better because I'm cooler than Janice,

I won't tell her, I promise.

They laughed again and kept reading. Each note, card, or gift was more ridiculous than the last. There was a cheap ring from a quarter machine, sweethearts, and chocolates. Sophie opened a box of them and started to share the brown squares with James.

The last card she got to was the one from James, after she read it, her eyes started watering up, and she leaned over the pile of Valentine's day cards to hug him for a long time.

"James, the only card that matters in here is from you,"

"I got you the lollipops, too," he smiled, she picked one up.

"The rest of them, they only want to be my friend because I don't have my glasses, or they only like me because of that," she sniffled and wiped her nose on her sleeve, "because I'm not wearing my glasses, they ignored me before." Sophie started ripping cards in half, and putting each half in different piles.

"Sophie! Don't do that, you'll ruin them!" But she kept it up,

"James, the only card that matters is yours," she explained, when she was done ripping them all in half, she divided the candy among the two piles, and slid one toward them. "You're so much of my friend that you deserve half of these,"

James hugged her, "Sophie, you're so nice, you really didn't have to do that-"

"No, I had to, most people don't know, they don't understand-" she sniffled again, "they don't understand what really matters, who really matters." she smiled at him.

"But you matter, I swear-" she interrupted herself, "I swear, when I get my new glasses, I'm never taking them off, not even when I sleep!"

"Sophie, you are really pretty without them, don't you want a boyfriend?"

"No," she said, too soon.

"Why not?"

"It never works out," she looked out the window.

"What never works out?"

"People," she said.

"Well, you're parents-"

"My parents," she began, "are getting divorced." They were quiet for a while.

"They told me yesterday, after school."

"I'm so sorry, Sophie."

"No, James, it could be worse, so much worse." She looked at him, "It isn't as bad as what happened to you. I'm so sorry for what happened to you."

"It's just like he hasn't come back yet,"

"But he isn't James, he isn't coming back," she started to get worked up, "and my parents aren't going to love each other again, and there is a war and people are dying every day-" she raised her voice for the first time since James knew her, "and all these people care about is who is friends with who, who can get a boyfriend, who has the most valentines."

The branches creaked like an old person's bones outside.

"They aren't like us, James, they aren't like us." and she shoveled half the valentines into her envelope.

"Thank you for being like me," James told her.

James broke the silence.

"Do you want to meet my mom?"

"Well, yeah, that would be perfect," she started moving to the ladder, "I don't want to go home right now." She began descending the ladder backwards, facing out towards the woods. James followed her doing the same thing.

"You can really see so much more," she said as they made their way towards James' house, "if you just do something like turn yourself around on the ladder, if you just take a risk."

James was thinking about how winter did not last very long. He glimpsed behind him while spinning every few steps and smiled at Sophie, he never looked long enough to make more of her features than a flash of golden hair. When they were close to the house, he turned around to her again, and when he faced his house, he saw a strange car in the driveway. James stopped spinning and slowed down so Sophie was walking beside him.

"Is that-"

"My dad's car," Sophie interrupted.

"That's so weird, maybe he is apologizing for how the other parents were at the PTA meeting,"

"What happened at the PTA meeting?" Sophie asked, and they both stopped walking. James looked down at his feet and moved some of the dirt around.

"They all wanted to talk about the kick ball field, but my mom kept talking about when our house got papered," he looked up at Sophie, "my mom said someone told her that if I had a father, I would know how to handle the other kids my age-"

"You wouldn't be so afraid?"

"Yeah,"

"My father told me about that after the PTA meeting, he said that he told that to your mom."

"So he must be apologizing!" James exclaimed. Sophie nodded and looked at the car again. They were quiet for a while before Sophie said,

"I skipped lunch today, I still have a few dollars, do you want to go to the gas station and get ice cream or something?" James thought about it,

"Sure, you'd do that Soph?"

"Yeah, it's Valentine's day, we should celebrate."

They walked away from James' house and toward the gas station. When they got to the end of the street James tapped Sophie on the shoulder and began running, she ran after him until they could hear their pounding feet on the cement of the gas station parking lot. They stopped running and smiled at one another while they caught their breath. James could hear the neon lights on the gas station sign humming and buzzing. He walked up to the door and opened it for Sophie with a slight bow. She laughed and walked in and they made their way to the ice cream case.

Leaning over it, their unsteady breath fogged up the glass on the top of the ice cream case.

"The fudge pops are really good!" said the teenage attendant. Sophie, usually shy, perked up.

"What's your name?" He pointed to his name tag,

"My name is Sam," he extended his hand, "What's yours?"

"I'm Sophie," she ran over to the counter to shake his hand, and pointed at James, "and that's James!"

"Hi James," Sam said.

"Do you want some ice cream, too?" Sophie asked.

"Oh, you don't have to,"

"No, really I want to!"

James picked out three fudge pops and brought them to the counter,

"Is that good, Soph?"

"Yeah," she smiled. There was nobody at the store, so after Sam rang them up, they stood where they were and started eating their ice cream.

"Every time I come in, you're working, you work a lot," James said,

"Yeah, I like it- and I need the money to pay my rent,"

"Why don't you live with your parents?" Sophie asked, "don't they love you?" Sam laughed and looked down at the counter before looking back up with a sad smile,

"My mom still does, I see her sometimes. I'm pretty sure my dad doesn't," Sophie and James looked at each other, "but it's really not so bad, I like working here."

"Did he kick you out?" Sophie asked,

"Yeah, right after graduation, he was in the Army-"

"My dad was too!" James interrupted,

"I know, I'm sorry you lost him, James."

"What did him being in the army have to do with you having to leave your parents house?" Sophie asked.

"Well, he wanted me to be in the army, and I didn't want to." James and Sophie had their full attention on Sam, and James' ice cream started dripping down the stick to his fingers. "So, I told the recruiting officer some things that would make it so the Army wouldn't want me,"

"You lied?" Sophie asked.

"No, it was the truth,"

"What was it?" Sophie asked,

"The army only wants some kinds of people to fight for them," Sam took a bite from his fudge pop and chewed on it while saying, "it worked to keep me out, because I'm different," Sam smiled at the two kids in front of the counter almost boyishly, "I just didn't think my dad would find out what I told the recruiting officer, but he went to basic training with him so they were really good friends."

"Like Soph and me?" James asked,

"Probably closer, but yeah."

"Do you live with your girlfriend?" Sam chuckled,

"No, I don't have a girlfriend"

"Do you have a Valentine, Sam?" Sophie asked,

"No," he smiled, "but it's nice to live alone sometimes, I get to take showers for as long as I want, and I'm not home that often anyway,"

"You're always working?" James asked.

"Yeah,"

"If you have to work, why are you always so friendly, so happy."

"Well," Sam thought, "I have to be here right now, and I don't have the option to be at home, or be with the people I care about-" he looked out of the gas station window, "so I just try to be happy where I am, doing what I am doing." He looked at James and Sophie, "I just try to be happy with where I am at, and who I am, even if other people don't like it." He finished his fudge pop. "You know, it's a really weird day to eat ice cream."

"Why?" Sophie asked while brushing the hair off of her face.

"Because it's so cold!" Sam said. They all laughed. "Thank you kids so much for sharing your ice cream with me, and talking to me, that's so nice of you."

"Well," Sophie replied, "It's Valentine's day, and if you want, you can be our Valentine, seeing as you don't have one."

"Yeah, that's great! Thank you!" He smiled and lifted the waste basket from behind the counter to let James and Sophie throw out their popsicle sticks. After tossing them in, Sam said, "You guys stop by whenever you want, you don't even have to buy anything!"

"Thanks Sam!" Sophie replied,

"Yeah, have a good day!" James said as they made their way out of the door to the parking lot again. After the door closed Sophie said,

"He is so nice,"

"I know, do you want to go meet Mr. Heckerman?"

"Oh yeah, the guy who owns the tree house, yeah," She started skipping through the sidewalk, "we still have time before dinner!"

Sophie had not been to Mr. Heckerman's house before that day. When they got to his sturdy door, James knocked and Mr. Heckerman called out for them to come in. As soon as they stepped into the warm living room, they heard Mr. Heckerman say;

"Eighty five percent!"

"What?" James asked.

"Eighty five percent of Valentines are bought by women." He picked up a beaker and raised them to his goggles upon entering the room, "it tells you something about-" he stopped, lifted his goggles, and spun the water in the beaker around, "something," he put the beaker back down and went back into the dining room where several experiments were going on at once.

"I'm distilling things," he looked at James, "Who's this?"

"My friend Sophie."

"Ahhhh," he shook her hand, "and what an auspicious day to meet!" She looked quizzically at him. "Everything, I'm distilling everything liquid I could find, just to see-" he interrupted himself, "The Catholics," he began, "the Catholics never intended for Valentine's day to be romantic, the story behind it isn't very romantic at all." he lifted two vials from the table and held each in a hand, "Two Saint Valentines, one from Rome, one from Terni, born over 100 years apart," he lifted the vials and threw them to the ground, emitting a poof and a loud noise similar to an explosion, "both martyred!" James and Sophie both Jumped back. "Both buried in Via Flaminia," He started sweeping the glass from the rug, "It's the only way to get out these stains," one of the experiment stations on the dining room table was bubbling over, so Mr. Heckerman quickly extinguished the flame beneath it.

"You two aren't martyrs, are you?" they both furiously shook their head 'no.' "Would you like to grow a potato without planting it?" he asked.

"Okay," Sophie answered.

They followed Mr. Heckerman into his pantry where he pulled a bag of old potatoes from under a shelf that held cans of soup. He pulled out one and handed it to Sophie, he pulled out another and handed it to James, then he got one for himself and filled mason jars with water. Mr. Heckerman got toothpicks from his cabinet and began sticking for around the waist of the potato. He allowed some of the growing eyes of the potato to dip into the water when he set it hovering in the Mason jar.

"Now you guys try, make sure you get the sprouts in the water," James and Sophie began to poke toothpicks through their potatoes and set them in the jars. "It's amazing," he said, getting their attention, "if the sprouts hit water, they become roots, if they hit air, they become stalks."

"Incredible," Sophie whispered as she set her jar in the light of Mr. Heckerman's window.

"How long do you thi-" James started to ask before Mr. Heckerman interrupted him,

"Two or three weeks," he set his jar by the window also, "Two or three weeks before these roots become roots, these stalks become stalks, and there will be leaves, and flowers in the spring." Sophie lit up before she started to ask,

"What color will the potato flow-"

"Some are white, some are purple, some are pink- it depends on the breed of potato." he looked at James and Sophie, "I mean it, if the sprouts hit water, they become roots, if they hit air, they become stalks," he smiled, "that is so often the case with people, what surrounds them can really change who they are," he began looking out of the window, "It'll just be a few weeks now, before we see leaves."

"It's rare."

"What?" James asked of Mr. Heckerman

"An Elephant's sneeze, it's the world's biggest sneeze, you know."

"Really?" Sophie asked as she re-adjusted her potato vase.

"It sounds like a boiler exploding."

"Have you ever heard one?" James asked.

"Once," he began, "My company sent me on vacation one year to India,"

"You worked for a company?" James leaned forward,

"A long time ago, a big company, they used a lot of my inventions," with this, Mr. Heckerman lowered his head before starting the story again, as if he thought of each invention the company paid him for. "So, I went on this vacation, and I knew that colds were very common among elephants," he cleared his throat, "My wife and I were on a hike with a few local tour guides watching a herd of elephants in the distance when suddenly an elephant started pacing back and forth, even walking backwards a bit, as if he were trying to get away from it-"

"It?" Sophie asked.

"The sneeze, I noticed all of our tour guides began to crouch down, face almost to the dirt, and begin talking very quietly, one motioned for my wife and I to do the same, so we did," he bowed his head and put his hands to his face momentarily to show what they did, "and boy," Mr. Heckerman laughed, "when it came, we knew, we were 200 feet away and it still was the loudest sneeze I've ever heard, louder than I thought I could hear- even at that distance." He smiled. "The tour guides began to get so excited, jumping up and down, hugging one another. As we stood up, my wife told me to ask them what was going on, so I did,"

"And what did they say?" James asked Mr. Heckerman, leaning in.

"Well, kiddo," he leaned forward and looked at James right in the eye, "they told me it was a highly regarded good luck sign."

"Regarded? What does that mean?" Sophie asked,

"Considered, it means thought of," Mr. Heckerman answered her. After thinking, James asked,

"Why were you all on the ground?"

"The tour guides were praying, praying to realize their wishes,"

"Wow," Sophie's jaw dropped, "Did yours come true?"

"I didn't wish, I had no idea what was going on!" At this all three of them laughed.

"I wish I could go to India," James said.

"I wish I could go somewhere, I'm so tired of this place." Sophie added.

"Hey, do you kids want to try something?"

"What's that?" Sophie asked,

"Lets send it a letter,"

"Send what a letter?"

"Anywhere else, ask them how they live,"

"How will we know what address to send it to?"

"We could attach it to a balloon, the letter, we could let it float into the atmosphere, drift a while, and deflate back to earth."

"What would we ask them?" James questioned.

"Well, what they do for a living, how old they are, what they think is fun," he looked at Sophie, "It could go across state lines, you know." Her eyes brightened up and she smiled.

They got out paper and envelopes. They each wrote questions on the paper with an envelope that had Mr. Heckerman's address on it. They each licked a stamp with a fluttering American flag and stuck it to the envelope. They put both in plastic bags that snapped closed and tied that to some string.

In the middle of blowing up their balloons, Sophie put hers to her mouth and breathed in the helium. In a high mouse voice, she asked,

"Do you really think anyone will find it, and if they do, will they write us?" Laughing, James sucked in helium, too,

"Of course they will, wouldn't you?"

"Yes!" She squeaked and the both of them collapsed in a pile of laughing on Mr Heckerman's basement floor. Mr. Heckerman himself took a lung-full of helium and scolded them,

"Now, kids! This is serious business, we are communicating with others, others who we would not usually meet. This is a great opportunity-" He filled his lungs again with helium, "this is a great opportunity for us to connect, to learn something about someone who isn't us!" When Mr. Heckerman said 'someone,' his voice returned to normal and he sounded all too serious, which made the kids laugh even more. At some point, Sophie sucked in the rest of the helium from her balloon and laughed loud and high like a siren signaling the approach of a tornado.

They pulled themselves together and tied their strings to the balloon,

"Deja Vous, James?" Mr. Heckerman asked,

"Yeah, but I like this time better."

"Me too."

"What are you guys talking about? What's Day-Jah Voo, is that like Voodoo?"

"No, Soph," James started to explain, "it means it feels like we've done this before, the balloons."

"Ohhhh, okay," she skipped out of the door to the backyard and instantly let go of her balloon. "Keep rising!" Sophie called after it, "Just keep going, don't stop, go higher! Go faster!" James smiled at her and let his balloon go, "East," he whispered, "go east."

Mr. Heckerman let his go as well, and for some reason, his balloon seemed to slumber up to the atmosphere slower than the other two.

"There it goes, where it will land, nobody knows,"

"Nobody knows," Sophie solemnly echoed.

"Do you guys know what eye drops are made of?"

"What?" James and Sophie asked in unison,

"Just the regular ones at the grocery store have salt, salt usually hurts eyes,"

"Why don't eye drops hurt?" Sophie asked,

"Well, there is such a small amount of salt, that it helps to replace tears, and it doesn't hurt, it helps."

"But the Ocean has too much salt," James added,

"It has too much salt for eyes," Mr. Heckerman corrected, "But just enough salt for all the ocean animals, if it didn't hurt our eyes- we might be in there more often, and where would the fish live?"

"On our plates!" Sophie jested.

Chapter 21

"I made sure I got thicker frames this time," Sophie told James as they walked together down the hallway.

"Why?"

"I don't want any more trouble, really,"

"Well, they weren't mean to you,"

"They might as well have been, they ignored me," she pushed her new black-framed glasses up her nose, "they only paid attention to what I looked like, not to what I said," she paused, "not really."

"Let's go this way," James pointed to his left down another hallway.

"But it's shorter just to go straight-" she looked at James and smiled, knowing that he was going to show her something new. "Okay," she followed him down the hallway.

They drifted through the tunnel of aged linoleum that had lined cases on one side. They were filled with sculptures that were glazed and fired. Each took a unique, lumpy shape, and looked like enlarged candies. On the other side of the hallway, layers of white paper were tacked to the wall making them look like a haze of tombstones in a cemetery. James and Sophie walked through the hallway in silence, looking from the walls to each other while they stepped toward the end of it. At the end, there was a bust sculpture of the man the school was named for, as well as a case behind him full of trophies. The sculpture had a hand written sign under it that was held in place by uneven masking tape: 'Please, do not touch.'

"Do you think that guy is still alive?" Sophie asked James. He looked at the dark bronze face of the man frozen in sculpture, the way his eyes were hollow, and his metal cheeks held a stern expression. James looked at his hair as one block fused seamlessly with the man's forehead, the way the ears emerged from the sides of the sculpture's head and twisted around like dual flowers. James reached out his hand-

"Don't!" Sophie nearly shouted. "Don't break it!" James put his hand in his pocket,

"Either way, he's alive here- I think. Those empty eyes." They turned right and continued to take the long way to the counselor's office. When they got there, they could hear that the session already started,

"No, Sarah, how does that make you feel." Sarah looked up and began to answer the counselor when the woman's face darted away from Sarah and toward the door where James and Sophie were.

"Sorry, the teacher let us out late,"

"Oh- sit down," she stood up and hugged Sophie, who nervously returned the hug but brushed herself off after before sitting down in a chair across the circle from James.

"This is Sophie," the counselor said, extending her hand palm up to point at Sophie. The counselor smiled like she was presenting a car on a game show.

"HI SOPHIE!" Sam said hyperactively. Sarah looked up and nodded. James looked over at Sophie and raised his eyebrows.

"Sophie, how do you feel today?"

"Alright,"

"Why just alright?"

"Nothing too interesting has happened," the counselor wrote in her notes and looked at James,

"How do you feel today, James?"

"I feel good,"

"Oh, good," she looked around the group, "I'm good, too. I'm happy to talk to you all today." She looked at Sophie.

"Sophie, how do you feel about your-" she paused and flipped through her notes before returning her gaze, "about your parents?"

"I'm a little unhappy about my dad, he made me a bologna and ketchup sandwich for lunch today- I hate those,"

"So- you think it's your dad's fault that your parents are getting divorced," she wrote in her notes, "what do you think your dad did wrong?"

"It isn't my dad's fault- they said they both decided,"

"How do you feel about your mom, Sophie?"

"What do you mean?"

"How much do you like her Sophie, here-" the counselor put her hands in front of her and extended one towards Sophie. "Would you rather spend a day with your mom," she pulled the hand away and extended the other one, "or would you rather spend the day with your dad."

"Both," Sophie answered as the counselor folded her hands and said calmly,

"You can't have both, anymore, Sophie, how does that make you feel?"

"Bad," Sophie turned red, "it makes me feel bad."

"Why?"

"Because I love them and I thought we were happy,"

"Can you be happy with them any more Sophie?"

"Not together, I can only be happy with one at a time,"

"Why, Sophie?"

"Because they only want to fight when they are together," she wiped her eyes and sniffled, "they only want to be happy when they are apart,"

"Do you think they had a choice, Sophie?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do you think they don't want to be happy?"

"I don't know-"

"We'll get back to that," She turned to James.

"James, how do you feel today?" James looked down at his feet, one of his shoe laces were untied.

"I'm upset that you made Sophie cry." The counselor smiled,

"James, you're incorrect, I didn't make Sophie cry, she is just working out how she feels about her parents. We are in control of our own feelings-" she looked right into his stern eyes, "James, how do you feel about your father today?"

"I feel," James mocked, "I feel," he rose his voice, "I feel," James stood up and almost yelled at the counselor, "I feel, like my father would want me to be very angry at you for pretending to understand us." The counselor leaned forward, like she was being challenged in the grocery store over the last ripe apricots,

"Us?" he waved his hands around in the circle,

"Us!" James' face turned red, "We are in elementary school, and we have to figure out how we feel about people we love who we might never see again."

