"The Gauntlet"

Four sprinklers sat in a row ahead of Gus, guarding the edge where sidewalk met lawn. The neighbors had arranged them so that the areas they sprinkled overlapped, but just barely, leaving no grass ungreened. Their spray tubes spat water in arcs that swept the ground like pendulums.

Gus rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt. He studied each sprinkler's motion in turn. When he was finished, he removed his glasses and tucked them into his breast pocket. Two teenage girls riding their bicycles in the street glanced at him while they cycled past.

He ducked his head and ran.

"Music Takes Time"

What a crappy photo. I promise, that squash is not swarmed with bugs. That's just my phone's camera adding specks.

Lucas came back to check on the seedling two days after the seed was planted.

"It's not ready yet," Old Man Bones, who watched over things that grow, told him. "Go home and practice. Da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM. That's right." Lucas frowned but marched home, tapping out a simple rhythm on his belly.

Lucas waited a month before he marched back to visit Bones, beating the same simple rhythm that the old man had given him to work with the last time. "Still not ready for you yet," Bones said, "but come here, look at this." He turned the fruit over for Lucas to see. "See this little groove right here? This little notch?" Lucas nodded and pretended that he did. "That's going to be important. You've got to be ready to play it. So try it with some extra notes. Da-DUM, da-da-DA-dum." Lucas practiced for weeks without understanding the point of it, until one day, when, tapping the rhythm against his arm, his finger twitched and struck the bone of his wrist instead. The feeling was completely different. That's all that music was, he realized: paying attention to how the slightest changes felt.

He and Old Man Bones continued like that over the following weeks, the old man giving him new steps in his rhythm each time. Finally, summer ended, and the time for harvest came. Old Man Bones gave Lucas a beautiful drum, plucked straight from the vine. "Now it's ready for you," he told the boy, who ran off and began to play. And you're ready for it, Bones' inner voice added as they both enjoyed the fruits of their labor.

"Sometimes on Those Summer Nights"

 

Sometimes on those summer nights, among all the shouts from the neighbors playing bag toss games in their driveways and the songs that fell in pitch as cars drove past the house, he would catch the sound of someone crying. He checked out the window a few times and once in the held-breath stillness of night even stepped barefoot on the lawn, but he never saw anybody. The only figure of any note was that of the tree, which stood in the middle of the yard, sticky with the sap that had built up inside it over the course of the spring and that was now escaping through cracks in the bark, unable to be contained any longer.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"Cloud Storage"

 

At night, no matter how hot it had been during the day and how much of that heat lay trapped on the tar-black shingles, she would climb from her bedroom window onto the garage roof and lie there, listening to bands play at the outdoor theater. The sound would echo like rain in a tin cup as it traveled the few miles from the theater to where she lay, but she didn't mind. Sometimes while listening she saw a contrail form in the sky overhead. She imagined that the people inside the tiny planes could hear the concerts as well. She told herself that they would carry the songs they heard with them wherever they were going. It was the kind of thought, on nights like that, that almost made it okay to grow up.