"The Wind"

 

I heard kids' voices come through the window on the back of the summer-day wind. When I got up, though, and pushed back the curtain, I saw no one outside.

Then I heard one of the voices again. "Shit," a boy said, "did you see that?"

"See what?" asked another boy. Still no faces appeared.

There was a pause before the first boy's voice returned with an answer. "Nothing," he said. "I swear I saw the old man's ghost," he added, speaking more quietly.

"You saw the wind move the curtain," said yet another boy I wasn't able to see. "Come on. I hate this place." The voices disappeared then as they always did, cut away by the wind that moved between us, as thin as a razor, separating the world into two.

"Blueberries"

 

[A double post for the day--making up for missing Wednesday's entry.]

After sweeping all the shards and dust from the floor, Ian hurried the ceramic angel and the wing he had broken off of its back into the forest behind the house, where the dirt near a low-growing cluster of blueberry bushes was still soft and bare, untouched by moss or grass. With the wing as his shovel, Ian dug a hole. The pale cast of the figure's material clawed like a scream, a sharp white next to the dirt's darkness when he laid the angel down, but he didn't know what else to do.

When he finished, he looked at the blueberries. Handful by small handful, he filled the pockets of his jackets. He didn't want any; he just needed the excuse. One of the blueberries burst. He glanced at the crevice between his forefinger and his thumb, at the skin where the purple mark was beginning to spread.

A shout split the air like a crack of thunder. Ian turned around. His father was home.

"Flashlight"

 

When the storm knocked out the power, Edna found herself thinking how glad she was that she had remembered to place the flashlight on the side table, which she happened to be sitting by at the time. Then, as soon she turned the flashlight on, she heard the tapping start inside the wall at her back. She was suddenly less glad. 

She swung the beam around until it landed on the wall. "Hey! Turn that thing off!" squeaked a voice somewhere behind the plaster.

Edna panicked and did what she was told.

"Seriously, what's the point of us fixing the lights, now, if you've already got a light to shine?" The voice was so small and light that Edna thought it would echo inside a teacup.

"Who's there?" she whispered.

"Oh, no one," came the voice. "Just give us a second, and..." Instantly, the power returned; the room was flooded with lamplight that drowned the flashlight's beam. 

"Hello?" Edna called, her own voice trembling. But no one replied. She turned in her chair and knocked on the wall, but no answer came. She sat for a bit after that, pondering what to do.

And then she unplugged the lamp.

"The Nut House"

 

He came into the kitchen while she was seated at the table and said, "I've got to know."

She closed her book on her lap. "Are you sure?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I've just--I want us to be excited about this together."

"You're sure?"

He nodded again.

"Okay," she said, letting her smile come out of hiding. She eased herself up from the chair. "I got you something that I actually bought to give you whenever you asked. Or, if you didn't ask," she added, tiptoeing toward the closet, "I was just going to give it to you after." She took a bag from the lowest shelf, reached inside for its contents, and passed him his gift.

He studied the antique metal sign.

"I don't get it," he eventually admitted. "Are you telling me it's furry? Or crazy? Or..."

"Use your sense of humor," she told him.

He looked at the sign a while longer, until she finally saw the light break across his face. "Oh," he said, and then, "Oh," with a smile. "A boy," he whispered. "It's a boy."

Short Break

No post tonight, possibly not tomorrow night, either. Work calls. Back soon (I hope)!

"Sour Times"

 

"I often wonder," he said to the bartender, who looked young, even in the bar light, "who it was that first came up with the idea to put lemons in water."

"Really? Do you really often wonder that?" she asked. Her eyebrows were doing as much of the asking as her voice and her words were.

"I'm very drunk," he said, sipping the water. 

"I know," she said. She smiled at him. "What I like to think," she said, tapping the bar counter, "and this is by no means historically true, but what I like to think is that someone decided to take all the goodness of water and add something sour to it, so that whenever someone drank it, the water tasted so much better whenever you got a taste of it through all that sourness." She dropped her bar rag onto the counter with a sodden slap and wiped away a pool of nearly melted ice. "Sounds like I'm a romantic or something, huh," she said. "But I think that sounds better than saying people did it so they wouldn't get scurvy, don't you think?"

He looked down at his glass. He wanted to ask what she could possibly know. But by the time he looked up again, she was at the other end of the bar, pouring whiskey for someone with a face even older than his.

