"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.

"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."

"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.

"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.

"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.

"I Won't Forget"

 

"Come on," Mark's mother said to him, "you've got to put it back now." Mark glanced up at his mom, then set the plush elephant down on the shelf. She picked him up; he looked away. 

"You said I could get him next time," Mark whispered, his chin resting so firmly on her shoulder that he felt each word that he spoke as a drop of pressure underneath his jaw. He watched the elephant get farther away as his mom carried him down the aisle, as if he were in the car and watching it through the rear window while she drove.

"I know, honey, but I had to pay the man to fix the washing machine, remember?" she said. "Next time," she told him, "I promise." 

Instead of listening to his mother's promise, though, Mark was staring at the toy elephant, whose head he swore he had seen turn toward him. A slight stretch of his neck forward, and Mark was able to see the elephant raise its trunk and fold its ears back against its body.

"See you later, Mark," the toy elephant said.

Mark looked at his mom; her gaze was locked ahead of her. He looked back at the elephant.

"Please don't forget about me," it said.

"I won't forget," said Mark. His mother looked at him then, just as the plush elephant lifted its trunk higher and waved goodbye behind her.

"The Closet"

 

"What was that?" Danielle whispered. She was sure that she had turned the front door's deadbolt before heading upstairs.

"What was what?" Ruth mumbled into her pillow.

"That sound. Like a doorknob turning." Danielle could hear the long creak of old hinges. "Fuck," she said as she got out of bed and reached for the pair of scissors on top of the dresser.

She opened the bedroom door slowly, with her breath matching pace, and reached for the hallway light switch while still standing inside the door frame. Much to her relief, a quick glance down the stairs to her left gave her the answer she needed: the coat closet door had popped open.

Danielle stomped downstairs and shoved all of the puffy down coats, still holding their breaths for winter, toward the back of the closet. She shut the door by turning around and throwing her back against it. When she did that, she saw the skeleton, sitting on the second stair from the bottom.

It had short bones all throughout its body, and tiny hands and feet; its skull was disproportionately large, like a full moon tilted close and curious toward the Earth. "I kept trying and trying to get out," the skeleton said in a child's voice, "but I was stuck for a long time." The radial bone of its lower right arm bore the marble tracings of several hairline fractures. "Hi," the skeleton said, tilting its skull so that Danielle could see all the way back into the hollows that should have held its eyes.

"No Special Waste Accepted"

 

"Aw, too bad, guys," Nathan said as he shoved Ed onto the gravel next to the dumpster, "looks like we can't drop him off here after all." The other boys stood around Nathan, flanking him, and watched Ed pick small stones out of the gash on his knee until Nathan shook his head and began walking. "Better get up before someone catches you," Nathan called to Ed over his shoulder, over the boys' laughter, which bounced behind Nathan like an eager pup. "We'll find some place that takes special waste like Ed tomorrow, right?" Ed heard Nathan ask. The boys yipped and howled, hyenas answering the call, while Ed licked the blood from the scrapes on his palm.

"Children Made of Stone"

 

Lars knew as soon as he saw his new neighbor step onto her front porch and close the door behind her that she was coming over to introduce herself, which is to say that she was coming over to complain about his kids. There was a certain stiffness of posture and weakness of smile that preceded questions like Do they run around like that all the time? and Lars had learned to spot it well. What he hadn't learned was how to make someone believe that his children would turn to stone if ever they stopped moving.

"Daddy, I'm hungry!" Bianca called as she and James ran around the ash tree in the corner. Lars shook himself free of his thoughts and reached down to the table for one of the sandwiches he had brought outside for lunch. He thought about telling her to run over and pick it up, but then, even as he was watching their neighbor cross her lawn toward them, he decided otherwise and instead jogged toward the ash tree, sandwich in hand, to join the kids in their game of circles. It was the least he could do for the children he would never be able to hold.

"A Hole in My Heart"

 

The tree was sure it knew what the girl was going to do. Through all the years of her climbing on its branches and hiding in its shade, it couldn't help getting to know her a bit. And she had been storing her journals in the hole in its trunk ever since she was six. When she tucked the knife inside one morning, next to all the yellowed notebooks, the tree understood immediately the choice she had made. As soon as she left for school, it began to cry. All that time, it had been so certain that it had kept her safe.

"Plates"

 

The day after Annelise gave birth, two women whom Annelise didn't know came to her hospital room and gave her the plates.

Annelise accepted the box, which also contained four salad bowls to match, and gave the women a long, lean frown. "What are you doing with my mom's dishware?" she asked them.

"Not hers," said one of the women. Her hair was sprayed and pinned into a neat ponytail, and her hands were folded in front of her. "They're actually yours. Your very own set."

"They're affordable, durable, perfect for kids to eat off of," said the other. "My mom used to make me spaghetti all the time. Always with the noodles and sauce separate. I'd mix them together on a plate just like one of those."