"Why don't you feel like you'll see your father again, James?" The anger felt by everyone James had ever met rose up like flames lapping at window curtains inside him. At this point, he began to shout at the counselor,

"Because he's dead! My dad is dead! And Sarah's granddad is dead! And Sam's mom was taken away! Sophie's parents don't love each other anymore, and all you do is pick at us," the counselor was calmly writing notes, "all you do is pick at us for an hour a week, and then-" He caught his breath and kicked his chair, making Sarah jump. "You don't really care, you don't even remember who we lost," he then yelled, "We are all going to die!" James collapsed on the floor and pulled his legs to his chest, with his face buried near his knees he murmured, "Don't you know we're all going to die?" and he sat there for a long time.

The counselor was smiling while scribbling down notes, everyone else including James was quiet and still. Sarah buried her face in her hands and dark hair. Sam stared at James and stopped kicking his legs back and forth in the chair. Sophie looked down at her hands. The room was still like rain-stained statues in a cemetery waiting to move the moment nobody was watching-

"James, why did you throw the chair?" James did not move. He thought about his father. While trying to remember his father's face, James could only think of it the way he drew it. James could only see crayon on white construction paper, not his father's eyes, his skin. James tried to remember going fishing with him, but in the boat next to James in his mind was a paper man drawn in crayon. When the paper man turned around, his eyes were hollow black. He shook his head and tried to remember his parents together, his mother was laughing in his mind but he could not hear his father's voice when his paper mouth opened and closed. James heard his father's arms crinkle as they were wrapped around his smiling mother.

"James, I have to report any violence to the Vice Principal, and your parents." The air was like cold water running through the catacombs of his fiery lungs. "Your parent," She corrected herself. James tried to remember his father shoveling the driveway he could hear him through the glass, scraping the snow off of the walk rhythmically. James' father was facing away, working towards the road. When he turned around to wave at James in the window, the smiling paper face was where James' dad's head was supposed to be. When the paper man started saying something, the black of his eyes started dripping down and devouring the other colors smeared on his face. His gloves fell off and his shovel fell down while he waved at James through the window,

"There's nothing to keep his fingers warm," James whispered,

"What- James why did you choose to make this session about you?" In James' mind the black crayon spread as far as his father's head, and it started to dissolve him. James' father's clothes collapsed into themselves, every article of it was piled onto his snow boots.

"We're all going to be paper." James lifted his head.

"What?" The counselor asked in an annoyed tone. James put his head back down in his arms and said,

"Oh my God." He lifted his head again and looked at Sophie, She looked back at him and finished his sentence.

"Oh my God, we're all going to die." She said between sobs.

Chapter 22

The behavior notice was printed on golden yellow paper. James somberly walked Sophie home in silence. He felt the weight of it pound like a throbbing heart jammed in his back pocket. It worsened with every step.

"Do you want to go to the tree house?"

"I think I want to lay down for a while, maybe tomorrow?"

James walked away, but turned back every few steps to watch Sophie as she walked to her house. The day was almost warm. It was the point of winter when all the true bone-coldness was gone, but none of the sounds of birds or other animals had returned. Snow would not fall until the next year. James did not wear his coat all week. He rolled up his sleeves while he pressed into the woods. He dropped his back pack at the bottom of the ladder, and ascended slowly like a cat would if it were stalking a bird. He could feel each of his muscles move as he put one arm in front of the other, one foot in front of the other.

In the tree house, James had his father's portrait was pinned to the wall, and its hollow eyes looked over him. James closed his own eyes and thought about the time his family drove to the Atlantic Ocean on vacation.

"Time to pay the Troll," James' father would say. At every toll booth James would hide under his blanket so the toll collector wouldn't see him. He laughed at himself in the tree house because he never thought of the workers of being anything but trolls until later. James remembered how when they got to the beach, it started drizzling but his family hopped out of the car anyway. His dad was paper again, but when his mom led him further away, to the water, his form turned solid again, and his mother kissed his father far away from where James was standing. They were far enough away that they looked like a pair of shadows. James remembered how the sparse rain drops hit his lips and tasted salty like popcorn.

He remembered running up to his parents at the water, but he could not keep remembering. When James thought of his parents when he got closer to them in his mind, James' dad turned back to paper and started soaking up water.

"Don't come any closer!" his mother pleaded. At this point, James wanted to catch his father and pull him to shore, so he kept walking. "Please!" she yelled, but James started running towards his father who was now beginning to crinkle. Each small wave that lapped against his parents raised his mother's voice and pulled is father under more. By the time James got to the edge of the foaming water, his father was dissolved into it. "Please," his mother said one last time to James in his imagination.

"Please," James said out loud through the window of the tree house to the sky. He looked at the portrait of his father that he colored on white construction paper. He ran his fingers over the crease lines, and then along the spots where paper was overlapped with the wax of his father's face.

James did not want the world to pull his father apart. He closed his eyes again while his palm was still pressed to the portrait of his father, and he thought about when he was younger, maybe only four years old. James remembered being in a fast food restaurant with his father and getting separated from him.

"Just wait out here, I have to go to the bathroom, then we'll eat," his paper father said while leaning close to James' face. In his imagination, his father's voice was different. It was not his father's voice at all. It was the voice of a local radio announcer that bred with all the booming voices on the commercials between cartoons, selling toy cars. James could hear the fluttering paper as his father pulled his hands off of James' shoulders and walked away in his military uniform. Everyone was wearing uniforms because they were on an Army base, and James could not see anyone's face because they were so much taller than he was at the time. He got scared of all the green and brown around him. It was like a dark forest, with wolves that always posed fierce around pools of water and trails that led outward to sunlight and civilization. James hid under one of the tables for a long time. Identical boots shuffled past, but he saw some that he knew were his father's. James burst out from under the table and ran to the uniform he knew was his father. James grabbed the pant leg, solid not paper this time, and said,

"Dad, Dad- I thought I lost you." The woman whose uniform he was holding onto bent down and asked him,

"Are you lost?"

James shot back to under the table and watched the counter where they sold the food beneath backlit signs. That was the end of James' memory of that event, but he imagined his father went to the counter to get the food. All James wanted was for his father to pick up the food at the counter, find him, and they would eat it at the table James was hiding under. In James' imagination, he could not make his father pick up the tray of food. His paper hands were too weak. He would just slide them under the tray, and when he tried to lift it, James' father's hands would just slip out, causing the tray to shudder as it collapsed on the counter. In real life James' father had to have found him, otherwise he would still be lost. His own imagination could not construct this truth.

James went down the ladder of the tree house and picked up his back pack. He slung it over one shoulder and walked home. He walked up the empty driveway to get to his house. When James turned the knob to the front door, it resisted him. The door was locked. That door was never locked when he was home from school. Nevertheless, James set his back pack on the ground and dug through the zippers until he found the key to his front door. While James unlocked it, he remembered his father would turn the same knob. When James picked up his back pack and turned the knob, he knew that he was touching the same door knob his father touched when he left.

Pressing the door open, his mother's laughter came through the crack. James had not heard his mother laugh like that in months. He slipped through the door quietly and stood there after closing it. His mother laughed again. James heard a man's voice.

"Of course, I'd never leave you," James dropped his bag immediately and ran into the living room where the voices were coming from. In the corner by the other door James saw them. His mother had his father's arms wrapped around her, and she was smiling at him like she did in the picture of her and her father before they got married that he saw in the photo album. James could not see his father's face. His mother looked so young. James bounded towards them and wanted to cry out, 'Dad!' but it came out more of a warbled non-word than anything.

His mom and Sophie's dad turned to him. And he stopped like he was never moving at all. Sophie's dad dropped his arms from James' mother's waist and put them to his own hips.

"Are you so rude that you just come in here, keep your shoes on, and make that much noise?" James was completely frozen, and a slow croak came from his throat, "did you even put your backpack up?" Sophie's dad walked towards James and grabbed his arm, pulling him almost painlessly into the foyer. Sophie's dad turned James around, "What is this?" James looked at his backpack, the same thing James' dad was looking at. "What kind of a pig are you? Put this away." He let go of James' arm. James hesitated before picking up his back pack, opening the closet, and putting it on the floor.

"Take off your shoes!" Sophie's dad barked. James did and looked at his mother, who was nervously holding onto her own shoulders in the kitchen doorway. Sophie's dad walked towards her and kissed her, "Don't worry, I'll get him sorted out," James took off his shoes and put them in the closet. Sophie's dad turned towards him, arm around James' mom's waist, "What did you do with your sleeves?" James opened his mouth to answer when Sophie's dad said, "Fix your sleeves and wash your hands, they're filthy, your mom made a nice dinner and I won't let you disrespect her by coming to the table like some slob."

James nodded and walked towards the bathroom to wash his hands. After he closed the door he thought about his mother. She was wearing a nice outfit, jeans and a blouse. James didn't see his mom wearing anything but a bathrobe in the house for such a long time. He turned the water on until the steam rose to his face. He stuck his hands under the faucet and winced. The shock of the heat made him suck in some of the steam through his teeth. James pulled his hands out of the water before getting his resolve again and keeping them under the water while taking in lung-full after lung-full of steam with his eyes closed. He opened his eyes and looked down at his pink hands. They were blurred by steam. He pulled one hand out of the water and grabbed the white bar of soap. Moving one hand out of the water made the pain intensify on his other hand. He pulled both of them out and lathered the soap between them like a prayer. He put the soap back on the soap dish and put his hands under the full force and heat of the water again. He rinsed his pink palms and shut off the water. He started to rub his hands dry on the towel behind him, and it hurt. He looked at his face in the fogged-up mirror and opened the door to the bathroom and brought the smell of soap with him into the hallway.

James walked down the dark hallway to the dining room. He looked down at his own stomach while he was walking, and could see his heart beating so hard that it moved part of his solar plexus in and out every time he froze his breath. He scuttled into his seat and only looked up from the table when Sophie's dad spoke;

"That's more like it, good that you show your mother respect," he began, "She's been too easy on you, she thinks it's the world against the two of you," James was trying to hold very still. "She thinks that her child is incapable of doing wrong, that everything is some other person's fault," Sophie's dad started scooping lumpy roast beef stew into his bowl, "she only cares so much because your father is gone, but that's over now," he slapped the ladle back into the serving bowl, "That's over now, you hear, James?" James nodded.

Sophie's dad was sitting in James' dad's seat at the dining room table. What used to be his seat. James' mother started serving James stew,

"Give 'em a little more," Sophie's dad said with a full mouth. James' mom slopped more into his bowl. It was significantly more than what James was used to eating, but he thanked his mother and began eating as quietly and as submissively as he could. James nearly lowered his face into the bowl as he tried not to overhear his mom's conversation with Sophie's dad.

"We should be able to get the movers to bring your boxes in here this next week," James did not look, but he could hear the distinct smooth sound of their hands coming together over the table.

"I'd like that," Sophie's dad said, mouth full of stew. James contained all of his shaking to his left hand, which he kept under the table. He thought about his father bursting through the front door, and rescuing him. James looked at his family's last Christmas portrait on the wall, the one they took just weeks before his dad deployed-

It was gone. James' jaw dropped, the wall was empty. James looked out of the window behind Sophie's dad's head towards the direction of where the tree house was.

"Eat!" Sophie's dad barked. James accidently dropped his spoon.

"I'm full, can I just finish my bread?" He ate more than what he was usually able to.

"You're eight," Sophie's dad pointed out, "I don't negotiate with eight year olds, eat."

James reached into his back pocket and handed his mother the sloppily folded paper. He sighed,

"That's from the Vice Principal, they said they are just going to warn me this ti-"

"What," Sophie's dad interrupted. James' mom unfolded the paper slowly and read the words for a long time. It looked like heat was being emitted directly from Sophie's dad's ears.

"It says-" she scanned it again, "it says James damaged school property, and verbally assaulted his counselor." she put her hand to her mouth and looked down so James could not see her cry. "You were right," she looked up at Sophie's dad.

"What happened was-" James tried to explain himself.

"No excuses, how can you come here and give excuses," Sophie's dad was turning redder, "These people are trying to help you. We are all just trying to help you. No excuses. No. None." James opened his mouth to speak, found the expression on Sophie's dad's face, and closed his mouth again. He picked up his spoon and tried to keep still enough to eat.

"You're a pig, you're getting it everywhere!" Sophie's dad pushed back his chair so hard that it hit the wall as Sophie's dad propelled himself to James' side of the table. He grabbed James' hand and wrist tightly, lowered it into the bowl and then brought it to James' closed mouth.

"Open." James' jaw felt suddenly paralyzed. He tried to open his jaw, all he wanted in the entire world was to open his jaw, but it was stuck. Instead of pry it opened, Sophie's dad ripped the spoon out of James' hand. He put the spoon in the bowl and threw the whole thing into the kitchen trash. Even the spoon and the bowl. He rushed back over to James,

"You're going to learn, that you have to respect people," He motioned for James to get up, "nobody owes you anything," Sophie's dad went over to James' mom and put his hand on her shoulder, "Now you go throw that trash out, I don't want your food to stink up our house." James looked at his mother,

"Take out the trash, James," she repeated almost sweetly.

"Don't worry, he'll get it," James heard while he pulled the trash bag in the kitchen closed and brought it to the garage where the trash bin was stored. As soon as James turned on the light of the garage, he saw Sophie's dad's car. James wished he knew Sophie's dad was there that day, he wished he parked in the driveway. If James knew Sophie's dad was there, he never would have confused him with his father. I'm so sorry. He apologized to his father about getting him confused with Sophie's dad earlier in the day.

When James pulled the door shut behind him as he entered the house, Sophie's dad stormed into the room.

"Don't slam doors,"

"I didn't-"

"No excuses, the house shook, you have to respect your mother's house while you're here." Sophie's dad fumed. "Put your hand on the door knob," James did so, "now, without opening it, turn the knob," James tried, "Without opening it!" Sophie's dad raised his voice. "Right, now, slowly, pull it towards you," James did so, and could hear the seal of the door break. "Let go, now hold the handle again," James did what he said and thought about all the times his father held that same handle, "turn it slowly, good, now- push it back slowly, don't slam it." James pushed the door back into its frame. "Now, twist it back to where it was," instead of letting go of the handle, James twisted his wrist and made it so it did not make even the slightest noise. "Let go now." James did. "Good, you might not be useless, after all." James kept looking at the door handle. "We'll get you sorted out. Go brush your teeth and go to bed," James walked towards the kitchen where his mother was doing dishes to say goodnight, "You heard what I told you," Sophie's voice pulled James away from his mother, who was humming to herself over the sink.

James brushed his teeth in confusion. He always thought he was a good kid. He remembered how many times he avoided making trouble at school, he just made a mistake. He ran the opaque bristles over his gums and thought about how he never had a cavity. James walked up the stairs and closed his bedroom door behind him. He was a good kid. Wasn't he a good kid?

His room was dark, he flipped on his light slowly so he could hear the current connect. James was suddenly struck with the fact that his father's body was somewhere. It had not come back to the family yet, but the last time he read his mother's mail; it said that it was en route.

James knew for sure that his father was not sleeping in a bed that night, that his father would never feel sheets again. James took his pillows and put them in the corner of his room. He pulled back his covers and rolled them up next to the pillows. After pulling the mattress sheet onto the floor, he pulled it up with a great force and made it billow out a grey like white as the winter sky above him. James folded it up and put it on the pile of other bed sheets. He slipped into his over washed pajamas that formed neatly to his frame. He smelled like the steam that rose from the side of the house on winter days. It was exhaust from the dryer. It was clean, fresh, and warm at the same time.

James flipped out the light and sat on the edge of the bed. He heard a crackle and looked around his room. Sensing nothing else, he leaned back and was on his side facing away from the door. James repositioned and heard the crackle again. His eyes were drawn to his hands as they moved across the surface of the bare mattress. James moved his hand slowly across and saw small blue sparks leap. The static electricity moved wherever his hand moved. James was in awe of how much energy was in everything. The quick bursts were almost terrible in their bright light beauty against the otherwise blackness of his room. Beautiful, he thought.

He held himself still after a while and closed his eyes to sleep. James found that his mind was kicking around everything, moving faster than a thousand lab rats that were intent on running on their exercise wheels. He went from the window to the bed a few times, and heard his mother and Sophie's dad go to bed. He put his back on the bed and thought about his father shoveling the walkway again. The same thing happened in his memory and after his father dissolved he realized he had to get out of the house. Using some of the new stealth skills Sophie's dad taught him, James opened and closed his door silently. He slithered like a crook down the stairs and walked into the kitchen. James was hungry again, so while rummaging through the fridge, he saw them.

The potatoes were nearly sprouting in the plastic bag they were sold in. James lost his appetite for food. He walked to the closet to where his coat and shoes were. He put them on, knowing it was colder outside at night than it was during the day. Returning to the fridge, James packed his jacket pockets with three potatoes each, and closed the refrigerator door very quietly.

He did the same with the front door and pulled into himself and away from the dark around him as he made his way to the tree house. The branches of the trees reached out like the hands of ghosts, and caught his hair and face from time to time as he wobbled toward the tree house.

It was certainly dark, a dark that James tried not to think about what was hiding in it. He hummed through every rustle of the dead leaves, and coughed when he heard some small animal or another leap away from his feet. James tried to do anything but expect the worst.

When he got there, he put the potatoes on the ground in a row. Leaving them there, he rummaged through Mr. Heckerman's shed to borrow his shovel. In the clearing by the tree house, he dug exactly one shovel head deep into the soft soil. The smell the earth released smelled like life itself. James got on his knees and held each potato to the moonlight before pressing it into the wound of earth he created. With his bare hands, he smoothed the dirt back into the hole, leaving a loose mound above it.

James put the shovel back in the shed and heard music. It sounded old and mellow. The music was coming from Mr. Heckerman's house. He looked at the light in the window, as awake as he was. James turned to go home. He felt a great relief by leaving the woods, and was so overjoyed to have not been eaten by some monster or another that he ran and leapt his way home. James could find a way to live in darkness and silence.

He slipped off his boots and coat from his body to their original place in the closet, ascended the stairs without a squeak, and lay back down on his bare mattress. Stretched out from arm to arm to leg to leg as far as he could across the bed, James closed his eyes. He thought about remembering his dad like their time together was a movie in his head, but decided to imagine new memories with him instead.

They were in a vast field, and from far away, James could not tell that his father was made of paper. He watched as his father, full of life again, picked up a shovel and drove it into the dirt with his work boots. His father threw the dirt to the side and lifted small objects to the summer sun before lowering them into the earth.

Part Two: Chapter 1

"I used to be happy- like you two are. Me and my woman-"

"You're spilling that beer all over, Sir."

"Pshh, ignore him- he's some dumb-shit bartender. You. . . two."

"Just don't fucking point when you're holding your drink. I'll charge more."

"You two."

"Sir, are you talking to us?"

"You are the center of this precious fucking world. I want another."

"Right buddy. You're shouting. I don't think so, why don't you leave them alone?"

"Ignore him. I used to have a woman."

"I don't see how-"

"We were in love. Like you. What? You haven't told each other yet?"

"Sheesh, buddy. You're done."

"Stop calling me buddy. Besides. They're in love."

"Sir-"

"What do you do?"

"I'm in the Army, and Karen here-"

"You two are in love. Like we were. They say behind every good man, there's a good woman."

"You look like you're about to throw up on my bar."

"Shut- you- just get me a beer."

"That's not gonna happen."

"Then let me buy a bottle of wine for these two lovebirds here."

"You're at the wrong bar."

"No- no, get them something stronger. Some strong sting to help them remember this time. You are going to lose each other. No matter what. But we weren't good men or good women back then. Not like you. Say something. Shit."

"I'm not sure what you want us to say, you're being very rude."

"Everybody loses somebody. You can't call me rude. The only difference-"

"You need to get out of here. You're ruining the ambiance, bugging this couple on their date."