"Circular"

 

[Two other influences on today's post: 1) an image I saw, very similar to this photomicrograph, of bone tissue; and 2) Inger Christensen's incredible poem "alphabet," which I've checked out from the library.]

bones and branches, they both exist

with their circles of cells swirling

whirling in a time-wrought wind

round go the centuries of record

softly the days play a song

"Discovery"

 

I sat next to an old woman at the bus stop. She had a book in her lap but was holding it there with the back cover facing up and the spine turned toward the street, so I couldn't see what she was reading. A bookmark was keeping its vigil about two-thirds of the way through.

"Must be a good book," I said to her, pointing. "Looks like you're almost done with it."

The woman smiled and said, "Oh, it's unbelievable. Very informative. Some books just, I don't know, wake you up, make you realize how much more you have to learn about the world, you know?" She turned her book over and showed me a dictionary's front cover. When the bus finally came, I let her board first.

"The Echo Tree"

 

[A note about this post: When I began writing it, I had an idea of how the story would end. As I continued writing, I liked that ending less. I might be able to fix this, but I couldn't in the time I had today. So below is what I was able to get down of this story.]

The Saturday night before classes were set to start, everyone else on our floor left for a party at one of the nearby apartments, which meant that it was just Lori and I who went out to see the echo tree.

The echo tree was on the west side of campus, near the intersection of Howard and Taylor. It looked like an ordinary tree, except for one abruptly terminated growth about five feet up the trunk. That looked like the remaining nub of a severed branch, except that it was hollow at its core, leading a cavity within the trunk and giving the impression that the tree was whistling, or puckering up for a kiss.

Lori tilted her head as she examined it. "'I'm a little teapot, short and stout,'" she sang.

"Oh, please don't let this tip over and-or pour anything out," I said. "I don't care if it really is empty inside. It's still pretty big."

Lori snickered. "Hey, thanks again for coming out to see this with me."

"No problem. Like I said, I was curious, too. And parties--not so much my thing." Which was true, and which made my assignment to a roommate like Lori, a stranger until yesterday who seemed to feel the same way that I did about what the resident director had labeled "social endeavors," all the more surprising.

"I know," she told me. "I mean, I know shouldn't be shocked, but I am, I can't believe how many people are spending their first weekend at school doing who knows what stupid things that they won't even remember. I mean, new-found freedom and all, I guess, but...."

"Freedom, and learning who you are," I said, "not to mention the fact that we're about to spend our Saturday night talking to a tree, so if anyone's wandering the realm of stupid...."

The story behind the echo tree was that whenever someone spoke into its hollow branch, the tree spoke back--made sense, given the tree's name. The thing about the echo tree, though, was that what it said back was never the same as what had been said to it moments before. There were all sorts of theories as to what was actually happening: that there were pipes that ran underground between the tree and apartments across the street; that one of the frat delegations had slipped some kind of device inside and passed down the secret from one batch of conscripts to the next; that some of the city's homeless, known to shelter in the underpasses, were having some fun at the students' expense. The only one with any answers to share was the tree, and the tree offered only what it had been given to say.

"When Your Petals Fall Away"

 

[Finally started reading A Game of Thrones not too long ago, and was reading it before making tonight's post. I think it put me in a certain mindset...] 

The girl behind the flower stall, who smelled as sweet as honey and smiled like a summer day, watched the old woman in the brown robe edge through the crowd, basket swinging from her arm like a chain, and head straight for the dark-haired man in velvet, the one the flower girl had thought was walking toward the tulips. "Care for something exotic for your kitchen, good sir?" the woman asked when she was in front of him.

The flower girl watched as the man peered first into the basket and then at the crone, his smile thin, his eyes narrowed in confusion. "Good woman," he said, "forgive me for being so frank, but those are the ugliest old roots I've ever seen."

"Not the first time I've heard that," said the crone, smiling, "but if you'll allow me a second, you'll see that those ugly old outsides hide a lovely inside." While the man looked on, she reached for a root and broke off one of its swollen branches. From behind her baskets, the flower girl saw the color of the root's flesh--a keen yellow, like that of autumn leaves--and caught its peppery scent. "A lovely inside," the woman repeated, "not to mention--absolutely delicious." She angled her smile at the man with a knowing nod. "If I may be so frank."

