"Scott Nicholson is the kind of writer who always surprises and always entertains."—Jonathan Maberry, author of Rot and Ruin

FLOWERS

A fantasy story collection

By Scott Nicholson

Copyright 2010 by Scott Nicholson

Published by Haunted Computer Books

http://www.hauntedcomputer.com

BUY OTHER KINDLE BOOKS BY SCOTT NICHOLSON:

Disintegration

The Red Church

Speed Dating with the Dead

The Skull Ring

Drummer Boy

Forever Never Ends

As I Die Lying

Burial to Follow

October Girls (as L.C. Glazebrook)

Curtains

Flowers

Ashes

The First

Murdermouth: Zombie Bits

Head Cases

Screenplays

The Skull Ring: The Screenplay

Creative Spirit: The Screenplay

United Kingdom

Creative Spirit

Troubled

Solom

The Gorge

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. The Vampire Shortstop

A Little League team’s best player just happens to sport fangs.

2. Thirst

Sally, A Maker, has the power to bring rain, but she’s far too happy to cry.

3. When You Wear These Shoes

A teen’s encounter on a trail with a stranger leads to a magical traveling tale.

4. Invisible Friend

Ellen’s best friend happens to live in a cemetery.

5. The Night the Wind Died

Wendy is a Maker who moves the wind, but she doesn’t want the job.

6. Scarecrow Boy

Jerp’s visit to his grandfather’s farm takes a spooky turn.

7. Luminosity

Kate the Moonbeam Girl is a Maker, but when the night falls, a boy’s romance turns cruel.

8. Wampus Cat

A teen’s journey on a remote trail evokes an Appalachian legend.

9. The Boy Who Saw Fire

Billy is a Maker  who learns about his power over the sun.

10. In the Heart of November

A dead girl has a crush on her best friend’s boyfriend.

About the Author

More Thrilling Titles from Haunted Computer Books

THE VAMPIRE SHORTSTOP

Jerry Shepherd showed up at first practice alone.

I mean, showed, as if he'd just popped into thin air at the edge of the woods that bordered Sawyer Field. Most kids, they come to first practice book-ended by their parents, who glower like Mafia heavies willing to break your kneecaps if their kid rides the pine for so much as an inning. So in a way, it was a relief to see Jerry materialize like that, with no threat implied.

But in another way, he made me nervous. Every year us Little League coaches get handed two or three players who either recently moved to the area or were given their release (yeah, we're that serious here) by their former teams. And if there's one thing that's just about universal, it's the fact that these Johnny-come-latelies couldn't hit their way out of a paper bag. So I figured, here's this spooky kid standing there at the fence, just chewing on his glove, real scared-like, so at least there's one brat who's not going to be squealing for playing time.

I figured him for a vampire right off. He had that pale complexion, the color of a brand new baseball before the outfield grass scuffs up the horsehide. But, hey, these are enlightened times, everybody's cool with everybody, especially since " Transylvania " Wayne Kazloski broke the major league undead barrier back in '29. And that old myth about vampires melting in the sun is just that, an old myth.

The league powers figured I wouldn't raise a fuss if they dumped an undesirable on me. I had eleven kids on the roster, only five of them holdovers from the year before, so I was starting from scratch anyway. I didn't mind a new face, even if I was pretty much guaranteed that the vampire kid had two left feet. Coming off a three-and-thirteen season, the Maynard Solar Red Sox didn't have any great expectations to live up to.

All the other players had clustered around me as if I were giving out tickets to see a rock band, but Jerry just hung out around first base like a slow-thawing cryogenic.

"I'm Coach Ruttlemyer," I said, loudly enough to reach Jerry's pointy ears. "Some of you guys know each other and some of you don't. But on my team, it's not who you know that counts, it's how hard you play."

At this point in the first preseason speech, you always catch some kid with a finger in his or her nose. That year, it was a sweet-faced, red-headed girl. She had, at that moment, banished herself to right field.

"Now, everybody's going to play in every game," I said. "We're here to have fun, not just to win."