"I have something to say. The only difference between me and you is you got someone else's hand in yours. Fall in love. Get married. Have a family. Lose everything. Build it up to tear it down. I can tell you two will come to a par- a particularly rough end."

"You don't know what you're talking about."

. . .

"I'm sorry- here you two, have this on the house. He comes around a lot, but I never heard him say more than a few words. Won't even talk about sports. What a weirdo!"

"I think you handled the situation very well."

"I had to, he was practically falling out of his seat, practically sloshing his drink on you with his crazy hand-waving."

"To each his own, I suppose."

"Yeah, you two have a good date, don't let that nut ruin your evening."

"We won't. It all depends on how you look at it."

"Ain't that the truth- I don't know what got into that guy!"
Chapter 2

James woke up to his alarm and the smell of dirt under his fingernails. He could hear his mother in the kitchen making breakfast downstairs. He was able to make it to the bathroom and wash his hands before they even saw the dirt, before they even saw the life.

James drew a slow breath and descended the stairs to the noisy first level of their house. The television was blasting news, then music videos, a western movie, then music videos again. Sophie's dad was sitting on the couch in the living room changing the channels. In the kitchen, James' mother was cooking something that must have been breakfast while she was also washing dishes. They were clanging against one another and the inside of the metal sink. James thought about how whenever anyone did dishes in the morning it sounded so angry. It sounded like his mother was trying to hurt the dishes.

"Good morning," he said, but she could not hear him over the noise in the sink and on the television. James sat down at the kitchen counter and sighed as he looked out the window. James' mother turned off the sink and was drying her hands off with the dish towel when she turned around and jumped a little when she unexpectedly saw James. She caught her breath and smiled. She was dressed and alert.

"Oh! There you are!" she called into the other room, "Honey, James is awake!"

"Send him in!" Sophie's dad yelled back.

"You go ahead," she said to James, "breakfast is almost done." She went to the stove and began humming as James went into the blasting rank noise of the living room. The television was set on some infomercial selling some product guaranteed to make the consumer a billionaire. It clashed entirely with the rising sun outside of the window. The sun was still and silent and full empty of promises but full of hope. Sophie's dad was on the couch and looked up at James.

"I'm going to have to apologize, for coming down so hard on you last night," Sophie's dad said, James tried to look at him, but his eyes were drawn to the booming television set.

"Look at me, boy!" Sophie's dad shouted and James looked back, "you can't just play up what happened to you and use people's sympathies to get away with what any other kid would get away with, you understand?" James did not understand, the infomercial was offering the system for half price, he nodded. "Not everyone is as lucky as you are," Sophie's dad continued, "not many kids your age get to play the martyr card, has their mom saving up the checks she gets from the Army for their college," James was paying Sophie's dad his complete attention, he did not know his mother was saving the money. "The thing is James, if you don't work for anything, you won't appreciate anything. All these things people do for you because they think you've had a hard life." James was confused, "It's not fair- but, I'll just have a talk with your teacher, let her know not to baby you like your mother does, we'll get you working more around here." Sophie's dad lifted his coffee cup and sloppily motioned to the kitchen.

"Breakfast!" they both heard called from the other room. Sophie's dad stood up from the couch and towered over James, "We'll have you sorted out soon," and he led James into the kitchen while the television continued its drone behind them.

Chapter 3

At school that day, James had a hard time not looking over at Sophie. He wondered if she knew anything of what was going on at his house.

"Everyone partner up for the bus ride!" Ms. Hopcke shouted while James was looking at Sophie, she looked at him, smiled, and nodded. They were going on a field trip to the art museum. James and Sophie had become an institution of best friends in the class. Everyone understood they would work together on most projects. They were both ignored enough by most of the classmates to escape any teasing for their closeness despite the fact that James was a boy and Sophie was a girl. "Okay, line up and let me write down all of your names, don't lose each other! Remember: responsibility!"

Ms. Hopcke walked through the line and recorded each group's names and then called for them to walk neatly and quietly to the parking lot outside of the front entrance to the school. The whole line moved forward, spilling out at the sides from the more rambunctious children the way macaroni noodles that were not drained enough would slide off a fork.

"Everyone keep order!" Ms. Hopke warned, "We've got a long trip ahead of us," the art museum they were going to was a town away. The one in their town was not worth a school field trip and was mainly filled with art of the owner's son. They boarded the bus. James and Sophie were towards the end of the line, so they were loaded into the front of the bus. They were far enough away from Ms. Hopcke and the wild bus driver as well as ignored enough by the children for only James to hear Sophie say,

"Every day, I find a thousand ways to run away and disappear," she was looking out of the window at the garbage truck that took the same route and picked up trash from the school as part of the route. Sophie was imagining curling up in a trash bin and disintegrating from everyone's memories.

As soon as Sophie spoke, James knew that she knew exactly what was going on with their parents.

Sophie looked at James, "So, how much do you know?"

"He's in my house," Sophie turned away from James and looked out the window, "how long did you know this was going to happen?"

"The PTA meeting," she began, "there was something about the PTA meeting, I just knew."

"Sophie, how is your mom?"

"She pretends like nothing happened, I see her sometimes,"

"How does he have time, what does he do for work?"

"He used to sell life insurance, but he doesn't do that much anymore." She looked at James, "can we talk about something else?"

"Yeah," he looked around, "do you know what art museum we are going to?"

"I think the big one, not the one at the capitol, or the one across from the deli- the one in the town about an hour away."

"Wow. That sounds great, I haven't been there before."

"I'm going to be an artist someday, I remember people really well, so I can draw their faces- someday," Sophie looked out the window, "I'm going to paint everyone exactly as they are, not how they look. I'll use all the colors I need to." James added as he looked down at the child-torn holes in the blue plastic of the bus seat in front of him.

"James, you know my dog died, right?" James put a quick arm around her,

"No Soph, how long ago?"

"A couple of months."

"What happened?" Sophie looked at James from behind her blonde hair so that only he could see the look of fear in her eyes,

"I don't know." she said clearly and quietly, each word on its own.

Mrs. Hopcke stood up at the front of the bus,

"Stop horsing around back there!" everyone on the bus turned to look, including James and Sophie. What they saw was Sonny holding Paul by the front of his shirt, as well as his arm frozen midair. Sonny looked up, and before Mrs. Hopcke could move, he looked back at Paul and let his fist fall on his face.

"That's it!" a voice that had the power of God came out of Mrs. Hopcke, "Sonny, to the front of the bus, now." Everything was still. She turned to James and lowered her voice, "can you stand up, please?" He did as quickly as he could, hoping not to conjure up any more of her wrath. No one on the bus had seen Ms. Hopcke angry before, and now even the bus driver was intermittently looking over his shoulder to watch her as if she were going to explode. "Sonny, take James' place, you'll be Sophie's bus partner, you can learn a thing or two from her." she looked at James, who had a sullen pull on his face, "Go ahead to the back for now, James."

James and Sonny walked towards each other in the narrow isle of the bus. They each started walking sideways steps before they collided, and as they passed each other carefully, Sonny smiled slyly at James.

From where James sat down he could see Sonny, suddenly a giant next to Sophie, lean closer to her and talk quietly. She laughed.

"James, you have to help me get him," Paul said so just the back of the bus could hear.

"No," James shook his head, "sorry, man." He was looking ahead, trying to see what was going on with Sonny and Sophie.

"James, he's just going to keep it up, until someone stops him,"

"Well-" craning his neck to see over the kids in front of them, "I won't be the one to stop him."

"But he's got your girlfriend!" James turned to Paul,

"She's not my girlfriend, she's just my friend," Struck by the serious adult tone that came over James, Paul changed the subject,

"I didn't even want to go on this trip." Paul crossed his arms, "I told my mom I didn't want to go, but she said it was a great opportunity for me. What do I want to look at stupid pictures for?" They were quiet for the rest of the bus ride there.

The bus pulled up behind a few other school busses in the great round parkway in front of the museum. James leaned over Paul to look out the window. The art museum was not old and stuffy like he thought it would be. Each of the exterior walls was a different color, and the whole building shone like clean silverware. It was constructed in a way that made it look like a house of cards caught mid-collapse. No two windows were the same, and the doorway was not a perfect rectangle, because one side was higher than the other. The bus began to get louder with excitement. Mrs. Hopcke had everyone line up outside, all eyes on the building, and tried to get their attention to go over the safety rules.

James was still looking at Sophie when they entered into the giant lopsided main doors of the art museum. There were other kids from all around the area from different schools. James thought about how strange school was, how all these kids who would never otherwise meet each other were lumped together. If it was one hundred years before and everyone lived on farms, he never would have met Sophie. His mom never would have met Sophie's dad.

The class slipped into the art museum winding around the front desk like a snake. The class was a lot quieter than the other kids in the museum, who seemed to be taking any chance to act out and send their echoes into the bowl of the entryway.

Mrs. Hopcke checked in at the front desk, she said her name and asked,

"Is our tour ready?" The attendant, a beautiful woman wearing a green flowered dress with a suit-coat plastered over it looked through a clipboard.

"It looks like you are a bit early. The guide should be here in about fifteen minutes," Mrs. Hopcke stared at her, "You can look at what we have in the lobby if you'd like to pass the time."

"Thank you," Mrs. Hopcke turned to the kids, "You are all behaving very well, if you could sit with your bus partner and just talk quietly by that wall for a few minutes, we'll start learning soon."

The kids walked neatly to the benches and an open space in the lobby and quietly watched the faces of children they did not know pass by. They could hear the echoes of laughter and arguments from the other kids bouncing off the walls throughout the museum like the sighing of ghosts. James felt like even a whisper in the farthest part of the museum would reach his ears in the lobby.

When the tour began, James and Paul were in the back of a crowd of kids around the tour guide. They both tried to stand up straight to see over the other kids, but they had a hard time even hearing the tour guide as they began going through the art museum.

James could see the kids goofing off and whispering in the front. He wanted to see what they saw when the tour guide talked about the art, but he could not because he was so far away.

"Woah! Real swords!" Paul nearly shouted when they passed a group of highly decorated swords and daggers that were hundreds of years old. The kids in class were quiet when they passed through the room of cherub-like portraits of colonial children. There was a wedding chest that held a dowry for some long dead bride in Italy over five hundred years before. James tried to crane his neck over the other kids' ruckus, and he only caught a few words from the tour guide's mouth.

". . . a scene from Pandora's box. . ." James heard before the noise overtook her words.

They broke for lunch in a great lobby under a glass sculpture of the moon that he knew must light up at night and look beautiful from the road. He found Sophie,

"Hey Soph, let's not eat here, it could fall-" she quickly moved off to the side with James and they started eating the trays of food Mrs. Hopke handed out. They each got a square of a sandwich, carrots, and either an apple or an orange. James could hear the rising voices of Sonny and his entourage halfway across the lobby. They must have been arguing about the fruit, because when it quieted down, Sonny walked over with his hands behind his back.

"I saw you only have an apple," Sonny said looking only at Sophie. James stuffed his whole sandwich in his mouth and stared at Sonny. "I got you more options," he pulled his right hand from behind his back to show a cup of strawberries, and he showed Sophie red grapes in his left hand. James could smell their nectar from where he was sitting. "You can have all of them if you want," James looked across the lobby to see two of Sonny's friends pouting and eating their carrots. He looked back at Sonny and Sophie.

"No. Thanks, this apple is just great." At hearing Sophie, Sonny slumped his shoulders and started to walk away, "-but you can sit here and eat your lunch with us! If you want," she trailed off.

"All right. You don't mind, do ya' Janson?" Sonny was not asking.

"Sure man, there's plenty of ground to sit on." Sonny ignored James' sarcasm and walked back to his group of friends to get his tray of lunch. He put the fruit on his tray, smiled at them, and walked back.

"Are you going to eat all that fruit?" Sophie asked, looking at the mountain of food on his tray, realizing he somehow had two sandwiches and potato chips instead of carrots.

"No- do you want some after all?"

"Nope, maybe you could give it back to your friends, they look like they are missing it," Sonny turned around and saw his friends quickly look away at their empty trays.

"Well, why not, Jansen!" James looked up, "Why don't you bring the grapes and strawberries back real quick for me, that'd be great." James knew better than to decline Sonny's invitation to help, so he took the fruit and walked over to Sonny's friends to give it back.

Walking towards where they were sitting, James noticed Sonny took his place next to Sophie. Instead of at his spot, he sighed and sat down next to where his tray was: a few feet in front of them. He noticed the different classes were eating in shifts. There were only two classes in the lobby, Mrs. Hopcke's and another. They sat on different sides, like opposing sports teams.

After lunch, the class went to the gift shop. Everyone saved up the quarters they found on the ground, or had their parents give them a few dollars to spend. They shuffled into the momentous gift shop all at once, and began perusing the racks. James made his way to the corner, where there was a big box of prints on cardboard. He moved each one slowly away from him on the stack to see what was on them. One was a vase with sunflowers. Another was a bunch of chairs and tables outside at night on cobblestone streets. There was a man and a woman sleeping on a haystack. There was one with men in worn clothes walking in a circle surrounded by bricks. James stopped. He saw something.

There was a family of five in peasant's clothes sitting around a square table. The room was mostly dark except for a minuscule lamp above their heads. None of them were looking at each other in the eyes, not one of the five. James pulled it out and hoped the seven dollars was enough. He turned it over and above the bar code it read:

'The Potato Eaters,'

Vincent Van Gogh

$4.99

It was his. He walked up to the counter, passing Sonny in the process of slipping a pair of earrings that were made locally and looked like the shining leaves of a vine into his oversized grime-encrusted pockets. James was up to at the register buying his poster when the class discovered it. They all found the whistles, exact reproductions of those used by police officers in the United Kingdom before stop lights and during horses. They were two dollars and most of the class bought one. James waited outside of the gift shop with Mrs. Hopke, some other kids, and Sophie. It was taking a long time because all the kids were paying in quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies.

"What did you get, Soph?"

"Nothing,"

"Oh, I still have a couple of dollars. I can get you something if you want-"

"No, I had money,"

"Why didn't you get anything?"

"I read that suffering is caused by attachment to impermanent things."

"Oh," James paused, "what does that mean?"

"I looked it up, because I had no idea, either," she chuckled, "it means, basically, we all feel bad because we lose things that don't last anyway."

"Like people?" James asked,

"Yeah, so I'm trying to circumvent suffering by not getting more than I need."

"Circumvent?"

"It means to stay away from."

"Oh. What did you get?"

"The Potato Eaters, a poster, by Vin-sant Vans Gog-H." Mrs. Hopcke, at the edge of her mind because of the chaos her class was creating corrected him,

"Oh Christ-" she lowered her voice, "James, they pronounce it Vin-Cent-Van-Go." she was wringing her hands and looking at the gift shop, "And he didn't specialize in posters- that's just a copy of one of his paintings."

"Thank you, Mrs. Hopke," He looked back at Sophie, "The potato eaters, all of the potatoes, the family, it's just like us."

"Let me see," Sophie asked, and upon inspection, she nodded. "The Potato Eaters."

When the whole class was done in the gift shop, Mrs. Hopke yelled,

"Everyone get back with your bus buddy!" James found Paul and Sophie was pulled away from him towards the back of the line. They got back on the bus and sat in the exact same seats that brought them there. James set the poster pressed against the back of the seat of the row in front of him so it did not take up too much room. Everyone who had a whistle pulled it out in one quick glimmer and began shrieking out the theme to common circus music the entire way back to school. Mrs. Hopcke buried her face in her hands or looked out the window the entire way, not even scolding them. Sonny sat facing Sophie for the entire ride and put his arm on the seat behind her.

Chapter 4

Stephen was the youngest of four brothers. By the time he entered the world, his parents could no longer celebrate. Not only had they spent their good times on the other three boys, they also did not start off with many good times to begin with.

His first memory took place around Christmastime, although he only knew that it was Christmastime from his memories of trees and eggnog, not because he was able to know what Christmas was or how that time of year was different from any other time of year. This is how memory works at the age of two.

He remembered stumbling into a dark room where the lit tree was. He stepped on a remote that lay on the floor next to a man in a chair. Stephen knew the man in the chair as the man who tipped brown bottles into his throat in an eternal fashion.

When Stephen tripped over the remote control, the television screen went black in a short moment. Sooner than he realized, his foot created a chain reaction, causing the bottle-man's hand to draw back and hit Stephen on the back of his head. Stephen would later learn that this was the strongest and most powerful man in Stephen's limited universe.

The bottle-man was Stephen's father.

The distinction between his father and his three brothers did not occur to him until later on because most of his brothers gave him a push or a punch from time to time.

His mother was different. Obviously afraid of the bottle-man herself, she coddled Stephen and deflected most of the angry energy that was aimed at him.

To him she was the most beautiful creature in the universe, and Stephen could never remember a time where her eyes were not red from crying or her body did not limp from the energy and pain she absorbed.

Most of his early life he spent hiding in the cupboards and waiting for his mother to find him so she could feed him or get him to bed.

His brothers picked on him, especially the one who was only a year older than he was, John. Feeling replaced, a day would not go by without John poking him in the eye, hitting him, or humiliating him in some other way. Stephen had to use all the malice he built up in his first two years of life to get his brother to stop. Stephen had to prove that he was stronger.

That is what his family was. A show of strength was a warning to anyone who dared to care. Their familial love was so heated that it could spill over into hate at any moment. The reason why his father sat alone in front of the television so often was to keep his energy locked in his own mind.

Stephen's mom would bathe him and John together and would leave for long periods of time. Some nights, Stephen's older brother would just splash him, other time he would him in the head with the bath toys or a shampoo bottle. One night, Stephen snuck a wash towel behind his back, and when it was heavy and wet he waited for his brother to turn around and select what toy he would torture Stephen with that night. He reached up and pulled the wash towel over his brother's face and used all his weight to push his brother under the water. With his brother facing down in the water, Stephen started to bite his shoulders and use his knees to plunge as much agony he could muster into his back.

By the time his mother came back to wash them off, his brother tumbled over the low wall of the claw foot tub and was crying. He never bothered Stephen again after that humiliation. Instead, he began to follow Stephen around and soon became almost sure to obey any directions Stephen would indicate.

This is the way that Stephen learned to make his way in the world. He began to idealize his father. By the time Stephen went to kindergarten, he grew strong enough to fight the brothers who gave him trouble, but still quiet enough to fly under the radar of his oldest brother who spent most of his time breaking the law with a cigarette hinged behind his ear.

Stephen would only let himself fight as much as the other kids would as soon as a menacing glare began to suffice as self-protection. He knew the way his family lived was wrong. Sometimes he had trouble believing his life was really his. It was more like a movie most of the time. Stephen spent most of his time avoiding the attention of anyone who could stop the reel of film his memories etched themselves into.

His mother grew to be hunched over in shame, pulling every room she entered into a curved cave of itself. As Stephen grew, her apparent beauty shrunk. She began to appear weak and pathetic. Strength began to mean everything to Stephen. Though she took more beatings than any of her children, he thought she should have been able to handle it better.

By middle school, Stephen had John fully behind him. John ceased to keep up in height or strength with Stephen. John's body was spun small like their mother's, and his eyes avoided people's faces in a way that Stephen grew to despise. The eldest of the four boys was in a detention center at the age of sixteen, and the other brother was on his way- with a cigarette behind each ears.

Stephen and John began to steal things from the gardens of the houses in the town and destroy them in the woods that blanketed the border of their town. After a while, neighbors and citizens stopped replacing garden gnomes and miniature plastic windmills.

So the boys started stealing small pets.

They would bring them to the woods where Stephen's older brother would serve as a lookout while Stephen would destroy the animals in many ways. At school, seminars bean to address moral concerns of students because the town was convinced dozens of the students were responsible for the destruction of garden ornaments and animals instead of a set of brothers. Nobody except the brothers knew it was anything but a disturbing teen trend. There was a rash of articles about it in the town paper.