The man offered a chuckle and a large brass coin in exchange for one of the roots and departed without a second glance at the flower stall. "You must do well at the market with your wares," the flower girl said curtly to the old woman once the man was gone.

The woman turned to her with a smile so toothy that the plainness of it was hard to behold. "I do fair at market, yes," said the crone with a shrug. "But I do better afterward, with the men who want to know what else those ugly old outsides are hiding." She tossed the broken root at the flower girl, who caught it just before it struck her face. "Something to remember later, child, when your petals there all fall away." And with that, the old woman left, calling out to another man, "Care for something exotic, good sir?" while the flower girl cast her eyes downward and studied her roses.

"Less than Nothing"

 

It was another morning in the hospital, and thoughts were coming and going through April's mind like insects flitting around a leaf, or nervous little birds hopping along branches. Some she understood why she had them. Like the one about the day she learned about mass versus weight in one of her early science classes. She could see the old memory play on a screen somewhere inside her head, see the pug-nosed boy sitting next to her--was his name Roger? or maybe Greg?--punch her arm and declare for all the students to hear that there was no difference between mass and weight when it came to April; she had a lot of both. And then she could follow the thought back around and recall what had brought it to mind in the first place. In this case, it was because she had glanced at her wrist. It was so thin now that her plastic ID bracelet, fastened on the last hole as it was, kept sliding down onto her hand.

Moments like those were becoming rarer, April could tell. Most of her thoughts arrived and left without giving any indication why they came. There were holes in her memory that she wished she could avoid. Inevitably, needing to know why her mind had chosen to drift this way or that, she would go a few steps backward along the path that her thoughts had taken and stumble. It was almost too much. At times, when she was aware that something was missing but couldn't say what, she imagined herself losing her mind at the same rate she was losing fat tissue and bone mass, imagined the subtraction of her memories from the world occurring alongside the depletion of substance from her body. In those moments, she saw herself at the end shrinking and shriveling beneath her blankets until she weighed nothing and then, as her last thought dissipated, shrinking even further until she weighed less than nothing, becoming a tiny disruption in the air, a bit of negative space that tugged at the people who passed the hospital bed and made them pause for a second, wondering if there was anything there that should have mattered.

An image of a bird flickered across the television screen. It sang its song and darted away, the camera following its flight. April had known once what kind of bird it was by that song. She would have sworn on it.

"Runaways"

 

Moira swore that no one could have heard her crawl out her bedroom window. Her parents certainly wouldn't have. They never listened, just called instructions to her while they balanced their checkbooks or filled out forms for work, telling her to clean her room, or do her homework, or change bratty little Liam's diaper, though at least they never told her to change Grandma's. But it was just an endless sea of chores with them. When she sneaked through her window that night, it was as if she broke through the surface of the ocean, although she made her escape very quietly, taking care to avoid even breathing too heavily.

Which was one reason she was so surprised to find the ash tree from her front yard, labeled by the people from Public Works with a tag that read "65," following her down the sidewalk.

Moira had sat in Sixty-Five's shade enough times to feel certain that the tree meant her no harm. It was the only fact that she felt certain of when, hearing its roots tap their way over the cement like the feet of a thousand tiny insects, she turned around. She made a few stuttering attempts at a sentence before whispering, "You're not supposed to be here," thinking both of her belief that she had left the house in secret and of the tendency of trees to remain in fixed locations.

Sixty-Five remained a few feet away. It tipped the uppermost part of its trunk to the right as if asking a question.

"Trees don't move!" Moira hissed. Sixty-Five replied by slowly waving its branches, giving the impression that a small wind was stirring them.

"You know what I mean," Moira said. "Trees don't get up and walk. They have roots."

A larger branch swung around until it was pointing at her chest.

"Me? I don't have roots. I have my family. Not like they're going to notice I'm gone or anything. Not till they need the toilet cleaned or whatever."

Somehow the branch curved inward so that Sixty-Five appeared to be pointing at itself.

"Trust me, they'll see you're missing," said Moira. "But I'm not as big as you are. And no one there cares about me."

As soon as the words left her mouth, Moira saw Sixty-Five's leaves droop. At first she thought that the tree was tired of arguing, which was confusing, as she always imagined that a good shade tree was nothing if not patient. Then Sixty-Five began to back away, and she realized the weight of what she had said. All those days before, with Sixty-Five looming high above her while she sat in the yard, Moira had assumed not that the tree cared about her, but that the tree was just being a tree, indifferent to anything she did or wanted.