The kids looked at me like they didn't buy that line of bull. I barely believed it myself. But I always said it extra-loud so that the parents could hear. It gave me something to fall back on at the end of a lousy season.

"We're going to be practicing hard because we only have two weeks before the first game," I said, pulling the bill of my cap down low over my eyes so they could see what a serious guy I was. "Now let's see who's who."

I went down the roster alphabetically, calling out each player's name. When the kid answered "Here," I glanced first at the kid, then up into the bleachers to see which parents were grinning and straining their necks. That's a good way to tell right off who's going to want their kid to pitch: the beefy, red-faced dad wearing sunglasses and too-tight polyester shorts, and the mom who's busy organizing which parent is bringing what snack for which game.

When I called out Jerry's name, he croaked out a weak syllable and grimaced, showing the tips of his fangs. I waved him over to join the rest of the team. He tucked his glove in his armpit and jogged to the end of the line. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, waiting for him to trip over the baseline chalk. But he didn't stumble once, and that's when I got my first glimmer of hope that maybe he'd be able to swipe a couple of bases for me. He was gaunt, which means that if he's clumsy you call him "gangly," but if he's well-coordinated you call him "sleek." So maybe we're not as enlightened as we claim to be, but hey, we're making progress.

I liked to start first practice by having the kids get on the infield dirt and snag some grounders. You can tell just about everything you need to know about a player that way. And I don't mean just gloving the ball and pegging it over to first. I mean footwork, hand-eye, hustle, aggressiveness, vision, all those little extras that separate the cellar-dwellers from the also-rans from the team that takes home the Sawyer Cup at the end of the season. And it's not just the way they act when it's their turn; you get a lot of clues by how they back each other up, whether they sit down between turns, whether they punch each other on the arm or hunt for four-leaf clovers.

By the first run through, ten ground balls had skittered through to the deep grass in centerfield. But one, one, made up for all those errors. Jerry Shepherd's grounder. He skimmed the ball off the dirt and whizzed it over to first as if the ball were a yo-yo and he held the string. My assistant coach and darling wife Dana grinned at me when the ball thwacked into her mitt. I winked at her, hoping the play wasn't a fluke.

But it was no fluke. Six turns through, and six perfect scoops and tosses by Jerry Shepherd. Some of the other kids were fifty-fifty risks, and one, you'd have guessed the poor little kid had the glove on the wrong hand. You know the kind, parents probably raised him on computer chess and wheat bran. Oops, there I go again, acting all unenlightened.

Another bright spot was Elise Stewart, my best returning player. She only made the one error on her first turn, and I could chalk that up to a long winter's layoff. She was not only sure-handed, she was also the kind of girl you'd want your son to date in high school. She had a happy heart and you just knew she'd be good at algebra.

All in all, I was pleased with the personnel. In fifteen years of coaching Little League, this was probably the best crop of raw talent that I'd ever had. Now, I wasn't quite having delusions of being hauled out of the dugout on these guys' shoulders (me crushing their bones and hoisting the Sawyer Cup over my head), but with a little work, we had a chance at a winning season.

I made a boy named Biff put on the catcher's gear and get behind the plate. In baseball films, the chunky kid always plays catcher, but if you've ever watched even one inning of a real Little League game, you know the catcher needs to be quick. He spends all his time against the backstop, stumbling over his mask and jerking his head around looking for the baseball. Besides, Biff had a great name for a catcher, and what more could you ask for?

I threw batting practice, and again each kid had a turn while the others fanned out across the diamond. I didn't worry as much about hitting as I did fielding, because I knew hitting was mostly a matter of practice and concentration. It was a skill that could be taught. So I kind of expected the team to be a little slow with the bat, and they didn't disappoint me.

Except when Jerry dug into the batter's box. He stared at me with his pupils glinting red under the brim of his batting helmet, just daring me to bring the heat. I chuckled to myself. I liked this kid's cockiness at the plate. But I used to be a decent scholarship prospect, and I still had a little of the old vanity myself. So instead of lobbing a cream puff, I kicked up my leg and brought the Ruttlemyer Express.