"My mother would leave rolls out for me on one of the small plates," the first woman said. "She was usually at work by the time I woke up for school."

"Welcome to the club, Annelise," the second woman said. "Hold on to those plates, and you'll do just fine." The two women exited the room, leaving Annelise to sit back on the hospital bed and think, about cheese and crackers, toaster waffles, all the good things she could remember, and to feel, for the first time since she had seen her daughter's face, a little less afraid.

"Obey All Posted Signs"

 

I stopped the car at the intersection--badly, I know; I felt the seatbelt catch like air in the throat of someone choking--and I looked at my dad, calm in the passenger seat. Again he pointed out the window at the arrow.

"That doesn't look like a real sign," I told him.

He gave a half-smile and let his breath escape slowly, through his nose, a teacher trying to be patient with a bumbling student. "Part of learning how to drive is learning what to look for," he said. "See if this helps." He made a few gestures with his right hand, signs that I had never seen before, and suddenly I saw. I saw everything. Now the air really was caught in my throat. I looked him in the eyes once more, and he nodded. "Same as before, press the gas pedal down, slowly, slowly...." The car's nose lifted, we lurched into the sky in the direction of the arrow, and more than ever before, I felt the enormous weight of moving forward.

"Come Out and Play"

 

I heard what I thought might have been an empty plastic bottle rattling down the street. I thought it seemed odd, as there was no wind blowing to sweep anything along over the blacktop. Because that was the only sound echoing in what felt like an empty chamber of night, I stood and looked out the window. That was when I saw the ghost, a blue flame burning in the image of a boy; on the sidewalk by his feet was a white styrofoam cup. He saw me staring at him from where I stood on the second floor. "It's been a lousy day," he said, as clearly as if he were right next to me. "You want to come out and play?" He kicked the cup with a foot lit by ghostfire. The rattling sound could have been the sound of bones. I didn't offer him an answer, because I knew I had no choice.

"Kiss the Pavement"

Convention weekends and their aftermaths make for really short blog entries, it seems.

It was funny, at least afterward, the way time had seemed to slow for Brandon while he was falling. I like skateboarding, he recalled thinking as the ground came up close, I just don't think I like it this much. 

"Then It Will Be Safe"

 

Little Em could hear their yelps and screams all the way in the corner where he usually lurked. With sunset fast approaching, he figured it would be safe to try to sneak a look, so he crept along the wall and climbed up to the windowsill. He had just brought his eyes to the level of the glass when he felt a claw close around his ankle and drag him to the floor.

He looked up from where he had landed and saw his grandmother, bent like the moon, standing over him. "What did I tell you about going out before dark?" she snapped. "What did I tell you about the children? You know what they'll do to you."

Little Em rolled his bright red eyes. "They'll make me ride bicycles and eat ice cream," he dutifully intoned.

"Darn straight they will," said Gram. "Now crawl back through the cracks and practice scratching on the walls."

Little Em ambled toward the shadows while his grandmother marched behind him. He didn't tell her that, before his tumble, he had managed to catch sight of them, because then he'd have to admit that they were every bit as horrible as the stories made them sound. Yet despite their toothy smiles and their upright walk, Little Em still found himself dogged by the notion that children weren't completely awful. All those stories about eating ice cream had to be fake. Maybe, he thought, if no one was watching later while he played under the bed, he'd go see what there was to see. It will be dark, he told himself, suddenly feeling brave. Then it will be safe.

"The Next Big Thing Is Here"

 

The sculptor ran his fingers over the words he had engraved onto the mirrored surface. Then, with a sigh, he took his screwdriver from the pocket of his vest, crouched, and began working to liberate his sculpture from the pedestal that had supported it for the past several months.

It was because each side of the cube he had crafted bore a mirror that he saw the two boys approaching from the other side of the garden. As long and lean as they were, he assumed that their reflections were being pulled thin because of the distance--"Objects in Mirror Are More Awkwardly Adolescent Than They Appear." Only when the boys were next to the sculptor, and he stood to acknowledge them, did he realize that the mirror had actually diminished their gangliness.

One boy said to him, "So did you, like, put this here?"

"Nope," the sculptor replied cheerfully, "I'm just looting and pilfering." The boys looked at each other sideways, and the sculptor eased his stance into something approaching friendliness. "I made this last year," he told them, "and then I set up here back in April. So yeah, I put it here."

"Okay, so," the same boy said. He shifted on the balls of his feet. "What is it?"

The sculptor let his shoulders fall. "Look, if I have to explain public art to you, it's already a lost cause."

The boys said nothing, confirming every little voice speaking out in the sculptor's head. But then the second stepped forward, his arms crossed in front of his chest like a shield. "You don't have to explain it," he said, "but is it, like, metaphor?"