She had made similar assumptions about her parents.

Once she and Sixty-Five were back in the yard, Moira dropped to her knees and patted the dirt back in place over its roots. It turned out, as she saw the tree's wings unfold like moth wings in the moonlight, that the work wasn't so bad after all.

"You and I"

 

If you're reading this, I'm sorry to scare you, though chances are that if your day has been anything like mine--let's be honest, you've probably pissed your pants at least once. At this point, I'm not ashamed. Because if you're reading this, there's a small chance that you and I are the last two people alive in the world.

There's nobody else here. No one is answering the phone, and the websites I visit haven't changed since yesterday. I have a pedometer. It tells me that I walked eight miles through my town today. Eight empty miles, covered without anyone else coming outside to answer the door or silence the car alarms that I kept setting off or see why there was some crazy girl walking down the middle of the street with a baseball bat and a chef's knife, crying until her lungs were in shreds.

What you see above is the one thing I've found that might be a clue. Someone left that camera there in the middle of the sidewalk. The view screen or whatever it's called was open on the other side. I think someone recorded video.

I have the camera with me. For what it's worth, I left a note on the door of the house next to where I found it. I'm not a total savage--not yet, anyway. But if you're out there, please let me know. I don't care where in the world you are; when I take a look at whatever's on the memory card, I don't want to be alone.  

"Pick-It Fences"

 

"See, there's that whole saying about how good fences make good neighbors. The thing is, though," John said to the giantess with a nervous cough of a laugh, "that you've gone and, well. You've decided to use our fence to make your toothpicks."

John looked at his new neighbor, all the way up at her, twenty feet above him as she stood. She had been using what was once the corner fence post to work either a large head of broccoli or a small tree free from the space between two incisors. "Seems that I have," she said. "Does that bother you?" she asked, leaning forward and blocking out a small part of the sun. Her shadow easily crossed the space that the fence had previously divided. All along his back, the summer heat pressed against him and pounded on his skin like boulders unleashed in an avalanche, but in front of him, her shadow and his forearm were nearly touching.

Yes, he wanted to say, it bothered him, very much.

"He Tried to Keep Them Safe"

Vintage paperbacks, wrapped in poly bags, on the shelf at the used bookstore.

He knew it was inevitable that they would get older, so he tried to keep them safe. It was a thin kind of protection, the love he had for them, one that inevitably would fail against the harshness of the years; yet he wrapped them up tightly, and for the most part, it was enough. Of course, a moment arrived when he realized that he had loved them a long time, but he sat with them less and less each day. Then, he knew. He understood that he would never stop loving them, even after he let them go.

"Water Carries It All Away"

 

[Making up for yesterday's missed story...]

Mae sat on the edge of her bed as lightly as her weight would allow and began loosening and peeling back the fraying leathers she wore over her arms, as carefully as if she were peeling away a layer of skin. The practician's orders sang in her mind like a hymn of absolution: "The healing pools are yours tonight, girl. Use the mineral salts."

Her skin exposed, Mae started to study the cuts that the practician had rubbed clean, the joints that she had shifted and worked as close as possible back to normal. "Got you good today, didn't they?" the practician had said to Mae, not needing to hear the answer. "Well, go, get yourself changed, and go sit in the water, then. Water carries away all that pain."

It was a saying in these green hills--water carries it all away--yet as Mae approached one of the pools and began to scoop salt from a nearby barrel into the water, she found herself angry at the practician for offering it. She was divided; her body ached for relief and responded to the hot water with what felt to Mae like its own wave, a wave of release; yet her mind wanted to hold on to the image of each wound that marked her, to examine it like a map, so that she would never again lose her way on the practice field. Sinking into the pool up to her chin, Mae turned so that she could see the barrel of salt. She thought about what she knew of the way that rocks and minerals formed: layers of earthen material, becoming hard under thousands of years of pressure. Inside, she willed herself to turn to stone. Water carries it all away, she told herself, but rock remembers.

"I'm Sad About It, Too"

 

Ladies and gentlemen (if any of you are here reading this), my apologies, but it seems that my desire to complete my work today is leaving me little time to think of a proper blog post. In exchange for not making an actual attempt at creative writing today, I will come back and make two posts tomorrow.