His line drive would have parted my hair, except for two things: I was wearing a cap and my hairline barely reached above my ears. But I felt the heat off his scorcher all the same, and it whistled like a bullet from a gun. I picked up the rosin bag and tossed it in the air a few times. Some of the parents had stopped talking among themselves and watched the confrontation.

Jerry dug in and Biff gave me a target painting the black on the inside corner. I snapped off a two-seamer curveball, hoping the poor batter didn't break his spine when he lunged at the dipping pitch. But Jerry kept his hips square, then twisted his wrists and roped the ball to right field for what would have been a stand-up double. I'd never seen a Little Leaguer who could go with a pitch like that. I tossed him a knuckleball, and most grown-ups couldn't have hit it with a tennis racket, but Jerry drilled it over the fence in left-center.

Okay. Okay.

He did miss one pitch and hit a couple of fouls during his turn. I guess even vampires are only human.

After practice, I passed out uniforms and schedules and talked to the parents. I was hoping to tell Jerry what a good job he'd done and how I'd be counting on him to be a team leader, but he snatched up his goods and left before I had the chance. He got to the edge of the woods, then turned into a bat (the flying kind, not the kind you hit with) and flitted into the trees, his red jersey dangling from one of his little claws. His glove weighed him down a little and he was blind, of course, so he bumped into a couple of tree limbs before he got out of sight.

And so went the two weeks. Jerry was a natural shortstop, even the other kids saw that. Usually, everybody wanted to pitch and play shortstop (both positions at the same time, you know), but nobody grumbled when I said Jerry would be our starting shortstop. Elise was starting pitcher, and Wheat Bran and the redhead were "designated pinch hitters." I told everybody to get a good night's sleep, because we would be taking on the Piedmont Electric Half-Watts, which was always one of the better teams.

I could hardly sleep that night, I was so excited. Dana rolled over at about one A.M. and stole her pillow back.

"What's wrong?" she grunted.

"The game," I said. I was running through lineups in my mind, planning strategies for situations that might arise in the sixth inning.

"Go to sleep. Deadline's tomorrow."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." I was editor of the Sawyer Creek E-Weekly, and Thursday noon was press time. I still had some unfinished articles. "That's just my job, but baseball is my lifeblood."

Thinking of lifeblood made me think of Jerry. The poor kid must have lost his parents. Back a few centuries ago, there had been a lot of purging and staking and garlic-baiting. Yeah, like I said, we're making progress, but sometimes I wonder if you can ever really change the human animal. I hoped nothing would come up about his being a vampire.

I knew how cruel Little League could be. Not the kids. They could play and play and play, making up rules as they went along, working things out. No, it was the parents who sometimes made things ugly, who threw tantrums and called names and threatened coaches. I'd heard parents boo their own kids.

In one respect, I was glad Jerry was an orphan. At least I didn't have to worry about his parents changing into wolves, leaping over the chain-link fence, and ripping my throat out over a bad managerial decision. Not that vampires perpetrated that sort of violence. Still, all myths contain a kernel of truth, and even a myth can make you shiver.

I finally went to sleep, woke up and got the paper online. I drove out to the ball field and there were four dozens vehicles in the parking lot. There's not much entertainment in Sawyer Creek. Like I said, Little League's a big deal in these parts, plus it was a beautiful April day, with the clouds all puffy and soft in the blue sky. Dana was already there, passing out baseballs so the kids could warm up. I looked around and noticed Jerry hadn't arrived.

"He'll be here," Dana said, reading my nervousness.

We took infield and I was filling out the lineup card when Elise pointed to centerfield. "Hey, looky there, Coach," she said.

Over the fence loped a big black dog, with red socks and white pin-striped pants. Propped between the two stiff ears was a cockeyed cap. The upraised tail whipped back and forth in the breeze, a worn glove hooked over its tip. The dog transformed into Jerry when it got to second base.

A murmur rippled through the crowd. I felt sorry for Jerry then. The world may be enlightened, but the light's a little slower in reaching Sawyer Creek than it is most places. There are always a few bigots around. Red, yellow, black, and white, we had all gotten along and interbred and become one race. But when you get down to the equality of the living and the living dead, some people just don't take to that notion of unity as easily.