Stephen's older brother did not remember the bathtub incident, but it was ingrained in him to obey his brother. When he was fifteen, he felt too weak to matter in his family, so he left. It wasn't long before Stephen began to warm up to his mother, the woman who he slunk away from earlier in fear of inheriting her weakness. He picked her side because he wanted to put himself between his parents so he could manage to challenge his father.

He waited again until the right moment came. One night, he flipped the oven's heat from 350 degrees all the way up to broil. The Lasagna baking within the oven filled the kitchen with smoke when it caught on fire. His father rose from the couch and beat Stephen's mother with the battery-powered fire detector. He beat her with his fists after the fire detector broke against her shoulder.

As his father stood panting from the physical and emotional exhaustion it took to tear Stephen's mother apart, Stephen took the chance to advance behind him. His teenage arms were taught but strong from mischief, and his eyes were sharp on the kill.

He grabbed a dishtowel off of the counter, pulled it over his father's face, and pulled him to the ground. Stephen only had to stand up to his father to get him to leave. When he left, Stephen thought he would somehow inherit that strength, but he felt the safe after. Stephen started to let the hatred for the rest of humanity leak from his eyes after nobody at school or at his job feared or respected him any more than before he conquered his own father. His mom grew quieter and quieter, until she rarely said a word.

He began to want happiness. He saw strength as the way to reach it. He decided before he left for state college that he would construct the happiness in his life in a way he could control. He would use any strength he had to bend the world to what he wanted. No matter how small that world would be.

After Stephen left for college, it took his mom one year to remarry, and two years for him to reconnect with John. They had not spoken since high school.

Stephen was sitting in the library, studying anatomy. He decided he wanted to go to medical school and was trying his best to enjoy his decision.

Someone dropped a book, causing Stephen to look up, mid-sentence about muscle structure.

"John?" Their eyes met.

"I heard you were going to school here, too."

"I've been here for two years," Stephen stood up and walked over to his brother, almost hugging him. When he moved his arms, John flinched. This automatic reaction was planted by early defenses formed after almost being drowned, grown from hearing the sounds the animals made when Stephen would lead them with twine tied around their necks into the woods around their childhood home.

Stephen and John started tentatively spending time together. They started with sporting events, but moved on to running errands together.

One day, they were both grocery shopping. They would share a car to get there, separate to traverse the isles, and then meet up again at the checkout lanes. They were crossing paths in the cereal aisle surrounded by a library of breakfasts when Stephen saw her. She was talking to his brother, and she was beautiful. She laughed and tucked some of her hair behind her ear.

"Stephen, this is the girl I told you about, from my history class."

"You never told me she was so beautiful," Stephen said without a heartbeat passing before his words. He said it while looking directly into her eyes. John's eyes lowered to what was in his cart. John knew he had no chance. She was practically Stephen's girl already and she had not even said anything.

John could not hold conversation or attention the way his brother did. He fumbled at nearly everything he did. Often, he would stammer. He was chubby, maybe fat- Stephen looked like he was made of stone. There was no chance.

That is how Stephen met his wife. That is how Stephen lost his brother for the almost the last time.

Chapter 5

James walked Sophie to her house and then walked by himself to the tree house. He tied a rope to the plastic-wrapped poster on cardboard, and carried the end of it up with him into the tree house. He lifted it up through the opening, and set it against a wall so he could look at it whenever he wanted. The faces were meandering and James just could not stop thinking about how none of them were looking at each other in the eyes, they were each looking at someone else. There was one woman, in the corner, who was looking right out of the poster and into James. He shuddered and made his way down the ladder. He let himself into Mr. Heckerman's house.

"It was the art museum today?" Mr. Heckerman handed James a cup of hot chocolate, sans marsh mellows.

"Yeah, thanks, do you have any marsh mellows?"

"God lord," Mr. Heckerman stopped walking, "I never would,"

"Why not?"

"They have gelatin in them,"

"Like Jello molds?"

"Like horse hooves, James, I don't eat horse."

"Oh," he looked down at his cup,

"So- what is the most striking thing about that museum, there? I haven't been to that one. Just been to the one at the capitol and the dinky one off Main Street."

"There was a big chest. It was for a wedding, a dowry." He took a sip of the smooth chocolate and smiled, "This is good,"

"Thank you James! Go on."

"I didn't hear much of what the tour guide said, but she said there was a scene carved onto it. The thing, the chest, was five hundred years old, from Italy."

"What was the scene?" they sat down in the living room on opposing couches.

"She said it was Pandora's box, a scene from Pandora's box- is that about wedding chests." Mr. Heckerman laughed.

"That's clever. They carved it right onto a box. No the story isn't about wedding chests, do you want to hear it?"

"Well, okay," He sat back and breathed in the aroma of the chocolate.

"This is Greek Mythology, so don't blame me if it turns out it isn't true, okay?"

"Okay,"

"Before now, a long time before now, humans had no idea what they were doing." He sipped his hot chocolate, "they didn't even have fire. Only the Gods had fire. One bold creative guy named Prometheus stole fire from Zeus, the king God, and gave it the mortals, the humans."

"Mortal?"

"It means we die, the Gods didn't." He looked out the window for a moment and then back to James, "Zeus was very angry when he found out, so he punished Prometheus by chaining him to the top of a mountain and making an eagle tear out his liver. Every day."

"Yikes,"

"Yeah, and every night, because Prometheus was immortal, his liver would grow back, and the Eagle would tear it out the next day." Mr. Heckerman looked down at his hands. "To punish humanity, Zeus had something else planned," He looked back at James, "Though they didn't have fire, the humans weren't doing too badly. There wasn't much suffering."

"Really?"

"According to the Greeks," he smiled, "Now, Zeus made one of his minions create Pandora, and the gods gave her a jar that she released to the world," do you know what was in the jar?

"Well, I have a jar of change I keep in the tree house,"

"In the jar was all the evil that was released onto mankind, all the suffering: vanity, lying, want, envy," he got very serious, "There was only one thing left to give to humanity after all of this evil, this pain,"

"What was that?"

"James, the only thing left in the jar after all the suffering was released onto humanity was Hope."

"The Gods gave us hope?"

"Hope."

"hope?"

"James, with all of the suffering, they had to."

"Why would they carve that onto a wedding chest?"

"Well, it was part of their culture, maybe to remember hope. Not a good thing to forget when you are married, but it's easy when things get very bad. You know, there is always hope, especially at the bottom of things." Mr. Heckerman finished his hot chocolate, "are you done?"

"Nope, not yet."

"What else did you see there, is that the art museum with the gift shop," Mr. Heckerman asked as he walked to the kitchen to put his empty mug up.

"Yeah, it is! I got a poster!"

"Oh yeah, what of?" returning to the living room.

"The Potato Eaters, by Vincent Van Gogh," James pronounced his name carefully.

"That was an interesting one, that Vincent. His paintings were always so expressive." He looked at James, "Here, follow me," Mr. Heckerman led James into the kitchen to the window. "Not many people understood him, what he was trying to say," He pointed at the vases they set the potatoes in. "Have you ever seen an original?" James shook his head no, "see one if you can, try not to touch it, the textures of the paint call out to people." James saw that only one potato was growing, "he was traumatized, by how little he could know people before they left, before they died," The roots were raw and clean in the water. James could see that they looked like cracks in the sidewalk, like tiny limbs entangled, like the legs of an ornate table, and like lightning frozen.

"Is that why he painted so much?"

"Yes. If you have a lot of bad things happen to you, sometimes all you can do to help yourself is to create." James could see the tops of the potato sprouting inches above the lip of the clear vase. "You either create, or you destroy."

"Did Vincent destroy, too?"

"He destroyed himself, he cut off part of his ear, and he ended up shooting himself in the chest."

"In the chest? Was he okay?"

"He didn't make it. He died, he couldn't show people the way he saw the world anymore. He didn't have the heart for it." Mr. Heckerman trimmed some leaves off of the potato plant. "It's almost funny, that's what he was trying to kill- his heart. They always shoot what they want to kill," James looked perplexed, "I'm sorry, I probably shouldn't be telling you this, it's very serious," He paused, "it's just that when someone kills themselves with a gun, they either shoot their head or their chest, the head is more common, these days." he sighed, "this is too serious, it would have been his birthday coming up soon, March thirtieth."

"When," James said he asked hesitantly,

"March thirtieth, he would have been one hundred or two hundred something years old-" he swept the air with his hand. "Something around there."

"That's my birthday." Mr. Heckerman picked up the leaves,

"Is it really?"

"March 30th."

"That's incredible, there's something in your mood and movements of him," Mr. Heckerman smiled, "there's an artist in you, a creator. Just take it easy, and stay away from guns." He laughed. "Potatoes are interesting things."

"How so?"

"Well, underground as you know, can be cooked- and make excellent food." Mr. Heckerman pointed to the bulb of the potato, "but the stalks, the leaves, the berries- when they grow, they're poison."

"How bad of a poison?"

"It's part of the plant's natural protection. It can be as mild as stomach cramps, as serious as coma and death, depending on how much is taken in, and how." He looked at James, "so, don't eat any."

"No problem,"

"It's the light that breeds the poison, if you leave a potato in the sun for too long, it'll turn green, the green parts are poison." he turned the vase so a different side of the growing plant was facing the window, "it's funny, with people, it's the other way around. The parts you see of them are fine, often nurturing, but they grow poison underground, inside of themselves." he looked at James, "I think you and Vincent are potato people, you have all the goodness in you- it's just hard to show because there is so much bad going on with the outside."

"Really?"

"And you want to show this goodness to the people you care about, but a lot of people would look at your life and only see the poison parts. They don't see there is something wholesome growing underneath."

"I think I have to go home."

"You are having dinner this early?"

"No, I just feel like I have to go home."

"Well, then! Until next time!" Mr. Heckerman led James to the door.

Chapter 6

If Vincent were to paint the sky that day, he thought, he would add a little spot of red paint to the pale blue. It would only have been accurate. Or, accuracy magnified, which is what he believed to be reality.

The grass in the field he was crushing beneath the thinning brown leather of his shoes was burnt a golden color by the summer sun. An orchestra of mating bugs buzzed in the distance and he felt like the only human being in the world surrounded by infinite life.

When he knelt down the dirt was moist, he could feel it through the knees of his pants. With his left palm, he knit his hand under the weeds of the field and felt the cold life of the earth. His right hand held a gun. Usually he would avoid guns- knowing what he was capable of, but he was no longer afraid of very many things. Kneeling down, the grass reached to his shoulders and a gentle breeze caused a brave strand to caress his bare neck.

His eyebrows fretted together. He pulled his left hand from the earth and dragged it across his forehead to remove some sweat that collected over his pink skin.

Days like that one always made Vincent think about the winter when the blue sky was covered with grey clouds, the wind forced itself into every being, and a dusting of snow covered the fields- even the field he kneeled in. Not many months before, the ground he knelt on was covered with snow. Soon the snow would begin again. The ocean was west of there; the ocean was east of there. He was born with its tides, and a thousand years after he was dead- its waves would crash on the shore. A thousand years after.

His stomach rumbled. Not from hunger. He was digesting a meal of hard bread rolls and cheese. In the distance he could see a skirting of trees with a few maverick pioneer trees establishing themselves sparsely in the field. The leaves from the trees caught every gentle wind and glimmered like emeralds in the summer sun. The silhouette of a bird fluttered up from the immense thick of the trees that dared to grow for what seemed to be eternity.

Vincent watched the bird drift up and over the trees and he himself lifted his right arm and put it to the bare of his chest which was exposed by a few undone buttons.

He took in a lone breath and let it go. His hands were steady. His heart beat firm, but not out of fear. He was no longer afraid of many things.

The force of the shot pushed his hand away from him and caused him to drop his gun. His entire body was pushed back and he laid facing zenith with his legs to the side. He pulled his legs straight with some of his shuddering strength.

Vincent felt less and less gravity. He began to ask for it with the pleading grace of a hungry child. Gravity. Only could hear himself, to anyone else his words were now mere mutters and moans of pain.

So, on that day a field that was once covered with snow and would be covered with snow again absorbed a great deal of blood.

Chapter 7

"You made all of this for me?" Danielle was surprised.

"The mashed potatoes are instant, but the rest is home-made." Mr. Heckerman replied. They sat down to eat the chicken and asparagus until their stomach were full of food and wine.

Later, when they sat on the steps of his back porch, Danielle put her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes.

"I do care about you." Her words caused his back to stiffen.

"Don't get hurt." He said as the moon appeared large and orange in the low horizon- waxing and waning, but with no real companion. He really did not want her to get hurt.

Later still, they were lying naked in his bed, she traced his forearm thinking it was like an anchor of flesh that kept him tethered to this world. Maybe it kept her there, too. The hair on his arm was already grey.

"You won't hurt me." She whispered. Deeper in the night, she was home. Danielle was already in the process of recreating the night and wishing it was not as sour and lonely as it had been. She imagined two oaks in the wilderness that grew together. Their branches would intertwine and their trunks would bevel out where they met. One tree would creak in the wind, old scars up its side. Because the two trees rose out of the earth together, their strength was multiplied and they would never fall in a storm.

"Don't get hurt," the one tree with the scars would say to the other.

Chapter 8

The contents of what a man needs to survive and what a man needs to live are so remote from one another they require two separate lists. What a man needs to survive is mere energy. Food, warmth, resistance to the elements, to attack. What a man needs to live is held in the spectrum of time. He needs to understand the past. A man needs to find love, which is nothing more than caring, kindness, and companionship- everyday of his life to allow him to grow. Love is the twine that holds balloons together in a bunch. Memories are those balloons. He has to be able to look forward to a continuation of his work, a trust that his companion will continue to soothe the bumpy scars of his past.

Peter was energy. The first time his boss at Syderski's Gas and Go scheduled him, the old man looked in Peter's eyes and knew he needed as many hours as he could get. So Peter worked 12 hours a day most days of the week. Men in flannel shirts and stiff jeans would walk into the shop some days and ask him when he was free to do yard work or help move boxes from one house to another for a friend. Peter would always offer his time to help- often in exchange for a meal or a beer.

On his time off, he would lay inert in his bed. He lived in an undecorated studio apartment with the furniture pushed close together. It did not look empty. Peter would stare out of the window or into the television, turning it up as loud as he could to avoid his own thoughts. Or, he would go for a walk in the park at the end of the block where his apartment complex was located. It was a small park, only a few trails, a miserly playground, and a bench that overlooked a murky pond. He would sit on the bench so he could trace the etched letters of the name that the bench was memorialized to. Peter knew the man- frozen by death at the age of eighteen a few years before. It was shortly after their high school graduation. The namesake of the carefully etched wood hung himself in his parent's basement after his girlfriend left him. Only Peter and the girl knew the reason he did it was because he could not stand to live his life as himself. Only to himself, Peter said it out loud,

"That's a stupid reason to die." But nobody was around to tell him it was also a stupid reason not to live. Peter was energy, a channel of industry. Peter had to work so much so he would not think about it. A lot of people do.

Mr. Heckerman once had love. Sometimes he would have to shut out beautiful thoughts when making love to his wife. He would think it was impossible for humanity to have existed the last 10,000 years for any other reason than him to be with her. Not architecture, not art, nor music, paddle boats, walls that could be seen from space, or shipwrecks. Sometimes he could not help but believe the entire world was made to create the moments he had with her.

He also loved his job. He would get a pure biological rush making diseases merge and dissipate, spin and waltz. Heckerman was getting somewhere. The numbers proved it. The lab reports echoed hope and promise. He had a window in the main lab that overlooked a lake- and with its seasons the research would change. Often in the spring and summer, he would eat his lunch outside on the picnic bench by the lake. He would smell the sweet decay of moss and hear the life surge from beneath the surface while he ate the carefully portioned lunch his wife created for him.

His son was his future, somehow more amazing than any other human he could imagine. They never planned to have children, but their son slipped ahead of their travel plans. Everyone was always telling Heckerman that his son that he was so mature. He was amazed at the talent and intelligence they boy possessed. The boy was both thin and tall for his age. He was the person the love created. Heckerman had beautiful thoughts about this part of his life, too. He thought about a spool of twine traveling through a great forest- wrapped around every tree. The trees would change species every few feet. He imagined the string went all the way to the heart of the forest- to the father tree, where they all came from. Mike was part of the forest, and his son was a continuation of not only himself, but everything that came before him.

There is beauty in life, but not in survival. That is at the top of the list of differences between the two.

Chapter 9

The chime above the entrance to Syderski's Gas and Go had not been jostled for hours. Peter was using his slow shift to check expiration dates in the coolers along the back wall. Opening one section after another, the cool air began to numb his nose and slow the circulation in his fingers where the slippage marks from a ballpoint pen grazed over his fingers earlier that day.

All through school, he was a 'B' average student. He played sports with friends but never excelled at them or tried out for the school's teams. Looking at the dairy case, he was starting to realize he was always alone. Peter's memories were being alone on the swing set, alone in front of the television, alone in a crowded room.

His first memory was during recess at daycare when he was watching a girl cry after falling off the slide and scraping both of her hands. He felt sorry for her, but he could not go over and help her. Peter did not even go to get one of the people who ran the daycare to help her. He just sat on a wooden border of the sandbox and watched her cry into her bloody hands.

He did not have anything better to do. He was not interested in many of the options of the playground, so he spent most of his time watching the other children. Peter just could not feel comfortable helping her. That event seemed to echo throughout his life. He would start to make friends, but whenever they started showing a lot of emotion or even started talking about the more intimate details of their lives, he could not stand to be around them.

There were a few reasons why he liked the job so much at Syderski's. One of them was the long hours afforded him a healthy excuse not to develop any relationships with anyone. Another reason was it gave him the kind of interaction with other people he was most comfortable with. He thought it was serene to meet someone, make small talk, and never see them again. He was even comfortable seeing the same people buy their pack of smokes from him every day, or their scratch-off tickets.

"Good luck" he would say, but he would not be required to prove that he meant it.

But there was loneliness. Comfort is not the same as happiness. Other than working at the gas station, he did not feel of use to anyone. It was not that he showed any promise growing up, as he was so average, he just thought he would grow out of it. He thought he would grow out of the shyness or whatever it was that kept him from connecting with people. Peter did care about people. He cared about his mother, his friend in high school who hung himself when he was worried about everyone finding out what they did.

The chime over the door clanged as the door opened. Peter closed the door to the dairy case and walked behind the counter.

"The regular today sir," he asked as he reached for two packs of Marlboros.

He worked a shift and a half that day, and drove his old white car back to his apartment complex. He could afford to drive a new car, but he did not want anyone to notice the car he drove. It was not so old that it made any obscene noises, and he could get away with driving it without notice in all the different classes of neighborhoods in the town.

His apartment complex had eight units and two stories. His was on the second level in the front. He chose this so because it was closest to the front door and he would have to navigate fewer awkward passing of neighbors.

He had a bag of food from Syderski's that he started to put away in the cupboards and the fridge as soon as he was inside and set his keys down. He was allowed to keep anything that was past the 'sell by' date. The food did not go bad that quickly, and Peter was not picky, so he did.

The car, the small apartment, and the free food combined with entertainment provided by television made his existence extremely cheap. Peter had saved up nearly thirty-thousand dollars. He was not saving it up for anything important or anything at all. He just did not spend much money on himself, and did not have anyone else around to spend money on. He had not spent a Christmas or birthday with anyone in his family for years, and his boss did not expect anything from him. Nobody mattered. Not even his slow breathing in a silent room mattered.

He sat down on his couch and started drinking a bottle of expired root-beer, and eating an egg-salad sandwich. The television brought scenes of romance on one channel into Peter's world. When he changed the channel an infomercial stung at his senses, then the news.

Peter tuned in on the international news. While he masticated an egg-salad sandwich, he was told about carnival in Bolivia. Nobody could walk outside for three days without the threat of water balloons and friendship. Maybe I could go there, he thought. He imagined getting a small apartment there like the one he had, and working a job or two. Everything could be the same, but when carnival came around he would be forced to talk to his neighbors who threw water balloons at him. Being forced to interact with people would be the trick. He could learn the language.