A part of me does hope that I'll come up with something magnificent in the last few minutes of the day, though. Because if I don't, the Lorax is just going to sit here and look at me like that the rest of the night, and that... that is a tough look to bear.

"Closing Time"

 

"It just..." The butterfly heaved and sighed. It folded its wings together and then let them lay flat above its body in defeat. "It just feels like everything's changing so fast sometimes, you know? I mean, I know change is part of life, but..."

"Sweetie," the flower said, gently, "it's almost nighttime. You know the drill. You don't have go to the underside of that tree branch..."

"...but I can't stay here," the butterfly finished. It wished so badly that it could mistake the closing of the flower's petals, the brushing of those petals against its legs, for the start of some kind of embrace.

"Take It Off"

 

"You know, I really kind of want to just take the night off," she said, leaning back in her chair.

To which he replied, "Yeah! Woo! Take it off! Take it all the way off!"

She looked at him.

To which he replied, "I was hoping you had said 'take the nightgown off,' which makes no sense, since you're not actually dressed for bed yet, but, you know," and then sheepishly cast his eyes downward and returned to reading his book.

"The Pitcher"

 

"So how do you see the glass, half empty or half full?" one man asked while he contemplated the tumbler of water on his desk.

"Neither," a second man, sitting at the desk to the first man's right, replied. "All I know is that, either way, I have to pour water out of my pitcher to fill it up. And every time you have some sort of existential crisis, I have to take time out of my day to deal with it. So how about instead of contemplating all the deep and meaningful parts of life this morning, you finish up your drink and get back to work?"

Eyebrows raised, the first man took a sip of his beverage and set the glass back down, gently, because the second man's glass, or pitcher, as it was, was obviously sitting on the edge of a terribly steep drop, and in no way did he want to disturb it.

"Swarm"

 

[While I'm writing about ants, might as well include a link to an article about ant behavior that I thought was a good read: "7 Reasons Ants Will Inherit the Earth"]

Lina had been at the window for a few minutes when Kristin came up behind her. Together they stood and watched a mad cluster of ants, thick as a cloud, swarm their front porch.

"I heard that ants go crazy like that right before a storm comes," Lina said, her eyes focused outside.

"Really?" Kristin murmured. "I heard that when they pile on each other like that, they're basically two colonies at war, fighting each other."

Lina turned. "Just have to disagree with me on everything, don't you?" Her smile was little more than a twist of her lips, as if she had swallowed something sour. 

Kristin sighed and pressed closer, placing her hand on Lina's arm, her chin on Lina's shoulder. "I'm sorry," she told her. "I didn't mean it like that. Look, can we, I don't know, just press 'rewind' and go back fifteen minutes or something? Try that again?" Outside, the sound of thunder rolled toward them like an army.

"Preserved"

 

Outside the labs, all along the hallways on the second floor of the science building, display cases stood silently, like sentinels. Most of them contained skeletons; a few held geodes. One was devoted to a collection of expertly preserved snakes. Jeri stopped in front of a case that offered a glimpse into prehistoric plant life through the fossils on its shelves and pondered what it meant that something that had survived the onslaught of so many years had ended up on display at a community college in the suburbs.

In the reflection of the glass, Jeri saw her instructor slowly approach. "You okay?" Ms. DuBois asked her.

Jeri heard her laugh cut the air open. "About what? The fact that I'm going to fail this lab? Not really," she said.

"No failure here," Ms. DuBois said. She folded her arms across her chest and moved to Jeri's side. "Dissection is hard on a lot of people, even the ones who look forward to it. I had a lab partner in college once, the second we made our incision into the abdomen, just threw up right there, right in the opening." Jeri raised her eyebrows and turned to see her instructor smile. "Look, take your time," Ms. DuBois told her, "but come on back. And my advice? Honestly?" Her smile was almost ghostly in the glass. "Ask your group to be the one to use the knife."

Jeri remained under the quiet watch of the display case a little while longer after Ms. DuBois returned to the lab. She took another peek at the fossils inside, split wide, their stories released into the air like souls and revealed to everyone despite what protection the case could lend, before drawing in her breath and heading back to continue with the dissection.

Her group had named the cadaver William.

"The Muffin Man"

 

[According to Wikipedia, there really isn't much to the lyrics of "The Muffin Man."]