And there was something else that set the crowd on edge, and even bothered me for a second. Hanging by a strap around his neck was one of those sports bottles all the kids have these days. Most of the kids put in juice or Super-Ade or something advertised by their favorite big leaguers. But Jerry's drink was thick and blood-red. Perfectly blood-red.

"Sorry I'm late," he said, sitting down on the end of the bench. I winced as he squirted some of the contents of the sports bottle into his throat.

"Play ball," the umpire yelled, and Elise went up to the plate and led off with a clean single to right. The next kid bunted her over, then Jerry got up. The first pitch bounced halfway to home plate and Elise stole third. Dana, who was coaching third base, gave her the "hold" sign. I wanted to give Jerry a chance to drive her in.

The next pitch was a little high, but Jerry reached out easily with the bat. The ball dinged off the titanium into center and we were up, one to nothing. And that was the final score, with Elise pitching a three-hitter and Jerry taking away a handful of hits from deep in the hole. Jerry walked once and hit another double, but Wheat Bran struck out to leave him stranded in the fifth.

Still, I was pleased with the team effort, and a "W" is a "W," no matter how you get it. The kids gathered around the snack cooler after the game, all happy and noisy and ready to play soccer or something. But not Jerry. He had slipped away before I could pat him on the back.

"Ain't no fair, you playing a slanty-eyed vampire," came a gruff voice behind me. "Next thing you know, they'll allow droids and other such trash to mix in. Baseball's supposed to be for normal folks."

I turned to find myself face-to-face with Roscoe Turnbull. Sawyer Creek's Mister Baseball. Coach of the reigning champs for the past seven years. He'd been watching from the stands, scouting the opposition the way he always did.

"Hey, he's got just as much right to play as anybody," I said. "I know you're not big on reading, but someday you ought to pick up the U.S. Constitution and check out the 43rd Amendment."

The Red Sox had never beaten one of Turnbull's teams, but at least I could be smug in my intellectual superiority.

"Big words don't mean nothing when they're giving out the Sawyer Cup," Turnbull hissed through his Yogi Berra teeth. He had a point. He'd had to build an addition onto his house just so he could store all the hardware his teams had won.

"We'll see," I said, something I never would have dared to say in previous years. Turnbull grunted and got in his panel truck. His son Ted was in the passenger seat, wearing the family scowl. I waved to him and went back to my team.

We won the next five games. Jerry was batting something like .900 and had made only one error, which occurred when a stray moth bobbed around his head in the infield. He'd snatched it out of the air with his mouth at the same moment the batter sent a three-hopper his way. I didn't say anything. I mean, instincts are instincts. Plus, we were winning, and that was all that mattered.

The seventh game was trouble. I'd been dreading that line on the schedule ever since I realized that my best player was a vampire. Maynard Solar Red Sox versus The Dead Reckoning Funeral Parlor Pall Bearers. Now, no self-respecting parlors were selling the blood that they drained. But there had been rumors of underground activity, a black market for blood supplies.

And Jerry had slowly been catching the heat, anyway. The grumbles from the stands had gotten louder, and whenever Jerry got up to bat or made a play in the field, some remark would come from the opposing bleachers. Oh, they were the usual unimaginative kind, like the old "Kill the vampire," the play on the resemblance between the words "vampire" and "umpire." The other common one was "Vampires suck." And these were the parents, mind you. They wonder where kids get it from.

The cruelest one, and the one that caught on the fastest, came from the unlikely mouth of Roscoe Turnbull, who'd made a habit of bringing his son Ted to our games just so they could ride Jerry's case. Jerry had launched a three-run homer to win in the last inning of one of our games. As he crossed the plate, Turnbull yelled out, "Hey, look, everybody. It's the Unnatural." You know, a play on the old Robert Redford film. Even I had to grudgingly admit that was a good one.

Now we were playing a funeral parlor and I didn't know where Jerry got his blood. I usually didn't make it my business to keep up with how the kids lived their lives off the diamond. But Jerry didn't have any parents, any guidance. Maybe he could be bribed to throw a game if the enticements were right.