Soon, his sandwich was gone and the news faded into a sitcom. Bolivia was as far away and dusty as any imaginable future, but dimmer light than what he was already doing. Peter was already so tired from work that he took off his shoes, stretched down on the couch, and fell asleep.

Chapter 10

The sound of James' feet pounding on the pavement was the only thing louder than the sound of his heart hitting the walls of his chest. He knew, before he saw his house, and before he opened the unlocked door, that his father was home. He kicked off his shoes and ran into the dining room. His mother was sitting at her seat with the lights off. On the table in front of where his father used to sit was a box that was only big enough to hold a bowling ball. The rest of the house was quiet so James knew Sophie's dad was not there.

"Mom, what is it?"

"They finally sent him, it's the only way they could," she sobbed, "your father." James sat down at the table where he normally would have- a pantomime of dinner. He closed his eyes.

He thought about the last time all three of them were at the table. The lights were on inside and the sun was down outside. They had mashed potatoes, corn, and roast beef. His dad dished out James' plate for him. As he handed it to him across the table, he looked at James in the eyes and smiled. The room was so bright then all of a sudden in his mind James' dad turned to paper again, and instead of matching blue eyes staring at James, it was the hollow crayon sockets. His father turned brown and folded into the box that was in front of James now. The room dimmed darker than it did in the poster of, "The Potato Eaters" that he bought that day. The silence gave way to muffles from his mother. James was very still.

"Can't you hear me?" He looked at his mother.

"What?"

"Your dad can't see us living like this, your dad can't see him." she put her head on the table, "and he can't see your dad, how did this happen?"

"What, mom?"

"You have to hide him."

"What?" James stood up.

"You have to be the one to take care of him now, I can't do it."

"Mom, I don't know what you are talking about."

"You have to hide him!" her voice and head raised, her bloodshot eyes met James and she was angry.

"Okay, okay. I'll hide him."

"You're a good boy." James walked over to the box and slid if off the table and into his arms. He picked it up and the weight was familiar. The box that held his father's ashes had USPS and military stamps all over it. James did not even know that they would ship ashes. He remembered why the weight was so familiar. The year before, he was with his family visiting an aunt. James had a baby cousin who was a newborn, he picked up the baby and it was heavier than he thought it would be, just like his father's ashes. After he walked up the stairs and into his room, James closed the door behind him. The weight did not leave him when he set the box down on the floor by his bed. It didn't leave him when he opened up the box and looked at the remains of his father, surrounded by thick plastic. The weight was heavy on his arms and chest when he thought about how his father looked like part of the moon, disintegrated. His father looked like cement and crushed up pills. The weight pulled at his ears when James thought about how he thought people were dust when they were cremated, not small stones. James closed the box and slid it under his bed, replacing the bed skirt over it so nobody could see the box from the door. James felt the pull on his chest when he lay down in his bed.

He looked up at the speckled-moon surface of the ceiling and felt like he was pressed between two great rocks and every part of him was being compressed. He journeyed on the valleys and mountain peaks of the moon above him, before he imagined descending into the great cavern of a box that held his father and running on the pebbles of the beach he had become.

When his mother called him down for dinner, he sat down in his usual spot and Sophie's dad was sitting across from him where his father used to sit. James noticed dinner was the same as it was before his father left, corn, mashed potatoes, and roast beef. This time, the corn was on the cob and when James ate it, he thought about how it did not just taste like the corn, it tasted like the pepper he sprinkled on it, like the butter he rolled it in. James ate quietly so Sophie's dad would not yell at him for eating like a pig. When he was done eating, James looked at his plate with his hands folded on his lap. When his mom and Sophie's dad were done eating, Sophie's dad stood up and told James,

"You do the dishes tonight, you've been good- you might not be a lost cause," before sauntering off to the living room and flipping on the television. James scraped the bones and bits of potato residue into the trash with the corn ear skeletons along with them. He turned the water on hot enough to steam, and washed each of the plates slowly and thought about himself. James knew he was more than just himself, James knew he was his father, his mother, the tree house, the potatoes.

Most of all, James felt like one of the potatoes, growing underground, almost protected by the nastiness around him. It kept him wholesome; the mean words, the bad days, the people who thwarted him, stole his friends, yelled at him, his mother's silence, the weight of his father's ashes kept him quiet, kind, thoughtful of others like himself. While James dunked the dishes in the soapy water, he imagined he was a king and lived in a castle by the edge of the sea. Suddenly, the spray of water on his face was the wet breath of the ocean, his mother was there, and so was his father, Sophie, Mr. Heckerman, Pandora, Sam from the gas station, Vincent. They were all watching him and waiting for him to tell them what to do. He turned from the ocean and told them,

"You should create,"

"What did you just say to me, boy?" Sophie's dad asked with the tone of a judge accusing a murderer. James had not noticed he walked into the kitchen. James was wide-eyed, but knew what to do. Rhymes.

"I said I was having trouble with this plate," James reached into the sink and pulled out a sparkling circle of plaster. Sophie's dad pulled it from him,

"What do you mean? It's just fine, there's something wrong with you." He walked to the fridge and pulled out a beer. It was glass with a twist top, and he threw the cap at James after he opened it. "Throw that out." The cap hit James' shoulder but still made him flinch.

James finished the dishes and knew to go right up the stairs and to bed. Sophie's dad was already closing in on his mother, inching his frame over her at the dining room table where she had not yet moved.

James fell to sleep imagining the silence beneath his bed. His dreams were in winter. He woke up in the dream and saw a bright white light coming from his window. Ecstatic, he ran to it and flung the curtains aside. The light filled both his room and himself. Snow piled the earth like heaps of white grain. It banked on trees and his fence, which it nearly covered. James blinked, saw it, rubbed his eyes, saw it. He ran downstairs and heard his mother humming a lullaby he had not heard in a year.

"I'm making breakfast for us, your dad is doing a lot of hard work out there- he'll need it, how many eggs do you want?" Suddenly, there was a pan and spatula in her hands, and the room was filled with the aroma of morning.

James ran to the front door, he ran out in the snow without shoes but the snow was dry, the snow was as warm as he was. He could see his father shoveling the walk, and when James yelled out,

"Dad!" he turned around. James stopped running, he could not see his eyes, he was made of paper again and James did not draw the eyes. His father's gloves fell off and the shovel dropped soundlessly into the soft snow. The eyes of black grew larger and larger until it covered his hands, his dad was screaming, but James could not see his mouth. The hands turned black and he started to granulate into his winter clothes.

He wanted to do something to help, so James ran towards his father. By the time he got there all that was left was a pile of clothes. James reached down and picked up his father's hat. Inside the container of his clothes were grey, sharp, fragments that looked like the moon.

James looked down into the pile of ashes like it was the ladder of the tree house, like he could descend it. He did and he came into the tree house from one of the windows, but it was not really the tree house. It was much larger, a great marble hall with velvet chairs. Each was filled with a potato and it was silent except for his own screams.

When he woke up the sun was still down and everyone else in the house was still asleep. It was Saturday and James knew they would be asleep for a long time. He went downstairs, put on his shoes and a sweater, and went outside.

The birds were not back from winter yet, but if they were, the sun was at the point where it turned the night sky a deep blue rather than black. They would have called out for it if they were there. James strolled down the street and listened to his own soles of his own shoes scraping with each step. He turned and saw the warm light of the gas station.

Peter was there, looking out of the window. James waved, but Peter did not flinch. Peter seemed disappointed. He looked down at his hands. James was confused until he realized it was so dark outside still that Sam could only see his own reflection.

James walked through the door with a chime, and Sam jumped at the noise. He smiled and put his hand to his chest,

"Wow! You gave me a start there!" he grabbed a white towel from behind the counter and started to wipe a small spill of his soda from when he was shocked. "You're up early!"

"Yeah," James set his hands on the counter, "I had a bad dream,"

"That sucks, what was it?"

"I was king,"

"That doesn't sound so bad,"

"But it was wrong, all the chairs in my court were empty. I was alone."

"I think there is another part of that dream that bothered you,"

"What's that?"

"Well, what has to happen for someone to become king?"

"They have to have a kingdom?"

"What else?"

"They have to have subjects," Peter was quiet, "What?"

"Just think about it for a while, its better if I don't say it, but I think that's what bothered you about having a dream where you were king."

"Otherwise, I'm having a good night."

"Very good, me too!"

At the tree house, James could see the potatoes sprouting through the surface of the soil. He carefully stepped around them and pulled himself up the ladder and into the dark interior of the tree house, not yet lit by the sun.

For James, there was a cold emptiness to most places. His house was hollow without his father. James' classroom was somehow silent despite the steady barking talk of the children. His dreams were quiet echoes of being alone. The streets he walked on were abandoned corridors. His room was a cave he slept in.

The tree house and Mr. Heckerman's house were both filled with artifacts and inventions. These places were full, and their fullness resonated to the interior of James. He ran his fingers along the rough edges of the portrait he drew of his father, and looked deep into the caverns of his eyes, both eyes were full of the things James could not remember. The wood in the tree house seemed to have more texture than any other wood. The lopsided boards that framed the window extended splinters that looked like comforting hands. The poster of the Potato Eaters looked out at James like they were in a completely different room of the tree house, filled to its edges with people, stares, and the aroma of true hunger.

From the windows of the tree house, the world itself looked fuller to James. The trees were beginning to form the buds of spring leaves. A thickness of the placing of houses was undeniable. Even the light of the sun invaded the street lights and filled the world with an over extension of bright.

At most times, James felt like he was empty inside his own head, too weak to pick up the memories he wanted to review, and too worn to be honest with himself. In the tree house, he had an old strength that flooded into him with the morning light. His mind was as varied as the painted clouds of the sunrise, his heart beat as sure as the steady drum of leaves emerging from twigs, sticks, and branches of the abandoned trees.

James knew that if he did not go home soon, this fullness would end permanently. If his mom or Sophie's dad saw that he was gone, they would ask where he was. Even worse, they could look for him. They could find him there and he might never be allowed back. The tree house felt like a sweater he was pulling off of himself when he left. It was still there, even with him not in it. It seemed to keep a place for him, his form.

His house was silent when he went back in and took off his shoes. He heard Sophie's dad snoring louder and louder until James' covers, pillow, and walls could not keep it from rattling his head.

The snoring stopped abruptly and there was a pounding and a loud creak from James' door that opened quickly.

"Get up, you're so lazy, you can't spend your day sleeping!" Sophie's dad was in the room and pulling at James' covers. James was not asleep. He stood up as Sophie's dad moved to the curtains to let in the morning sun. The street lights were out. There was a strange bump on the silhouette of Sophie's dad's wrist.

"You're going to make your bed, you're going to help your mom get groceries today. . ." The noise of Sophie's dad's voice faded nodded background of James' mind as he focused on what was growing on Sophie's dad's wrist. His arms were moving so quickly as Sophie's dad spoke that James had trouble seeing was on his wrist until he took a breath and stood as still as a photograph.

James' dad's gold watch hung from Sophie's dad's wrist.

"Do you understand?" James nodded without looking from the watch. James could see the watch cling to Sophie's dad's wrist without loyalty. He saw the watch and Sophie's dad stroll out of his room.

He pulled his blankets, pillows, and sheets from his bed onto the floor. The lumpy surface of the exposed mattress looked like the scars on old trees from where their branches broke off during storms. He stuffed the sheets back onto the mattress, imagining it sucked the corners of the sheets under the mattress like a mouth devours spaghetti. He lifted the comforter over his head and made it billow down like a parachute to the bed and threw his pillows in perfect alignment to one another at the top of them.

James left his room and knew that Sophie's dad was gone. The door to his mother's room was open a crack that James made wider. His mom was asleep in the warm burp of the room, and James saw a glimmer coming from the top of his father's dresser. He opened the drawer that held the watches, saw they were misarranged, and grasped all of them in his hands. He carried every watch, downstairs and grabbed the one in his backpack before stuffing all of them into his pockets.

He put on his shoes and ran, unstoppable, to Mr. Heckerman's shed. Inside, he found a hammer, and he dashed up to the tree house for the second time that day. James pulled the watches out of his pockets like spilling water and looked at them all face up. Their batteries were not dead yet and the uneven ticks of them sounded like a heart afraid of the world around it.

These were not Sophie's dad's watches. The watches would be worn by anyone strong enough to take them from James, unless he destroyed them. James lifted the hammer and the resulting noise burrowed inside of himself and made him out of breath. The cracks gave way to pops and James kept pulling the hammer back on the piles and spots of living watch until it was as quiet in the tree house as it was before James ever climbed the ladder.

He scooped the broken arms, faces, and gears of the watches into his hands before dropping them down to where they bounced around the ladder to the tree house. He put the hammer back in Mr. Heckerman's shed and grabbed a shovel. James dug in front of the ladder and put the watches, now destroyed, into the hole. He scooped the soil back over the smashed watches with his bare hands and pounded the soil tight again with the shovel.

James was in the shower, scraping dirt from under his fingernails, by the time his mom woke up. Emerging with the steam from the bathroom, James could smell his mother cooking bacon. The salt in the air was as thick as near the ocean. The last time he was at the ocean, James hung off his father's back as his dad dived into the crashing waves. He could hear his mother's muffled laughter behind them when they sunk underwater. She took pictures of them at the beach, building sand castles, swimming, posing in the bright sunlight. They did not develop the pictures in time for James' father's funeral.

The funeral itself was empty. James' dad's best friend talked about how they met, James' mom tried to talk but choked on her words, sobs, and tears. James could not cry, he wanted to, he knew it would be one of the few times in his life that it was right to cry. James thought about the good times with his father, he imagined life without his father, he pretended he just watched a puppy crawl under a moving car. James looked at his mother's streaked face and was too astonished to feel anything like what she felt. James did not cry at all during the funeral, but he curled under his mother's arm for a long time and breathed slowly enough so she thought he did.

Downstairs, James' mother was scraping his breakfast onto a dish painted with small blue flowers. She sat down in her place and watched him scoop bits of scrambled eggs and bites of bacon into his mouth.

"I heard you're going to help me get groceries today," she rested her chin casually on her hand and said everything in an almost playful giddiness.

"Yeah, I can help," James started, "I don't know how much, we usually just get the same stuff."

"I know we usually get the same stuff," James' mother paused, "but we want to try new things, I know you're a picky eater, but it's been getting on people's nerves around here."

"Your nerves?" James was direct,

"It didn't used to, but it is now," she looked down at her hands, "Let's just try to make this work, okay?" To James, the food tasted like a salt lick, he nodded.

He washed his own dishes as his mother dried them and put them away. She never ate around or with James except at dinner anymore. She often did not finish her food unless Sophie's dad was around. Before James' dad died, she was his mother. After James' dad died, she was a hollow woman who could not connect with James, could not relate the way she used to. She ate differently, talked differently, dressed differently, she even walked differently. James noticed especially that she walked differently when he followed her out to their car in the garage and she unlocked the doors. He thought about how different she was when she let him ride in the front seat. She would normally never do that. It was not as safe in the front seat. He snapped his seatbelt on and looked at her while she looked away.

James' mom slipped out of the driveway with an over-careful speed. The car crawled down the street, past James' school, and on a long stretch of two opposing lanes. There was nobody else on this road, just like there were no words inside the car.

"Don't be mad at me," James' mom said without looking from the road.

"I'm not."

"I just can't take everyone disapproving, everything I do-" she caught herself.

"He's not nice,"

"You need a father,"

"I have-" James took a breath, "I had a father, and he did just fine." James felt every bump in the road for the rest of the trip.

Chapter 11

The florescent lights were flickering in the grocery store. A heady warm hum came from the motors of the cold refrigerated isles. The automatic glass doors opened and closed with the sound of ice skaters coming to a steady halt. James pushed the cart slowly behind his mother. She held a yellow-paper list two feet away from her face and pointed left. James pushed the cart left. The back right tire wobbled, constantly.

"I just want to be happy, James," his mother told him in a terse tone, not even turning to look at him. The wheel made it so the cart shook and his hands trembled with it. "You'll understand, you just need to mature a little," James thought about how his father always thought he was mature, well beyond his age.

"That doesn't sound like you,"

"What do you mean?"

"It sounds like something he told you." The cart was nearly bouncing down the aisles, James kicked the wheel. He took a few steps, and when he realized the wobbling did not cease, he kicked it as hard as he could.

James did not notice if his mom cursed before or after the wheel flew across the aisle, before or after the spoke of the cart dug deep into the faded linoleum. An old woman, a grandmother of one of the students at the school, said it first;

"You need to get some control over that boy, he's a trouble maker." James scurried for the lost wheel that was making its way down the bread aisle, he heard his mother,

"I'm doing the best I can, you don't know how hard it is after-"

"After what? After you became a widow? You aren't the first person to raise a kid alone, but it doesn't look like you're doing any raising, letting the boy kick-"

"I didn't let him do anything, he broke it when I wasn't watching," She caught her mistake, but not before the hobble of a woman could reply,

"He scuffed up the linoleum to the cement when you weren't looking, so maybe you'd do well to keep a better eye on him." James got hold of the wheel, and sprinted past the both of them to the cart. He lifted on end of the cart,

"It's broken James," His mom said, "Just leave it-" The wheel connected to the spoke with a muffled snap. James spun the wheel with his hand before standing up and pushing the cart, without the wobble. He tried not to smile.

"See?" His mom turned to the nosy woman, "Everything is better, no big deal,"

"Yeah, lady, no big deal- wait until he starts kicking windows, people- starts stealing things,"

"My son won't break and steal things. You have no idea what you're talking about,"

"Yeah, me and the whole town have no idea what we're talking about-" and she scoffed down the aisle and towards the registers.

James' red face was pressed to the glass window of the car during the ride home. He leaned so far away from his mother that he was closer to standing outside than he was to sitting inside the car. He watched the trees slip past his vision in an echoed fury to the memories of his mother in his head.

He was eye-level with her hips, draped in a flowing floral dress and supporting a picnic basket.

"Let me carry that," James' dad kissed her, and plucked the basket from her arms.

"I can handle it," she yelped,

"Not while I can!" and he began running with it, giggling, she chased him to the top of a hill where they both sat down and called James over.

"There's our boy," she smiled. She sobbed the same words into James' hair when he came home one day after school. No one said anything to him, no one knew exactly who from the town died, but they knew how the man died and they knew what James' dad did for a living. Walking back from school that day he kicked an empty water bottle half the way home and wondered why the school's flag was drooping so far from the top of the pole. His mother did not tell him anything, just kept saying,

"Our boy," over and over, holding James too tight, her face streaked pink, and James knew. That day was covered in clouds before the time they would usually eat dinner, a dark storm drenched James' town, James' world. When he woke up the next morning, he decided to go to school instead of stay home. There were twigs and leaves all over his front yard. In his class, people talked to him as they usually would, before they were hushed by the students who already knew, the children of the fast gossipers.

"Shhh, don't you know what happened?" and everyone would be quiet. When he got home that day, the twigs and leaves were gone, but there were yellow ribbons tied to the lower branches of the oak tree in his front yard with the ladder someone used to get up there against his house. The fence in front of his house had more yellow on it than white because of all the ribbons tied to it. James had to step around a picture of his father with four candles, folded notes, and bundles of flowers on the sidewalk. He creaked open the gate and walked up to his front door. There was a quiet hum coming from inside. When he opened the door, the neighborhood rushed on him. His back was pat dozens of times, and he was hugged more than that. His mom was sitting down in his dad's lounging chair, surrounded by three or four older neighborhood women. James later found out they were other widows. His mom looked like she could have been their child. One of James' neighbors led him around the house and showed him how much food everyone brought. In the kitchen, He saw someone across the street lift a sign that stated,

'Support our Troops,' while the man's wife lowered the flag in their front yard half way.