As an artist, the sculptor sometimes felt as if he owed it to the world to look upon it with pity. He tried not to reveal this thought as he spoke. "Okay, here's what I was thinking about this work," he said, stepping toward them as if laying out a secret. "It's shaped like a box, right?" The boys looked at the cube and nodded. "With boxes, we're all taught to think about what's inside them. And with the words 'The Next Big Thing Is Here' on it, you assume that the Next Big Thing is inside, whatever it is." He raised a hand and lifted a finger. "But the whole cube is mirrored. All the world around the cube becomes part of the Here. And that means that anything we see around us can be the Next Big Thing. Even--" he folded his hands together "--the person looking at the cube."

The two boys glanced at each other. "So you're trying to get people to think outside the box," said Boy Number Two.

The sculptor's hands separated, and his fingers spread apart like the rays of a firework; suddenly, nothing was as it seemed in the mirror, which made everything around him wonderful. "Yes," he said, his eyes and mouth gone wide, "yes, exactly!"

"Nice," the first boy said as he and his friend turned to leave. As they walked away, the sculptor heard the second one say, "This whole time I thought it was an ad for something." And then the sculptor sighed once more and took his screwdriver to the base of the sculpture, because he didn't want to think about everything being screwed.

"One Big, Fat, Juicy Apple, Part Two"

 

[I wish I could do justice writing about the large events rippling through the world right now. Until then, I go with the little moments that I know. Hope you're all well.]

Nailah's mother knew things that Nailah herself did not. Nailah understood this fact perfectly and hated it. Something about apples in particular made her mother suspicious, and not even all the books in the library could distract Nailah from trying to find out what it was when they made their afternoon visit.

"Mommy," Nailah said as they entered the children's room hand in hand, "I like apples."

Her mother laughed. "I figured as much, since you made a song about it."

They made their way to a pair of beanbag chairs. "They're really juicy," said Nailah.

"So I've heard."

Her mother handed her a cardboard picture book, which she accepted but kept closed as she pondered what else to say. "I like how they're big," she finally offered. "When I hold them in my hand? They're big."

"That they are," said her mother.

"And hard."

Her mother glanced up from her novel.

"And..." Nailah rummaged through her thoughts for all the words that belonged to apples. "Crunchy?" she said.

Nailah's mother leaned forward. She took Nailah's picture book, opened it to the first page, and handed it back.

"Try reading this for a while," she said. "You know, if you had gone with something like 'smooth,' I probably would have had to ground you." She leaned back in her beanbag and returned to reading her novel, while Nailah, completely dissatisfied with the simple illustrations in her picture book, peered over the top of it at the pages her mother was reading, trying to divide those chunks of words into slivers, desperate to digest that tempting fruit, knowledge.

"One Big, Fat, Juicy Apple"

 

"There you go," Araceli said, setting the plate in front of her daughter, "one big, fat, juicy apple."

The apple had actually been cut into slivers better suited for Nailah's little pink petal fingers, but she didn't seem to mind. Nailah giggled and smiled, and Araceli turned to rinse an apple for herself under the kitchen faucet. When she glanced back, however, she discovered that Nailah's delight had little to do with the snack she'd been given.

"Nailah!" Araceli said. "What are you doing with Mommy's phone?"

Instead of placing the phone in Araceli's open hand, Nailah grinned and pressed a button. Suddenly Araceli's phone was transmitting a deep line of dance beats and bass notes, and Araceli's voice, heavily autotuned, was singing a club-ready ode to a big, fat, juicy juicy apple apple apple.

"Oh, lordy," said Araceli. "Honey, what did you do? How did you do that?" Juicy juicy juicy, sang the phone, and Nailah laughed. Araceli narrowed her eyes. "What exactly does it mean to you when you hear that?" she asked.

The music continued. Nailah shrugged and looked around the room, as if the answer were hiding somewhere nearby. "I don't know," she finally said, with a simple, timid smile. "That you have a juicy apple?"

Araceli took the phone from Nailah's hands. "Exactly," she said, marveling at both the depths and limits of her daughter's knowledge. "Now what do you know about uploading and selling music files?" she asked as Nailah reached for an apple slice with both hands' chubby fingers. "I think we just figured out your college tuition."

"Bright Little Blossoms"

 

I think I noticed Dorelle and Keith at the reunion the same moment they noticed each other. Ten years after the last time we'd all been together in that gym, and there they were, looking at each other with new eyes and offering each other smiles that neither one would have had the chance to see the other wear before, given how things had gone in junior high.

It was like this: some trees start out in spring with a show of bright little blossoms, the kind with petals that curl under perfectly, the kind that make everyone who sees them feel lighter and happier. That was Dorelle. Then there are the trees that, instead of flowers, present buds at the tips of their branches, dull, difficult things all covered with scales. That was Keith, and he'd had terrible acne. Yet none of that mattered, not ten years later, when they both had had time to grow and flourish. You doing okay? I saw Dorelle mouth to Keith. I am, I really am. You? Keith said to her. And suddenly it felt like the end of summer, when no sounds were greater than the whispers between tree leaves, and everything was about to happen.