So I was worried when Jerry came to bat in the sixth with two outs. We were down, four-three. Biff was on second. It was a situation where there was really no coaching strategy. Jerry either got a hit or made an out.

He had made hits in his three previous trips, but those were all in meaningless situations. I couldn't tell if he was setting us up to lose. Until that moment.

"Come on, Jerry," I yelled, clapping my hands. "I know you can do it."

If you want to, I silently added.

Jerry took two strikes over the heart of the plate. The bat never left his shoulder. All my secret little fantasies of an undefeated season were about to go up in smoke. I started mentally rehearsing my after-game speech, about how we gave it all we had, we'll get 'em next time, blah blah blah.

The beanpole on the mound kicked up his leg and brought the cheese. Jerry laced it off the fence in right-center. Dana waved Biff around to score, and Jerry was rounding second. I didn't know whether I hoped Dana would motion him to try for third, because Wheat Bran was due up next, and he'd yet to hit even a foul tip all season. But the issue was decided when their shortstop, the undertaker's kid, rifled the relay throw over the third basemen's head as Jerry pounded down the base path. We won, five-four.

"I never doubted you guys for a second," I told the team afterward, but of course Jerry had already pulled his disappearing act.

Dana was blunt at dinner as I served up some tastiwhiz and fauxburger. I'd popped a cork on some decent wine to celebrate.

"Steve, I think you're beginning to like winning just a little too much," she said, ever the concerned wife.

I grinned around a mouthful of food. "It gets in your blood," I said. "Can't help it."

"What about all those seasons you told the kids to just give it their best, back when you were plenty satisfied if everyone only showed a little improvement over the course of the season?"

"Back when I was just trying to build their self-esteem? Well, nothing builds character like winning. The little guys are practically exploding with character."

"I wish you were doing more for Jerry," she said. "He still doesn't act like part of the team. And the way he looks at you, like he wants you for a father figure. I think he's down on himself."

"Down on himself? Down on himself?" I almost sprayed my mouthful of wine across the table, and that stuff was ten bucks a bottle. I gulped and continued. "I could trade him for an entire team if I wanted. He's the best player to come out of Sawyer Creek since—"

"—since Roscoe Turnbull. And you see how he ended up."

I didn't like where this discussion was headed. "I'm sure Jerry's proud of his play. And the team likes him."

"Only because the team's winning. But I wonder how they would have reacted, how their parents would have reacted, if Jerry had struck out that last time today? I mean, nobody's exactly inviting him for sleep-overs as it is."

"He's just quiet. A lone wolf. Nothing wrong with that," I said, a little unsure of myself.

"Nothing wrong with vampires as long as they hit .921, is that what you mean?"

"Hey, we're winning, and that's what counts."

"I don't know," Dana said, shaking her pretty and sad head. "You're even starting to sound like Roscoe Turnbull."

That killed my mood, all right. That killed my mood for a lot of things around the house for a while. Lying in bed that night with a frigid three feet between us, I stared out the window at the full moon. A shape fluttered across it, a small lonely speck lost in that great circle of white. It most likely wasn't Jerry, but I felt an ache in my heart for him all the same.

At practice, I sometimes noticed the players whispering to each other while Jerry was at bat. I don't think for a minute that children are born evil. But they have parents who teach and guide them. Parents who were brought up on the same whispered myths.

I tried to be friendly toward Jerry, and kept turning my head so I could catch the look from him that Dana had described. But all I saw were a pair of bright eyes that could pierce the back of a person's skull if they wanted. Truth be told, he did give me the creeps, a little. And I could always pretend my philosophy was to show no favoritism, despite Dana's urging me to reach out to him.

Dana was a loyal assistant regardless of our difference of opinion. She helped co-pilot the Red Sox through the next eight victories. Jerry continued to tear up the league's pitching and played shortstop like a strip of flypaper, even though he was booed constantly. Elise pitched well and the rest of the kids were coming along, improving every game. I was almost sad when we got to the last game. I didn't want the season to end.