Passing houses now, months later, several still had ribbons, and there was no lack of signs sticking out of yards and tacked to houses that commanded that James Support our Troops. James thought about their own license plate, given to his family shortly after his father passed. It had the same numbers on it, but had the pattern of the American flag behind the numbers, and an eagle on one side. In small letters below the plate number, there was dialogue almost from the eagle itself,

'Support our Troops,' it was not until James was in the car with his mother coming back from the grocery store that while he sat in the car, he was surrounded by it in the front and back of the car. 'Support our Troops,' became the bread of the car sandwich, James thought. He and his mother were the meat. They were the meat for the entire town to gossip over, pity, loathe, they had no presumptions of their own, but the town viewed them as the cause itself rather than an unpleasant side effect of it.

James thought about the side effects of his father's death like it was a sickness. His mother did not eat any of the food that the neighbors brought. She stopped cooking, stopped getting dressed and only shuffled around the house wearing her bathrobe. She stopped showering, could only bring herself into it once or twice a week for the longest time. When James hugged her, he noticed she did not smell bad, or like her perfume. James' mom stopped smelling like anything, like she stopped sweating, like she stopped living. Her hips narrowed in her bathrobe, her hair thinned and dulled like she was ten years older. Her summer tan faded to an opaque grey and life narrowly escaped from her frozen stone face from what used to be her bright lilting eyes. James' mom stopped smiling and did not talk to him much. The other widows, who befriended her right away, were the last to stop visiting,

"You have to hold yourself together, for him," they pointed about James as if he were furniture when they left through their front door for the last time.

She improved, she started talking. She did not smile much, she did not hold herself together, but she tried to be there for James. She started cooking again when James finished off the last of the food the neighbors brought, but she did not eat much of it herself.

When Sophie's dad moved in she appeared to become like her old self. To everyone else, she was getting better, but James thought she was more like a doll or a puppet of her old self than she was her old self. James missed her being sick, missed a stone face or a sad smile compared to the characture her smile had become when she was around Sophie's dad. She wore makeup again, but she wore her makeup differently than she did when James' father was alive. There was more of it on her face, exaggerating her features. In the car, James looked over at his mother and she turned to face him and gave him a grin framed in bright red lips. James shivered and looked away.

"He's out of town for the weekend, some sales conference," James almost asked who, before he remembered his mother only talked about Sophie's dad, now.

"Okay,"

"Don't be mad at me, I can't handle you being mad at me,"

"I'm not angry at you." James felt empty at his mother. He wondered if empty was a feeling like anger or love that can be extended onto another person. They pulled into their driveway and his mother pressed the button to open the garage, pulling in she said,

"You don't have to help me unload these," as soon as the car stopped moving, James opened the car door and nearly fell into the yard, and down the street.

Chapter 12

The door to the gas station chimed open and lifted Peter's eyes from the magazine on the counter to James.

"Have any more of those bad dreams, James?" he asked, it took James a moment to remember what dreams Peter was asking about. Oh yeah, the kingdom.

"Not yet,"

"That's good, unless they get better, unless you start getting subjects." He chuckled and closed the magazine, sliding it to the side, "That's the great thing about this job, all the magazines I can read, and all the time to read it in," James nodded, "You know, I could tell you the events in just about any celebrity's life,"

"Oh you read those gossip rags?" James asked, impressed by his own pop vocabulary,

"I have to, after the newspapers, sporting and hunting magazines, car ads; it is all this town reads, gossip,"

"Yeah,"

"Did you figure it out yet?" James was looking at the candy bars on the counter, he lifted his head up,

"What?"

"Did you figure out what the dreams meant, why they fit you?"

"No, not yet,"

"You will," Peter smiled and nodded, "You're a smart boy, you will." He looked at James, "You have to promise me something,"

"What's that?"

"Promise first," Peter leaned over the counter and the bright light from the window shone on his face and faded out his pimples so he looked more playful than in pain for the first time since James knew him,

"Okay, I promise," Peter took a breath,

"Get yourself out of this town, go to college somewhere, get out and don't join the army."

"Why would I join the army?"

"Everyone expects you to, everyone wants you to join, you know- it'd make a good story."

"How?"

"They all want you to get the guys who got your father, so their little lives and their little war makes sense, none of it counts for them if you forgive them,"

"I'll get out of here,"

"Good, and maybe I'll read about you doing good things for people in one of the magazines, I can tell everyone I knew you, before you were famous."

"Hopefully not in the celebrity gossip mags," they both laughed.

"Nah, you'd make a horrible actor," Peter said, "Christ! Buy something, steal something, whatever! It's Saturday. Go! Live your life!" James picked up a chocolate bar, and threw some change on the counter,

"That'll do," James said, when he touched the door handle he turned around to Peter, who was already pulling the magazine back in front of him, "Thanks," he said,

"For what, James?"

"For talking to me," he opened the door, "like we're the same,"

"James, we are the same, go play in a park or something, it's practically the first day of spring!" James laughed his way onto the sidewalk.

He was not two steps away from the door to the gas station when he saw something small and dark scurrying around on the pavement. James immediately thought it was a huge cockroach, and it unwittingly went towards him while he tried to step out of the way. The creature ran into his moving foot and afterwards was very still.

James jumped back. It did not move. James leaned stepped closer to it and leaned over. It was a really small mouse, or something. It was about the size of six postage stamps.

It did not move, and James hoped it was not dead. He pulled his sleeves over his hands and picked it up. The mouse was still breathing, but it was not stirring at all. He walked down the street and around the corner to Mr. Heckerman's house. He went, out of the ordinary, to the front door, and kicked the bottom a few times to get Mr. Heckerman's attention. James could hear Mr. Heckerman moving around inside, so he kicked again. He came to the door.

"James why don't you just open it, it's unlo-Oh my! What happened to that guy?" he exclaimed while looking down at the creature in James' hands.

"I kicked him accidently, I think I killed him." James' voice cracked when he said the word killed.

"Get inside, we'll see." They sat down at the dining room table and Mr. Heckerman sat the creature on a napkin between the two of them.

"Yeah, he's dead alright,"

"But he's breathing," James gasped. Mr. Heckerman looked up at James and smiled.

"I see you've called my bluff," and began rooting through a box near the table.

"What kind of mouse it that, what's wrong with his face?"

"It's not a mouse, and there is nothing wrong with his face," Mr. Heckerman replied, "Looks like you've kicked a Sorex Vagrans,"

"What's that?"

"A Vagrant Shrew, he's really distinctive because of his small ears, extremely small eyes, and big snout, makes him look goofy, I think."

"It does look really weird, do you think it's rabid?"

"Probably not, James." Mr. Heckerman pulled out a syringe and a small vial of fluid.

"What's that for?" James sat back in his chair,

"The shrew, mostly fluids, should wake him up and make him feel a lot better." He took the syringe and put it into the vial, and sucked up a small amount of fluid, "You see James, the Vagrant shrew doesn't often have shoes in its natural environment, I think you gave it a fright most of all, maybe a slight Shrew concussion," Mr. Heckerman giggled to himself. He put the syringe down and put gloves on. He picked up the shrew with one hand and the syringe with another. "You might want to look away," James did, "Now, he should be as good as new in the next few days, say, can you go into the living room, in the corner by the National Geographics there is a small cage that I think will be quite roomy for this little guy." James left the room and found the cage. On his way out he saw a picture of Mr. Heckerman when he was a number of years younger with one arm around a woman and one arm around a boy a little bit older than James. The woman and the boy had dark hair which contrasted Mr. Heckerman's already white hair.

"Here we go."

"That's a bit dusty," They wiped down the cage, filled the bottom with newspaper, and put the shrew in there. Mr. Heckerman covered the cage with a small blanket. "That'll help. He'll be awake in a few hours."

"Are you retired?" James asked,

"Do I look that old?" Mr. Heckerman asked while running his hands through his white hair comedically.

"No, that's the thing, I know you aren't old enough to get the government to pay you for being retired, but you don't work-" James looked around, "Well, you don't go out of your house to work,"

"I want to work, I don't know if you'll understand this," Mr. Heckerman sat down at the dining room table. "But, you're a smart kid, maybe you will- sometimes I don't think I understand what happened," Mr. Heckerman had James' full attention. "These inventions," he waved his hands around the room, as if he were pointing at the whole house, "they have always been more of a hobby."

He took a breath, "What I've always done for work, since I was in college, is work with viruses." he looked down at his hands, "I worked for a medical company that did a lot of work with fighting viruses, creating immunity, cures, but there was a department- my department, we were paid to develop viruses."

"Is that illegal?"

"The kind we were making were illegal, but we signed confidentiality agreements, this company operated above basic law- they were aspiring to work for the government,"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, we were working on the perfect strain, one that could kill an enemy without evidence, and not get carried onto another person." He took a breath, "They had a huge cash payment for whichever scientist on the team made the discovery first, we're talking tens of millions of dollars,"

"Someone else discovered it and you lost your job?"

"I discovered it. I destroyed it. I quit. They knew I was close, I can't work in the industry anymore, they'll expect me to discover it."

"You did the right thing,"

"I wish my family understood, the money could have helped with some new treatments for my son's Leukemia, they could have saved him. That's why my wife's heat broke and she died. I didn't help him." He drew a long breath, "if there was another way to get the money, where I didn't have to kill people, I would have done it. After my wife was gone, I had enough money to keep myself settled, it'll probably last me a long time, I own the house, so I don't have to worry about paying a mortgage."

"I'm so sorry,"

"We can only expect ourselves to try our best. Nobody ever said doing the right thing won't get anyone hurt." A sad smile spread across his face, "Like I said, I know a thing or two about loss, but really- I don't understand any of it."

"I don't understand, either," there was a squeak in the cage. Mr. Heckerman lifted the blanket,

"Up already, he wasn't hurt as badly as I thought."

Chapter 13

Back at his house, James was laying on the floor in the living room imagining patterns in the bumps on the ceiling. The phone rang, and for the third time that day, James hid behind the couch as his mother called out for him. She gave up after a while and cooed into the phone to Sophie's dad. James heard her say,

"I'm sorry Stephen, I think he's out of the house again, maybe next time." as if Sophie's dad wanted to have a friendly chat with James. He crouched behind the couch, walked up to his room, anything to stay out of his mother's sight when she was on the phone.

James spent the day looking through the boxes in one of the hall closets of legal documents. He found his birth certificate, his parent's wedding certificate. There was a letter that he was avoiding, when he realized he would not be able to stop looking at the papers until he looked at that one, he pulled it out of the envelope.

The paper itself was thick. It was heavy with what seemed like the weight of the news it delivered, but was really just the fact the paper was closer to being construction paper than it was printer paper. It had a seal pressed firmly on one side. There were watermarks of eagles throughout it. The paper itself was already yellowing, and was not the gleaming white discarded on his dining room table when he came home from school the day his world changed.

James saw his own name, but knew it was his father's. Senior. He never looked at the paper before. He meant to let it be. James started to wonder who killed his father, did his comrades kill the person who killed him, or did the person get away? James read the page several times.

The helicopter James' dad was riding in had its radio out. Forces on the ground could not contact the swiftly approaching helicopter. There were several raids on aircraft over the previous month. James' father's allies shot the helicopter down, they had to identify the bodies by the dog tags they found littered about the crash site.

Everyone wanted James to be angry at someone, and it was some mistake. There was some mistake that changed everything for him, his mother. Sophie's dad was not the kind of person James' dad would even be friends with. The town changed their pity over James and his mother to sour judgment. The yellow ribbons faded, just as the memories had. James' memories of his father were as lasting as the paper in his hands. Everything lined up in just the correct way to kill his father. The difference between a miracle and a tragedy was a radio signal, a lack of haste on the part of the ground forces. James always thought it was better to wait and see.

"James, James!" he heard his mother call, he swiftly put the letter back in the envelope, closed that in the box, and slid it back into the closet,

"Dinner!" James was relieved that Sophie's dad was not around trying to bait him into some argument. He was almost comfortable the way they were before when Sophie's dad was away. He could feel every molecule in his dinner that night.

Chapter 14

The next day, Sophie and James were in the tree house.

"I like your poster,"

"Thanks, I got it at the art museum,"

"Sonny bought me these earrings," Sophie turned her head to the side, slipped her long shining hair behind her ear to reveal a green vine of metal.

"Bought?"

"Yeah, for me,"

"Sophie, Sonny stole that, I saw him,"

"Oh James, he just wanted to do something nice,"

"It's about time,"

"I don't like that drawing of your dad, it's creepy," James' face turned red,

"I didn't mean it to be, I just couldn't remember what his eyes looked like," Sophie put her hand on his shoulder,

"Sometimes it's hard to remember what my uncle looked like,"

"What do you mean, I thought you said he lived nearby, right?" Sophie looked down at the boards on the floor of the tree house so that James could not see how wide her eyes became. She opened her mouth as if to catch the lie she was looking for.

"He did, but there was a big fight, and he lives with-" she looked up at James and smiled, "He lives with my grandma now. Everything is okay."

"Sophie-"

"It was an accident, I said everything is okay," she tried to be stern.

"He had to die-"

"What?" Sophie curled herself around her legs,

"He had to die!"

"You don't understand- it was an accident."

"In my nightmares, Peter from the gas station said it was weird that I would dream about being a king, because some things have to happen for someone to be king-"

"James?" He stood up and the tone of excitement rose in his voice.

"To be king, the king's father has to die."

"Your father? Oh I thought you meant, I mean-"

"Yeah, I think my dreams mean something; you remember those potatoes we planted in the vases?"

"I remember, mine died, so did Mr. Heckerman's"

"Potatoes are food, but you know their stalks, their leaves are poison."

"What are you talking about?"

"The potatoes couldn't grow; they couldn't make more potatoes if there weren't the poison parts."

"James-" he was ignoring her, he was talking to himself more than he was to her.

"If we could just do the same thing with things that happen, dig up the good parts and get rid of the rest, not even touch it."

"You can't fix what happened." Sophie started going down the ladder.

"Hey, wait up," James followed her. They walked through the woods to Mr. Heckerman's back yard.

"What's wrong?" Sophie slowed her walking and turned around,

"I just get so scared,"

"Of what?"

"Of everything, James, everything." He put her arm around her like he saw adults do, the way that he was not really holding her still as much as letting her know he was there.

"You're good, Soph- that's all that matters. You're good, and you try."

"I do," she took a breath; "I do try."

"Sophie?"

"Yes James," He took his arm from around her shoulder and put it in his pocket,

"Would you like to see a Vagrant shrew?"

"Well, I guess so, what is it?"

"Well, it's like a really small mouse, with a long snout and really little eyes," they walked into Mr. Heckerman's house.

Inside, the shrew was busy burying itself under the packing material they put in his cage for warmth.

"Interesting creature, right?" Mr. Heckrman asked,

"Yeah, what does it eat?" Sophie looked up at him,

"Small bugs, fungus, very interesting,"

"Eww, what do you feed it?" Mr. Heckerman looked at Sophie,

"What do you think?"

"Ewww,"

"Humans have an equally, if not more, odd diet,"

"I'm not on a diet-"

"That just means what we eat usually,"

"In this context?"

"Context?" James asked, Mr. Heckerman and Sophie smiled.

"Those are interesting accessories you have in your ears, Sophie," Mr. Heckerman said while pointing at earrings,

"Thanks, they're ivy, it's a gift."

"Very interesting," He laughed to himself.

Chapter 15

James kept the jar of change under his bed. He waited until a Saturday afternoon when his mom was running errands and Sophie's dad was snoring on the lounge chair. Sophie's dad's face was lit only by the television and the muted brown light that dispersed from the dark garbage bags he cut open and taped over the windows of the den. To stop the glare, he told James' mom when she looked at him curiously as he hunched over the plastic he tore with his bare hands.

Like many children, James picked up any coins he could find. Often, he would even reduce himself to slyly begging for change returned to his parents at gas stations or fast food restaurants. James saved everything that was not copper.

He would drop the pennies on the ground while he saved everything else, hoping someone would find them and it would brighten their day- bring them some luck. Other times, he would set them by fountains so other people could find them and make a wish. For every penny a person finds on the ground, there is someone who put it there. James was one of those people.

The trip would take all day, but he had nowhere else that he would rather be. His house was all but invaded by Sophie's dad and all of his things. The boxes filled the foyer and brimmed at the edges of each hallway.

He put the jar of change in a brown paper grocery bag. The ink of the store's logo formed blocked letters. As James walked the bag jostled in his arms and he stared at the letters. They would switch from a word he recognized into nonsense, and back. Whenever he stared at something for a long time, it would become unrecognizable and lose all meaning. It only happened for the last few months, beginning after what happened to his father.

Once, in class, he was staring at the chalk board when suddenly he was overwhelmed with it as a two-dimensional block of dark green. The chalked letters and numbers on the chalkboard were just dust. James could not even remember the word: chalkboard. He could remember forests, what forests were the green on the chalkboard base was the same that would fill his vision if he would stand among the trees around the tree house near sunset when the light that shone through the leaves cast that same dark green into his eyes.

The teacher called on him to answer the question but it sounded like she was talking in another language. When she moved on, all the students chuckled. The chalkboard was a chalkboard again after that.

When the jar of change got heavy, he switched arms. James walked out of the neighborhood and along a long winding sleepy road set in the woods. Walking up each hill with the change was hard, and his mind grew silent during those times. Descending the hills was easy, but his mind went back to everything that happened to him. Sunlight lifted his eyes skyward.

The bank was a few blocks into town. It was built a few years earlier and sat low to the earth, almost built into a hill. In the lobby of the bank, James approached a change converter. When he poured the change from the jar into the top of the machine, each coin glittered like the light was disbursed underwater. When he was done, the two coins in the rejected change slot were a German Fennic and a bent dime. A receipt printed and he brought it up to the counter.

There was a younger woman behind the counter that smiled at him. She was refreshed to see a customer who was not disgruntled and middle-aged. She had long blonde hair like Sophie, although the bank teller was in her early twenties. She had shell-pink long nails and counted out $29.17 delicately and expertly with a few flicks of her wrist.

"Are you going to spend it all on baseball cards and candy?" she teased sweetly. Her intention was to connect with James. Although she did not know him, she felt instantly drawn to be kind to him. He smiled and looked down,

"I'm going to buy some paint."

"Oh! Are you going to paint your room or a clubhouse, a fort?" James put the money in his pocket.

"I am going to try to paint on paper, like we do in art class."

"Have a great day," the girl behind the counter called out to James as he left the bank.

The bank was across the street from the craft store. James remembered when he went there with his mother to get supplies in order to make a banner for his father the last time he came home. They used big red letters and set it up in the dining room. His father liked it when he saw it, but a few days the novelty wore off and they threw it away.

The painting isle was near the back of the store. The rows of paint seemed to light up and hold endless possibilities of landscapes and portraits, memories and dreams. James found an acrylic kit that had basic colors, a platelet and a few paint brushes. That and a stack of paper cost about twenty five dollars.

Emerging from the store, the sun hit James' face and he felt like everything was new. The clouds, trees, and buildings were fuzzy with the light, and the cars and the street shone in it. The feeling he had was like the feeling he got at the beginning of summer, the morning after school was out. It felt like anything could be done.

Later, at the tree house, James let his bare feet dangle out of the door into the air while he painted a sheet of paper that lay at his side. He was creating a universe where trees ran right up to the shore of a quiet lake, and a human form lay resting at the surface of the water. Although the shapes he used were simple, he felt something developing inside of himself. Each brush stroke seemed to strengthen his hope and desire to survive the suffering around him. He started to mix colors and added an elegant sort of texture to the trees and wispy clouds above the form.

James looked up. The sky was the same as in the picture. He felt like he could make both worlds converge. He wanted them to grow together like two trees, each too weak to stand on its own. Over time, their roots could intertwine and life, memories, and moments would be stronger. He closed his eyes and felt the breeze on his face. The breeze was cool the way it would be if it was carried over the lake in his painting.