When I pulled up in Janelle's driveway, I saw that she was sitting on the step leading up to her front door. She was frowning and had her chin resting on her hands; she was sitting like a little girl who had gone outside to nurse a broken heart. Because she had invited me over for margaritas, this confused me.

"Hey," she said after I had gotten out of the car. "You know the Muffin Man?"

"Yeah, why? What's up?" I really didn't know him any better than Janelle did, but I had seen him walking through the neighborhood enough times, taking on that big, doughy middle of his through daily bouts of exercise, that I knew who she was talking about.

"He died," Janelle told me. "I saw his picture in the obituaries today."

"Oh," I said. I didn't know what else to say after that. I didn't know anything else about him, except that I thought he lived on Drury Lane--I saw him go into a house there once. So I told her that.

She looked at me and nodded. "His name was James Obryzewski. Fifty-three years old, no kids, volunteered twice a week at Prairie Food Bank," she said. "Listen, I think I want to take a walk." She placed her hands on her knees and stood, wearily, no longer looking young with her heart in pieces but older, the age she truly was, with her heart showing all the little cracks that come with living and never fully heal. "You want to come with? Or maybe we can go later, I don't know."

"No, now's good," I said, "margaritas can wait."  Janelle took me by the arm and smiled. It was a simple thing, what I said to her, but I had the feeling that to her, like a child's nursery rhyme, it meant so much more.

"Better Than Snail Mail"

 

When I was a kid, there were plenty of times when I wanted to send someone mail but couldn't get to the post office in time or was a few cents short of the money I needed to buy stamps. In those cases, I made a trip to see Mr. Aves.

I still remember the time I made a card for my grandmother when she lost her job. Allowance Day was two days away; I was a sucker for tater tots and so had gone back and paid for seconds at lunch at the school cafeteria; in short, I was a handful of pennies away from what being I called "broke," and so I went to ask if Mr. Aves could help. I was only expecting a robin or a sparrow. But he took my pennies and from the bunch plucked one that had all the shine of the morning on it. "Well, now, here we have something special," he told me. "For this, we can do for your grandma something very nice." From his cages he brought out a kestrel, young and razor-thin and spectacular, and gave the bird my card to deliver to my grandmother. 

More than anyone, I think Mr. Aves understood the magic of getting a letter in the mail.

"Food for Thought"

 

"So they call it pot," said the first girl.

"Yes," said the second.

"And when you do it, you get baked."

"Yes."

The first girl rolled onto her side. "I don't know about you, but I am so friggin' hungry right now."

The second girl responded by shoving most of her left hand into her own mouth and saying, "Problem solved," except that it came out sounding like pwobwob solb, and after they had laughed for a while about that and about how stupidly enormous their heads were, they went to the hot dog stand at the end of the street and got the largest bag of fries on the menu.

"Leaving a Red Brick House"

 

"It's a good house," the second brother said to the first while they were standing outside their younger sibling's home of rich, red brick. "Better than anything I could ever build."

"Hey, you don't have to tell me about the value of a good house," the first brother said. He glanced two lots over, at the pile of blown thatch that had once been his. 

The second brother turned to him. "So why don't you want to stay?" he asked.

"In there?" The red house sat in front of them, kindly and squat.

"With us," said the second brother. "As one of us."

The first brother squealed. "Oh, come on. 'One of us'? Really? You're talking like some girl's going to come kiss me into a prince or something." He sighed. "We've been through this. It's just--you know, after everything that's happened, I've been wondering what I've been doing with my life. Why all of this--" he pointed with a hoof at the brick house "--matters. No offense. But maybe it's time for something more spiritual, I guess."

"It's 'cause you're getting old," said the second brother.

The first brother raised an eyebrow, then snorted a laugh. "Yeah, well, losing a house sure makes you feel old," he said. "But you should know that. Shit, you're just as much a geezer as I am, in that case."

"Just a few years away from my own existential crisis," the second brother agreed. "Still don't see myself picking a religion where they butcher me, though."

The first brother saw the second glancing back at his loins and became confused and suspicious. Then he remembered. "Right, the circumcision thing," he said with a shrug. "Eh, it could be worse. Overall, I feel pretty safe with them."

"Yeah, I guess I can see that." The second brother nudged the first with his forehead and began trotting toward the brick house. "I think it's just slop in the trough tonight, but what do you say? One more dinner where you don't have to worry about keeping kosher?"