He set the painting in the corner of the tree house to dry as he flipped through the pages of an art book that featured the life and paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. With the straw from a box of apple juice in his mouth, he found the page of dark charcoal and men in sickbeds. He read the corresponding paragraph which described Van Gogh's overwhelming desire during his youth to help those around him with the power of God. He would read scripture to the poor and once put his gold watch in the offering plate.

The paintbrush was like a beam of gentle light in his hand. The parts of his history poured out onto the paper as the paint did. A ticking red watch lay over a wrist made of clouds in the painting he was working on. He worked without looking up. The leg James was sitting on went numb without his notice. James began to sweat as he lay down line after line of paint to form the scene. Every member of the human race that contributed to his creation began to emerge as a trickle of paint on the paper. Their past intertwined with his present and gave him strength.

He closed his eyes and spread out on his back across the floor of the tree house when the painting was done. The light flickered through the trees and created embers out of his vision behind the blood that rushed through his eyelids.

James felt like a warm blanket was wrapped around his skin and he could no longer feel anything. He felt like he was blissfully floating as he drifted into sleep.

Vincent was in church, fighting hysteria. His elbows dug deeply into the rough wood of the peasant pews as he covered his face to hide his tears and his mumbles of prayers. He felt like a machine. Fist it was a machine that did child tasks, then a machine that completed schoolboy tasks. He was not sure what kind of things he ought to do he was after that. That was Vincent's problem. He would not have noticed the system he was born in, grew up in, worked in, and lived in if it had not run out of places for him. Sometimes, while painting, he would feel like he had a use. Other times, when he prayed he felt like he had a purpose also. He did not have a real use to those around him other than an anecdote or a funny story to tell to acquaintances. He saw the most useless version of himself in others' eyes.

Dust. He could taste the dust entering his nostrils. Everything was utterly human and dense. He could feel the blood surging to and from his heart. He could feel his face contort in grief. Each sinewy muscle tensed and released itself as if in maintenance. At the end of the world the church would be dust. His clothes would be dust. His body would be dust. Vincent's paintings would be dust. Every word he said was less than dust already. His watch would be dust. Vincent's watch would be dust. The collection plate, a simple slab of metal, urged itself into his vision. He gave his dust to it. Take my nothing. He thought, and continued in weeping prayer.

Stupid machine, he thought.

Nothing in particular woke James up, but waking made him think about dreams. Mr. Heckerman told him the only way to remember a dream is to wake up during it. Though, dreams were often like life in that they were experienced. James was entranced by the thought that by experiencing a dream, a person could know that they will wake up during it. Maybe, he thought, life is that way. James wondered that by experiencing life, a person could know that they would eventually emerge from it like it was a deep sleep. They could know they existed after just by existing in the present.

He could hear a car drive past on the road below. He wanted to capture that sound. The sound of all the molecules of rubber slapping all the molecules of concrete seemed like an immense orchestra that blended together to the gentle hiss that reached his ears. He wanted to paint that togetherness. Surging in him, the strength of his predecessors lapped at the surface of his consciousness.

What could he do, he wondered, to merge a peaceful world and the world he lived in? What could he do to fortify one oak with another?

Chapter 16

"He's in the tree house again," Danielle said as she peered from Mr. Heckerman's back kitchen window and across the yard.

"He's been painting. He said he was going to pick up some paint today." Mr. Heckerman was rolling dough on the counter to make an apple pie.

"That should be good for him."

"It won't make it better. It won't bring him back."

"James' father?"

"Who else would I be talking about?" They both grew silent. Danielle let the curtains fall back and throw their shade into the kitchen. She sat down at his kitchen table and started sipping at the cup of tea she made for herself when she got there. It was cold already. She took a sip.

"I read in the paper today that they're going to build two story mall across town. They'll have a few department stores, gift shops, even a pet store."

"I don't need any of that."

"They aren't building it for you." she trailed off "not everything is about you." He did not respond. "What do you need, anyway?" He did not answer her. "Do you need me?"

"Don't get hurt." He said, and began scooping the cut up apples into the pie crust. She was trying to ignore him now. She walked to the sink and dumped out the rest of her tea. When she passed him, she was close enough to make him feel like she did not even see him.

"The painting is good for him." Mr. Heckerman conceded, "It might not bring his father back, but he's good at it- and it makes him happy." He used his thumbs to seal the edge of the pie, "He's got a talent for it." Mr. Heckerman cut holes in the top of the pie with a knife. Danielle wiped off her hands with a towel that was laying on the counter and walked behind Mr. Heckerman. She walked behind him and put one arm around his stomach and let the other one snake up the middle of his chest. As she held him, she let her forehead rest on the top of his back and she took a deep breath.

"Did you preheat the oven?"

"Shoot!" She let go, and they both laughed.

"It's okay, I'll get it." as she set the temperature, he looked at her and thought about hurt. He would not hurt her. People can get hurt without letting anyone hurt them. That is what happened to his son, and what happened to him. He did not want to care about her the way he cared about his wife before she died, but she could hurt him anyway. He could not find a point in caring for anyone anymore, not after what happened.

Later, the sun was fighting its way through his bedroom window's curtains. His room had blue walls, a blue rug, blue sheets, and blue curtains. Most of the room was dark, but a streak of bright golden light ran across Danielle's bare back. She was sleeping, and each breath would cause the light to move slightly up and down her spine. He reached out to touch it-

"Mmm, hey there." she said into the pillow. She curled up closer to him.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked. Her back tensed, she turned her head and looked at him.

"I'm thinking that I want to be with you."

"We're together right now."

"No, I want to be with you." He ran his fingers through her hair.

"Don't get hurt."

"You say that a lot."

"That's because I mean it."

"You don't have to hurt me, so you won't hurt me."

"Sometimes people get hurt even when nobody is trying to hurt them." He pulled his hands away from her. "Sometimes people get hurt by the people who are trying to protect them."

"It's so s-s-simple." She looked away. "It's so simple, it isn't hard. It's easy." Her voice was cracking.

"You sound like you're going to cry."

"I'm not." She wiped her eyes and did not look at him. "I care about you."

"I care about you." He put his hand on her back again. "I care about you a lot."

"We have to figure this out." She told him. "I need to know what we are."

"Those are just labels."

"I need words to tell me who I am." She turned on her back and looked up at the ceiling. "To you." Her words were met with his silence. The two melded together like a gentle echo that lingered in the dark air above them. The beam of light was over her heart at that point.

"Would you like another piece of pie?" was all he asked. She took a heavy breath.

"Yes," She started to put her clothes on, "that sounds nice, some coffee, too." Danielle did not really want any pie. She knew that his offer of something was an offer to end the conversation they were having in a way that would not cause her to leave and never see him again. He would have returned to the man across the street who looked sadly into the empty belly of his mailbox each day, the memories of him would darken and dust in her mind. She would miss him. So, she said yes to pie, even though her stomach was still unsettled and her heart beat the blood too fast through her body out of nervousness to enjoy any of it. Even though she wanted him, not just a day at a time, the whole of him, she would have the smallest piece she could have, and drink the coffee while holding his hand. Yes, that is what she would do.

Chapter 17

Sonny sat under the walk bridge in the park near his house and threw stones as hard as he could at the surface of the water, hoping to hit one of the minnows beneath the surface. The weather was improving and the air was heating up. The entire thin layer of ice that formed on the water over the winter was long gone, and small bits of life crept their way into his.

Midway through lifting his arm to hurl another stone into the water, he heard someone walking on the path up to the bridge. He paused, lowered his arm, and peeked around the edge of the bridge to see who it was. James Jansen. Sonny leapt from beneath the bridge and scaled the walking path formed by truants like him. He was able to walk silently in front of James, who was looking at the ground as he walked.

James looked up seconds before he was about to walk into Sonny.

"Woah!" He nearly fell back. "Hey- how's it-"

"Going?" Sonny asked with a crazed smile.

"Yeah, how's it going?"

"It's good weather."

"Yup," James started to try to walk around Sonny. Sonny put his arm out.

"Woah there. Where do you think you're going?"

"Just taking a walk, you know, nice weather."

"It costs money to walk this way." James put his hands in his pocket and paused to think.

"I'll just go back that way." James said as he turned around.

"You don't want to do that-" Sonny crossed his arms.

"Why not?"

"It costs more money to go that way."

"Oh." He moved some of the dirt under his feet with the tip of his left sneaker. "How much?"

"A dollar." James pulled a dollar from his pocket. "There are fish in the creek." James looked behind him. "Here." Sonny pushed past James, grabbing the dollar from his hands. He nearly leapt down the trail and under the bridge. James quizzically followed him. Sonny sat down on the sandy edge of the creek and James did the same. James peered into the water while Sonny seemed to look off into the distance. Sonny picked up a stone from near his feet and hurled it into the water. The surface seemed to bubble with the life and movement of the fish beneath. "Why'd you give me the money so fast."

"I don't think I could have not given it to you."

"No, I mean you didn't whine at all about it. You didn't protest."

"It's just money."

"Money is important, money buys things." Sonny threw another stone at the surface of the water.

"Dust."

"What?"

"I mean. . ." James was the one who began to look out into the distance and squint at the sky. "What money is, and what money buys doesn't last."

"Well, people don't last, either. You know that." James looked down and nodded. Sonny threw another stone in the water. Sonny chuckled. "It's funny, I've always worried about my mom or dad not coming home one day." Sonny spoke quietly. "But I never thought about what I'd do until after I heard about your dad."

"What would you do?"

"That's the thing." He breathed deeply. "I don't think I could do anything. I would eat, and sleep, and go to school. But I wouldn't do anything." James nodded.

"I don't really like my brothers and sisters, they only bug me. No real trouble. But, I know someday we'll get along and they're going to matter to me." Sonny started to dig the toes of his shoes into the dark wet dirt. "I don't talk to anyone about this. If you tell anyone, they won't believe you, and I'll beat you. A lot." James nodded. "I look forward to when I can have my own house, just have them visit and really get to know them. Same with my parents, when they're done raising me. See what they're like as people." He chuckled. "I'd hate to never really be able to get to know them- that's all I'm saying." Sonny got up and patted James on the back a little too hard. He walked up the path again, leaving James by the edge of the creek.

James picked up a stone and threw it into the water. He watched the movement of the fish as they scurried away.

Chapter 18

Sophie was still wearing the earrings the next day at school. James had trouble not turning around during class to look at their green glint between the strands of her blonde hair. She sat with James at lunch, but smiled at Sonny when he walked by.

"What do you think he wants from you?"

"Why would you think he wants something from me, he just likes having someone he can be nice to."

"Well, I think-"

"You're thinking, Janson? A new trick!" Sonny patted James on the back a little too hard to be friendly. He was facing Sophie, "I noticed you only got one cookie. I figured I'd get you another,"

"Thanks! That's so nice of you!" she squealed as he put a cellophane-wrapped chocolate chip cookie on her tray and walked past her. She waited until he was across the cafeteria before she looked at James, "See, no harm, he's just being nice,"

"Tell that to the guy he stole the cookie from,"

"It's so typical that you would assume he stole the cookie- I think it was just left over."

"Nobody 'leaves over,' a cookie Soph, maybe half a sandwich, or an apple, but cookies don't get 'left over.'"

"You're so silly, we're all just trying our best, right James?"

"Yeah, yeah," he replied before burying his mouth in his ham sandwich. Mid-chew, he pointed out, "Just remember, he's nice to you, it doesn't mean he's a nice guy."

"Mmmmmm, this cookie is delicious." They both burst out in laughter.

On their way back to the classroom, James and Sophie passed Sonny, who was across the hallway from the sculpture of the man's head who founded their school. Sonny was leaning against the wall with a smile on his face and his arms crossed.

"See,"Sophie drew James' attention to Sonny, "He appreciates art."

"Yeah, Soph. Sonny enjoys art."

"I'm not stupid. Don't talk like I'm stupid."

Recess was more of the same. James stitched his way across the monkey bars while Sophie talked about the shrew that James injured. Half of the time, James could see Sonny arranging bets for a game of kick ball. James was happy to turn the other way to go back across the monkey bars.

It was after school when the trouble started. James found Sophie to walk her home and they were close to exiting the school when Sonny ran up behind them.

"Jansen! I need your help with something," James and Sophie turned around.

"Can I help?" Sophie asked, Sonny shifted his weight between his two feet,

"Nah, that's okay Sophie, I don't want to get girls involved in it." Sophie looked at James, "You go ahead, I'm just gonna go home, have fun, really!"

"But Soph-" James managed to say without whining, but she was gone halfway down the sidewalk so he could not catch up with her.

"What's going on?" he asked Sonny. Sonny walked up to James and put his hand on his shoulder and leaned in like he was going to tell him a secret,

"I don't know if you've noticed, but I like your friend-"

"Yeah?"

"Do you have a problem with that?" Sonny raised his eyebrows and leaned back, hand still ominously on James' shoulder.

"No, why would I mind?" Sonny chuckled,

"I just thought-" he laughed, "never mind, I just want to get to know you a little better, I don't see why you can't be her friend- hell-" He said the word hell a little bit louder than most third graders would be comfortable saying around the orange-vested school safety guards. They feared him. "I don't see why you can't be my friend."

James was confused.

"We have to get some stuff from the art room," Sonny said before walking down the hallway. James looked at the entrance of the school, where Sophie left through. He knew it was too late to catch up with her, and she would want him to be nice to Sonny. James followed him.

The door to the art room was open a crack, and there was no light coming from the inside. When Sonny put his palms on the door and slid it open, no light fell on his face or the hallway to give them away. When Sonny entered the room, darkness took over his face the exact opposite way light does when someone looks through a window on a bright day from within a dark house. The mud on Sonny's jeans seemed to reach out and pull him into the dark belly of the art room.

"James, comeon, before someone sees you," Sonny whispered so loudly he would have made the same amount of noise speaking with his normal voice. James slithered into the dark classroom and Sonny reached behind him to shut the door. There was a moment of darkness before Sonny stumbled to the light switch and flicked it on.

The school was built on a hill, so half of it was underground. The art room was in that section of the school, and in addition to having no windows; it was noticeably colder than the rest of the building. James wrapped his arms around himself and held back a shiver,

"What are we doing in here?"

"Jansen, have you ever wanted to make a difference, do something that would-" Sonny was flopping his hands around in a drawer that held paint canisters, "that would become a memory for someone else?"

James thought about the balloons released, the potato growing in the light of Mr. Heckerman's kitchen window. Back at his senses, James realized Sonny was planning something devistational and responded,

"Not really," Sonny picked out the canister of white paint, set it on the counter next to him, and looked at James,

"That's okay, you're young, I can't expect you to understand this right away. . ." he trailed off and put canisters of red, green, and purple paint on the counter next to the white. He reached in and pulled out a yellow tube of paint while saying, "Vandalism," in an overly adult tone. He continued deepening his voice when he chanted, "Destruction of school property."

James opened his mouth to ask Sonny a question before Sonny blurted out; "It's not that easy! Adults always want what you do to fit into good or bad, like a glove made for it!" Sonny picked up a black tube of paint and put it next to the others. "And if you do something that confuses them, they assume it's bad, when all you're doing is trying to explain yourself to begin with." Sonny's hand emerged from the drawer with blue paint, he looked down and closed the drawer, "That'll do, I think." Sonny moved to another part of the classroom and picked out two equally sized paint brushes with the equal quality of nearly un-bent bristles. He put them next to the tubes and canisters of paint and filled a glass with water next to the sink. Sonny turned to face James and put his palms on the counter behind him, "Can I ask you a question?" James nodded, "Jansen, do you want to change the world?"

"Well, I don't want to hurt anyone, but I could see how a little bit of difference would help."

"Jansen, do you want to change the world?"

"It's just I don't want to get in trouble or do anything bad,"

"Jansen," Sonny began turning pink in the way a cooked animal does, "do you want to change the world?"

"Sure."

"Grab some paint, will y'a?" James grabbed most of the paint canisters. Sonny had one hand holding the water and the paint brushes while he grouped the rest of the paint in the nook of his other arm. Sonny opened the door and turned out the light.

The school was empty at this point and they walked through without even making an echo from their shoes. They walked through the hall where everyone's art was pinned to the walls and folded behind the glass doors of locked cases. They walked to the bronzed bust of whoever founded the school, and set the paint, paint brushes, and glass of water on the platform next to its shoulders. It scowled at the wall behind them. James looked around nervously,

"The hall guards," Sonny said while opening each of the paint canisters, "decided they would all become seriously ill and go home right after school," he dipped his paint brush in the red paint and handed the other paint brush to James, "after I talked to them, that is." He chuckled and James relaxed.

Sonny smeared the red paint across the scowling bronze bust's lips. At first, he applied them in the pattern that a woman would apply lipstick, then after dipping the brush again in the red paint, he lifted two lines at a curiously tight angle upwards, and finished it with two dots on the end at where the apple of the bust's cheeks would be if he would only smile. Sonny emptied the red from his brush in the glass of water making an almost a harmonic series of 'tink,' 'swish,' in the echo of the empty hall while doing so.

"Jansen, how about you paint a purple star of this kind man's eyes?" James tried to hide his shaking hand as he dipped his paintbrush into the purple jar of paint and started out the star by drawing a star skeleton point to point, dip, point to point, dip point. James filled it in. By this time, Sonny had one quarter of the face sanctioned off and was filling it with yellow paint. When James was done Sonny asked him,

"Can you make a green star, just like that, on the other eye?" James nodded and walked around the bust to the other side to swish his paint brush around in the water while Sonny swept white paint over the entire half of the face that he was on. They finished in time for Sonny to tell James,

"How about you pint blue in the empty corner of this fellow's face," James smiled, the statue looked happier, if he crossed his eyes to blur his vision a bit. While James filled in the blue, Sonny began to trace all of the lines with black.

Fate rallied against them. The principal himself walked past the hall. Neither of the boys noticed until they heard a slush, which happened to be the effect of the principal unintentionally dropping his Styrofoam cup of black coffee on the industrialized linoleum tile. It took the principal a few seconds to realize not only were there children in the school after it was supposed to be closed, but they were standing dangerously close to the bust of the founder, with paintbrushes.

A slew of curse words came from Sonny as he dropped his brush and heaved his heavy backpack across his shoulders.

"Just drop it!" he shouted at James, who when nearly throwing his backpack on accidently knocked the bust. The principal was slipping down the hallway in his expensive tread-less shoes while he tried to run and catch the falling figure. James was nearly out of the emergency exit door when he heard a crash. He turned around to watch the bust, which he previously thought was bronze, shatter into dozens of thick clay shards. It was hollow and the shattered face still contained the smeared personage of a clown. A shard the size of James' palm slid toward him and hit his foot. It was the sculpture's ear. He reached down in and in one motion was out the door. James ran as fast as he could away from Sonny who only had to yell

"Scatter!" once. Without stopping to take a breath, James was tearing his way into the tree house. He collapsed onto his back and held the bronzed ear to his heaving chest while he looked at the beams of the tree house above him. In his mind he almost yelled at himself the questions that would be apparent to any person his age in the trouble he was in. Did the Principal see me? He reached over to a crate and stood on it. Will they send scent hounds after me? He reached up and put the glazed clay ear on top of one of the beams. The paint brush, the door, will they be able to lift my fingerprints? He hopped off of the crate and scooted it towards the window. James promptly sat on the crate and looked for the almost imminent onslaught of police force that he was sure was close to finding him. After he caught his breath and lost most of the blood that shot into his head, he slipped down the ladder of the tree house and walked up the gentle slope to the unlocked door of Mr. Heckerman's house.

James could hear Mr. Heckerman in the basement. He took the time to set his bag by the door, and slipped out of his shoes. James went to the fridge where he found some chocolate cake. He used a fork from the drawer to scoop the cake onto a shining plate rimmed with the light blue spittle of blossoms.