The first brother stared at his youngest sibling's home. The home was family; it represented everything he had ever known, the sum of his life story as it so far had been written. But what was he without a home? He didn't yet have the answer. He knew only that there were a people who had gone homeless for forty years and were still around today. The rabbi wasn't expecting him for a few days anyway; everyone knew how long a trip it was to the temple. So, "Sure," the first brother said the second, and they went to join the third brother for a meal of scraps, their last together before the first brother left to begin his journey through the study of the Torah. He tried to imagine the taste of milk and honey the entire time he ate.

"Spiders on the Brain"

 

[Doodle courtesy of Wesley Wong]

"You've been drawing spiders a lot lately," he said to her.

She shrugged and swept her pen across the sheet of paper, creating a web of thin lines and broken angles. "I don't know. They've just been on my mind."

In bed that night, he woke and found her turned away from him. The lamp on her nightstand was on and dimly glowing. He peeked over the crest of her shoulder and saw that she had a notebook open and a pencil in her hand. Another spider menaced him from the corner of the page.

"Hey," he whispered, "drawing again?" Her hand kept moving, creating lines on the paper. He glanced at her face and saw that her eyes were closed. And then he saw the first of the spiders crawl out of her ear.

"The Faerie Mosh"

 

He was tall, lanky even, with two spindly legs that carried him behind her like exclamation points at the end of her name. The faerie queen liked this boy very much. She tucked her hair behind her ear, letting the multiple piercings catch the moonlight, and took him by the hand to lead him toward the cluster of erratically grown mushrooms beneath the oak tree.

"Just to be clear," she told the boy, "this is what they call 'being pixie-led.' You're being pixie led right now."

"You know, I think I knew that," he told her with a shrug and a smile. He stopped at the edge of the mushroom cluster and poked at one toadstool with the toe of his plaid canvas shoe. "Why did I think that faeries dance in, like, a circle of mushrooms or something?" He suddenly moved his foot back. "Should I not touch that?"

The faerie queen laughed and wove her fingers into the spaces between his. "Relax," she told him, "we're much less formal than you think. Circles are fun, but we can dance just fine without them." She thought of how he had looked at the club, jumping and bouncing to the music on those skinny legs that had shouted to her from across the room. His hair was a crown of red-tipped spikes that had held its shape despite his frenzy. She couldn't wait to see what kind of mess she could make of it.

"It All Ends Up the Same"

 

The old ones say, "You're young and green; you have nothing to worry about."

The young ones say, "Nothing can hurt you, with your thick, weathered skin."

It turns out that a knife cuts all of them equally well.

"Never Tear Us Apart"

 

"Please! Let me down!" the fledgling robin chirped as the hawk plucked it from the ground.

"Sure, I'll get right on that," said the hawk.

The robin's voice nipped at the air as it continued to cry. "Please! My brother's down there! I can't leave him alone, or else he'll get in trouble."

The hawk's response was to release the young robin and let her go tumbling across the lawn just below them. The hawk glided onto the grass behind her.

"So let me get this straight," the hawk said as the robin righted itself. "You believe that if I let you go back to your brother--brother, you said, yes?--you'll be able to keep him out of trouble, and he'll be fine?"

"Oh, yes," the robin said, giving her feathers a shake. "That's what our mom said. She said that as long as we stay together, we'll be all right."

"I see," said the hawk. "Well, then, I believe we have no choice but to go find your brother." The way the hawk spread her wings, it was almost as if she knew how to smile.

"A Fresh Start"

 

[For brownie lore and background information, click here.]

The brownie slumped down the night-swamped street, the doll's clothes that had been left neatly folded for him in his corner of the old house now tucked under his arm like a bundle of rags. He was cold, and he had already started to despair.

When he glanced up at one point during his walk, he did so intending to ask the heavens for some form of deliverance from his current plight. He did not expect to see a sign already waiting for him.

"'Garage Sale,'" the brownie read aloud. He mumbled the address to himself several times over, until it stuck in his mouth like taffy. There would be a large house there, one that had been emptied of some of its stuff and was ready to be cleaned, one with space that a brownie could fill nicely. He smiled then, took his sorghum-bristle broom out from the bundle on his back, and began twirling it as he resumed his walk. It was a broom well made for sweeping, which made it a fine accessory for a fresh start.