He strolled over to the kitchen window and with a mouth full of cake his jaw dropped. His potato had a flower on it. He put the plate down and cupped the flower in his hands and pulled is face towards it. The stem connecting the flower to the potato itself extended from his palms and stitched its way across the surface of the feral potato. The flower was white with an almost purple sheen when the light hit it at specific angles. It had webbed petals, in that it looked like each petal was connected to the other petals in the way that made it look like a crinoline skirt instead of one folded flower. The yellow pistol stuck out like a rude tongue. It was perfect. James was overcome with just how perfect this flower was. The flower grew from his potato and he smiled with an adult charm.

"I see you found the flower," Mr. Heckerman boomed from behind James, making him jump a little. "It's okay, just me, and I see you found the cake," James swallowed what was in his mouth.

"I forgot they made flowers," he smiled proudly.

"They do, the potato is a very versatile plant. One part nourishes, another poisons, another gives beauty." James looked at the potato, how it had the flower as a crown, stems and leaves firmly attached to the bulb of a potato, and below the surface of the water the stretched roots spread out and looked like dozens of orphaned fingers grasping for water.

"Say, James," Mr. Heckerman asked,

"Yeah?"

"Why do you have paint on your hands?"

"Oh! I just forgot to wash them after art, that's all," James said as he reached over to the sink and scrubbed them clean.

"You know, that water was once part of a lake, and once part of a cloud, that water has been around since before the dinosaurs!"

"How?"

"If there is a body of water, or even puddles, the sun heats it up and it turns into a vapor. This is known as evaporation, and that water builds up and becomes clouds," he pointed out the window to a puff of white clinging to the blue afternoon sky, "the clouds form an appropriate density, and then they become heavier than the air, and that is how rain is made, it goes back to the lakes and puddles."

"And this happens constantly?"

"Yeah, it's a cycle, it never had a start, and it will never end." James looked up at Mr. Heckerman,

"It had to start somewhere, because it's here now. And if it started, it has to end, eventually,"

"It's good that you noticed that. A lot of people think it is always and forever, but it will end. Hopefully that won't happen when we're alive." James nodded and looked outside to see heavy dark clouds forming over the sky,

"I should get home before it starts to storm,"

"Yeah, if the rain is good, then we can release the shrew in a couple of days, the ground will be soft and there should be some bugs out."

"Okay,"

"Keep out of trouble? Will ya?"

"Okay," James wasn't listening, James was wondering if the Principal saw his face. He was pretty well known around the school after what happened to his father. James remembered something that happened a week after he found out about his dad's death. A teacher he never met before and did not see since went to his house. It was an older woman with her hands behind her back. She rang the doorbell while James watched her car idle through the kitchen window. His mom was not speaking much yet, but she opened the door with her face lowered. After a soothing muffle and a hug, the woman came into the house and found James. She pulled her hands out from behind her back and held out a light blue teddy bear with wings sewn on its back. Condolences came through her red-lined lips and swirled around the strands of her bleached hair before it reached James' ears.

"You're an angel, you're just an angel for making it through this," she smiled, eye level with James, "will you hold onto this for me?" James nodded.

Chapter 19

After Mr. Heckerman's, he went to the gas station. When he made it to the parking lot, the rain crashed down on him like it feared its own death. Relatively dry, James entered the gas station. Peter nodded at him behind the counter.

"All the time, this weather!" Peter leaned over the counter to get a better view of the rain, "Wow, that guy's in a hurry!" James looked to where Peter was pointing and saw Sophie's dad jump over the curb and into the parking lot of the gas station.

Before James could move away from the front door, Sophie's dad invaded the gas station.

"Your mom got a call from your principal, you pig." Sophie's dad grabbed James' neck and started pulling James out of the gas station.

"Hey, what are you doing?" Peter shouted before he jumped from behind the counter and put himself in between James and Sophie's dad. Sophie's dad looked at Peter. James could see murder in his eyes when he hit him over the head and left the gas station.

He tore down the street and into the driveway. Leading James by the arm he pulled him up the stairs. Sophie's dad did not stop his momentum if James tripped over his own shoes, which he did a few times, he dragged him a few steps before James regained his balance.

They were soon in James' Mom's room, standing in front of the empty open drawer that used to hold James' Dad's watches.

"Where are they?" Sophie's dad asked, almost nicely.

"What are you talking about?" Sophie's dad tightened his grip around James' upper arm,

"Where are they," in a menacing tone.

"I don't know,"

"Well, then, let's look." Sophie's dad made James go through his entire room, and when it got to the part where James was supposed to pull out everything from under his bed, he looked away. "That's it, then, James go ahead and take everything out from under your bed." James got on his hands and knees, and pulled out some pillow cases, a few sweaters, and the cardboard box shipped from the government.

"What's that-" Sophie's dad picked up the box, and surprised with its weight, set it on James' bed. He lifted the top flaps,

"Jesus- you're sick, this is going in the trash," Sophie's dad started going towards the door,

"No!"

"You sit down right there, don't bother coming down for dinner." James waited in his room until nightfall, and it seemed like as soon as the sun was down he got a massive headache. He laid down in his bed awake for hours, listening to the conversations downstairs die down, and his mom and Sophie's dad to go to sleep.

Chapter 20

It was at the point in the night after the dew settled on the grass outside and before the sun came up that James' headache was well enough for him to sneak outside. He made his way to the big green trash bin at the end of his driveway and silently lifted the lid. The stale sweet smells of old trash invaded his nose as he peered down into the bin. With his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw the box, which he lifted out and set on the sidewalk before closing the trash bin again.

With the box of his father in both arms, James traversed through Mr. Heckerman's woods. The potatoes James planted outside absorbed enough of the oncoming spring weather to blossom. Just like the Jar in the kitchen, each stalk extended a flower. Together, it became somewhat of a field. As the sun came up, heat slunk through the fresh leaves on the branches of the trees above him, and the evaporating dew on the sleeping blossoms filled the air with a heady sweetness. James breathed in deep while he dug off to the side of the potato plants.

James dug deeper than he did for the potatoes, deeper than any hole he dug before. It was about four feet in when his shovel hit something solid. James reached down into the hole and pulled out golden hair poking through a torn black plastic tarp that came loose from the body it was attached to. James thought about Sophie's dog that disappeared only a month ago. James dropped his shovel and held the hair tight in his fist as he burst into Mr. Heckerman's house. He knew Mr. Heckerman was sleeping, and usually he would not bother him, but James went upstairs anyway. He pounded on Mr. Heckerman's closed bedroom door. The door creaked open,

"Well, look at you, making yourself at home!"

"I think there is a dead dog buried near the tree house!" Mr. Heckerman in his pajamas and a housecoat shuffled across his yard behind James. When they got to the tree house the sun was up enough to light the woods the way fancy restaurants are lit by candles.

"James," Mr. Heckerman looked at the plants, "did you plant all of these potatoes? My, it looks kind of nice." He looked at James' face, and realizing he was alarmed, moved towards the hole. "Well, no harm in getting my hands a little dirty," he said while squatting down and reaching into the hole. James heard Mr. Heckerman move dirt away from what was in the hole in order to get a better look. Mr. Heckerman put his hand to his mouth and nearly leaped away from the hole. "James!" Mr. Heckerman was not looking at James, "You need to get the phone right now, and we need to call the police." When James handed Mr. Heckerman the phone, he asked,

"I was going to bury my father's ashes, can I put them in the tree house? Just for now." Mr. Heckerman was quiet for a few seconds,

"Yeah, James. Go ahead." A calamity of expressions wore thick on his aging face. James was in the tree house, trying to understand the crayon portrait of his father, trying to remember the color of his father's eyes while Mr. Heckerman made the phone call. James went back down to the woods. While James was in the tree house, Mr. Heckerman put his housecoat over the hole James dug.

"Don't worry, you didn't do anything wrong," Mr. Heckerman said, "You're a good kid." James nodded, "You were just digging up the potatoes you planted, and you're okay."

Chapter 21

Stephen and John became bothers again after Sophie was born. By the time he graduated college, Stephen had made himself an institution in his new wife's life. He noticed her smile grow smaller over the years he knew her, and he noticed that her voice shrunk the way his mother's did as he grew up.

Sophie was no surprise to him. A daughter, a son- it did not matter to Stephen the way it did to most people. He just wanted a family that was his. He was drunk with the power that the possibility of creating the exact life he wanted gave him. All along, his wife grew to near-silence. He and his brother occasionally painted the interiors of houses or installed windows on weekends to earn extra cash. As Sophie grew, John began to test the limits of Stephen's rage.

He would show up late to a job site, or not show up at all. That seemed to have no effect on Stephen. John just would not get paid for the work he did not do.

But John could make Stephen's wife smile. They only went out on a few dates in college, and he never made any moves on her back then. He did not even have enough time to decide if he wanted to really pursue things with her before she fell in love with his brother.

Now she was torn apart. After they got married, Stephen stopped letting her go out with her friends and would not let her call her family as much as she wanted to. By the time they had their daughter, she was only allowed out of the house to get groceries or go to the bank. John never said anything about it to her or to Stephen, but he knew she wanted out.

So, it was easy to steal her away. First, John created moments for her that had nothing to do with Stephen. He made her smile. The first time he kissed her, Stephen walked into the kitchen. John found the line that would tip Stephen over the edge, and he prepared for it.

When Stephen dragged John into the garage, John pulled out a pocket knife and drove it into the arm Stephen had wrapped around John's neck. It puckered under Stephen's skin on his forearm, but did not go deep enough to keep Stephen from pulling it out of himself and driving it into John's wailing stomach until he lay cold and quiet on the concrete of his garage floor.

Stephen's wife did not dare to open the garage door while Stephen cleaned up the blood and wrapped his own arm in a rag that was lying around the garage. Stephen was able to wrap an old tent around John and carry him like a bag of dead leaves through the deserted night-time neighborhood to the woods behind an old man's house and dug deep.

Nobody would notice John being gone, when his rent was due his landlord would assume he skipped town broke. Their mother had not talked to either of them in years.

Stephen spent the night cleaning up and showered through the sunrise. He wore a long-sleeved shirt to cover the bandages on his arm and walked downstairs to see his wife and daughter eating breakfast. Sophie was sleepily eating corn-flakes and his wife was carefully dodging his eyes.

"Ready for your eye-appointment today, Sophie?"

Chapter 22

The police came and started asking questions about Sophie's dad. Some woman gave James a blanket to wrap around himself. The cold air left layers of dew on the plants and leaves in the woods behind Mr. Heckerman's house. There were dogs sniffing at the ground and when they barked, men with shovels would start to dig. The hole that James started was dug up. A woman in police uniform and kind eyes nodded to a detective and led James into Mr. Heckerman's yard. She asked him questions about Sophie's brother and James saw that the men with shovels were pulling out something a lot bigger than Sophie's dog and putting it into the back of a truck that opened from the back and pulled away slowly.

It was on his doorstep. Mr. Heckerman was shuffling towards his mailbox in his bathrobe and nearly choked mid-sip though his morning coffee. James had somehow gotten hold of a canvas. It seemed he got a hold of some acrylics, too. Mr. Heckerman was shocked most by the overabundance of red in the portrait, if it was in fact a portrait of some sort. The smears appeared to form a face.

After getting the mail, Mr. Heckerman could hardly get the painting inside fast enough. It was not that he did not want the neighbors to see out of embarrassment, but that he wanted the focus to try to understand it.

A real mess, he set it down on his kitchen table against a wall. Adjacent, Mr. Heckerman and his coffee sat motionless. It just looked red and black and white, swirls that seemed to ascend like a tunnel seeking light.

It was then that he was struck with the image of the last day he saw his son. The last months were filled with status reports, IV drips, yellow flowers, and the gentle hum of electronics- all designed whirling around his son who oftentimes could not lift himself out of bed anymore.

"I'm feeling better."

"That's good," Mr. Heckerman looked around, "they're doing all they can to make you better."

"I won't be walking away from this, I'm too sick, you know that. The doctors told you that," his son responded in usual pre-teenage defiance. "I just wanted to let you know it doesn't hurt anymore." Mr. Heckerman focused his attention at the light coming in through the seams of the blinds that covered the hospital window.

"I think there's a way- I know there is. I worked on it."

"What you worked on was a cure and a curse, the company would have been able use it to condemn people to a life of sickness. To death. You made the right choice."

"Tell me that next year." The silence between the father and son at that moment seemed to be a dark shadow on the natural white light that grew from the walls of the hospital room.

"I'll tell you that tomorrow." Mr. Heckerman's son said. He followed his father's gaze to the shattered light emitted from the window. A steady buzz rose above the sound of the machines tied to Mr. Heckerman's son. "Shouldn't you get that?"

"It's your mother," Mr. Heckerman said as he pulled his cell-phone from his pocket. "Hi sweetheart." He waited, "Yeah, I'm with him now-" another minute passed in the hospital room, "He's feeling good- yeah, yeah. I'll tell him." He snapped the phone shut and looked at his son. "Your mom loves you."

"I love both of you, very much. I'm getting tired."

"I'll let you rest; I have to pick some things up from the store before dinner- want me to bring leftovers for lunch tomorrow?" Mr. Heckerman said while hugging the frail version of his son.

"That sounds great," he said as he watched his father walk towards the door.

"Hey dad-" Mr. Heckerman turned back, "I want you to promise me something." It was obvious that he was holding back tears with all of the strength he had less. He moved his face into a beam of light to camouflage his sadness with squinting.

"What's that?"

"I just want you to be happy, above everything. Could you find a way to be happy?" Mr. Heckerman paused a moment and put true thought to the value of his answer.

"I'll try. I mean, if there is a way."

"There's a way."

"You can't know that-" Mr. Heckerman said gravely.

"You're right," his son perked up, "see you tomorrow, then?"

"Sure thing, kiddo."

The call came in before breakfast the next morning. The bowl of pancake batter remained on the counter to bubble and rot until after his son's funeral. Mr. Heckerman's wife followed their son into the earth less than a month later.

Now, Staring at the swirls of white and red, Mr. Heckerman knew. He had to be happy, he had to lift himself up and live for both of them, for all the whole family. He had to let himself enjoy the woman he found. That found him. He had to.

Chapter 24

Karen lifted the handle of her SUV, and the resulting interior light illuminated not only the dark garage, but her face and what was set in the passenger's seat.

She rushed to sit down. Behind her, Karen slammed the car door. She sat in the resulting darkness, though it did not darken the pull of the image of what lay beside her. Her thumb on the garage opener above her head again pulled light into the garage.

It was mid-day, and Karen clung to the errand list in her hand like it was her ticket out of hell. She would occasionally glance at the painting that was beside her. When she got to town, she peered at the paining while stopped at a stoplight. Her eyes traveled across the dark branches and the aging leaves depicted in the painting. Her eyes then drifted to the absent-agony of the driver sitting in the other lane at the stop light.

James painted it, she knew. His teachers mentioned his artistic inclination during conferences. He would sometimes bring home a sketch along with his math tests or project grading sheets. The suburbs go on like this forever, she thought. Lines and lines of cars and hoses and people who cannot focus their eyes to see the trees that slip between the architecture of their lives.

A horn blared behind her and she realized the light had been green for some time. At the grocery store, she tried to put it out of her mind, but the textures that created the painting came back to her. Also, a memory began to nag at her.

When Karen was in college she sat next to another woman in one of her classes. Through conversation, Karen learned that the woman was married. In between lectures or before class started, they would continue to talk. It was not uncommon for a woman to be married in college in those days, but something about the woman's storey pulled Karen in. The woman revealed that she knew she would marry the man who would become her husband.

"You both had the same goals in life?" Karen asked for clarification.

"We hadn't talked about that yet, but when you meet the man you're going to marry, you just know."

Karen did not really believe her, but nonetheless, she began to ask her married friends and family members.

"I heard that when you meet the person you're going to marry, you just know." But it was not when the met them, they corrected her; it could be months into the relationship, but they all came to know the future of their relationship with their someday-spouse as a moment of epiphany.

She knew with James' dad. Not when she met him. When he took her to meet his parents and family, he took her to a park near his house to calm her down. Karen did not know what to expect from her older boyfriend's parents, she had trouble getting calm. She was worried they'd think she was just a kid.

He led her calmly by hand to a trial that eventually led to a walking bridge. They stopped in the middle of the bridge. It was winter, so the creek they were crossing over was frozen. If any wildlife was around, it was still and any sounds were slumbering like the trees and the sunlight. The trails they affixed themselves to that night were rarely frequented, but never when it was that cold.

The wind pushed through the path like a funnel and caused the couple to pull their coats tighter around themselves. When he put his arm around her, the wind stopped.

Because of the winter, it was silent. His breathing even slowed and she could not notice it except that it pushed his chest tighter against hers when he inhaled.

She could see more stars than she usually could because the clouds retreated and the dim lights from the nearby houses hardly penetrated the thick of the trees that surrounded them.

It was in that silence that she looked at him and knew.

Now, in the grocery store, pretending to peruse the fresh apples, Karen did not feel so far from him. James' painting brought him back to her in a way. The tree he painted looked like the oak that grew outside the house where they met during the Halloween party. Her son could not have known about the oak tree, she was not even sure that her husband noticed it at the time. To her, the tree, the silence, the calm- they were all part of her memory of James' dad.

It seemed as if the branches twisted out of the painting and into her mind. She could remember the way it felt to know. Karen knew the risk her husband was taking with his job, but she never expected it, never planned for it. He planned: life insurance, low debt. He did not prepare his wife, his son.

Karen began to think of her life as if it were a tree. The fragmented tragedies and events of her youth came together when she met James' dad. It was like the roots of a tree surged against one another and rose from the earth to form a trunk. When he died, it was like everything splintered again, but it was still rising upwards. Karen, for the first time since his death, felt calm. Her life was turbulent, and there was a short while where everything mellowed down. She could feel the sadness for losing not only her husband, but that quiet safety that persisted through the peaceful time in her life. What she was left with was her son, the branches of her life held them up. Later that day Karen's old work called her and asked if she could come in and do some part-time work with the books again. She told them she would seriously consider it.

Chapter 25

On James' birthday, James' mother allowed him to go with Mr. Heckerman to a surprise he said he planned for a long time. They drove for an hour and a half before they stopped at a farm. Mr. Heckerman got out of the car and introduced James to a few men he used to work with and resigned around the time that he did. They walked behind a barn where there was a hot air balloon.

"James, do you want to see what it feels like to float?" James smiled and nodded.

In the air, Mr. Heckerman showed James how to steer the balloon. He explained the way the hot air pushed the fabric and the basket up. James gripped the edge of the basket but was not very afraid. Mr. Heckerman cleared his throat,

"I figured it out,"

"What?" James shouted over the air, which rushed around them and smoldered at their ears.

"Loss, do you still want me to tell you?"

"yeah,"

"Well I've noticed you've begun to hold onto things, haven't you? Creating things? Keeping things? Growing things?" "It's because you've lost someone- and you'll keep growing things as long as you let yourself." Mr. Heckerman put his hand on James' shoulder, "And people won't understand you, and they'll think you're strange for connecting with these things, these projects you create- but it'll help. It'll help you, and it'll help anyone who lets it." Mr. Heckerman looked out over the hills and farmyards,

"James, you should know that these bad things happen to you not because life will be easy from now on, but if you can deal with this, what else can you deal with?" James looked up at the sky. It was an infinite blue that echoed in his heartbeat, "Remember Van Gogh? Those who have contributed the most to other people grew up like you or worse. You'll have to decide if this makes you a better person, or if it will swallow you."

James thought about the sky, and how really it began where the ground ended and stretched out to eternity. He realized that not only was he in the sky right now, but he was always in the sky, with every step. The sky continued from where he was all the way to the ground. James thought about his father and tried to remember his face. The wind and Mr. Heckerman's words whistled in James' ears and in his mind James' father was not made out of paper. James had to fight to remember him as anything other than paper, he had to fight to remove the hollow black crayon that shielded the memory of his father's eyes, Mr. Heckerman asked him,

"James, you can choose to go up or down, which way do you want to go?"

"I want to go up," as soon as James spoke, Mr. Heckerman opened the valve more and they began to soar more than float.

It was then that James remembered the color of his father's eyes. Infinite blue.