Naturally, we had to play the Turnbull Construction Claw Hammers for the championship. They'd gone undefeated in their division again. Ted had a fastball that could shatter a brick. And Roscoe Turnbull started scouting his draft picks while they were still in kindergarten, so he had the market cornered on talent.

I was so nervous I couldn't eat the day of the game. I got to the field early, while the caretaker was still trimming the outfield. Turnbull was there, too. He was in the home team's dugout shaving down a wooden bat. Wooden bats weren't even used in the majors anymore. Turnbull could afford lithium compound bats. That's when I first started getting suspicious.

"I'm looking forward to the big game," Turnbull said, showing the gaps between his front teeth.

"Me, too," I said, determined not to show that I cared. "And may the best team win."

"What do you mean? The best team always wins."

I didn't like the way he was running that wood shaver down the bat handle.

"You getting all nostalgic?" I asked, tremblingly nonchalant. "Going back to wood?"

"Good enough for my daddy. And my great-great-grandpaw on my mother's side. Maybe you heard of him. Ty Cobb."

Tyrus Raymond Cobb. The Hall-of-Famer. The Georgia Peach. The greatest hitter in any league, ever. Or the dirtiest player ever to set foot on a diamond, depending on whom you asked.

"Yeah, I've heard of him," I said. "That's quite a bloodline."

"Well, we've always managed to win without no low-down, stinking vampires on our team."

"Jerry Shepherd deserves to play as much as any other boy or girl."

"It ain't right. Here this"—he made a spitting face—"creature has all these advantages like being able to change into an animal or throw the hocus-pocus on other players."

"You know that's against the rules. We'd be disqualified if he tried something like that. There's no advantage."

"It's only against the rules if you get caught." Turnbull held the tip of the bat up in the air. It was whittled to a fine, menacing point. "And sometimes, you got to make your advantages."

"Even you wouldn't stoop that low," I said. "Not just to win a game."

A thin stream of saliva shot from his mouth and landed on the infield dirt. He smiled again, the ugliest smile imaginable. "Gotta keep a little something on deck, just in case."

I shuddered and walked back to my dugout. Turnbull wasn't that bloodthirsty. He was just trying to gain a psychological edge. Sure, that was all.

Psychological edges work if you let them, so I spent the next fifteen minutes picking rocks from the infield. The kids were starting to arrive by then, so I watched them warm up. Jerry was late, as usual, but he walked out of the woods just as I was writing his name into the lineup. I nodded at him without speaking.

We batted first. Ted was starting for the Claw Hammers, of course. He was the kind of pitcher who would throw a brushback pitch at his own grandmother, if he thought she were digging in on him. He stood on the mound and practiced his battle glare, then whipped the ball into the catcher's mitt. I had to admit, the goon sure knew how to bring it to the plate.

Half the town had turned out. The championship game always drew better than the town elections. Dana patted me on the back. She wasn't one to hold a grudge when times were tough.

"Play ball," the umpire shouted, and we did.

Elise strode confidently to the plate.

"Go after her, Tedder," Turnbull shouted through his cupped hands from the other dugout. "You can do it, big guy."

The first pitch missed her helmet by three inches. She dusted herself off and stood deeper in the batter's box. The next pitch made her dance. Ball two. But she was getting a little shaky. No one likes being used for target practice. The next pitch hit her bat as she ducked away. Foul, strike one.

Elise was trembling now. I hated the strategy they were using, but unfortunately it was working. The umpire didn't say a word.

"Attaboy," Turnbull yelled. "Now go in for the kill."

Ted whizzed two more strikes past her while she was still off-balance. Biff grounded out weakly to second. Jerry went up to the plate and dug in. Ted's next offering hit Jerry flush in the face.

Jerry went down like a shot. I ran up to him and knelt in the dirt, expecting to see broken teeth and blood and worse. But Jerry's eyes snapped open. Another myth about vampires is that they don't feel pain. There are other kinds of pain besides the physical, though, and I saw them in Jerry's red irises. He could hear the crowd cheering as clearly as I could.

"Kill the vampire," one parent said.

"Stick a stake in him," another shouted.

"The Unnatural strikes again," a woman yelled.

I looked into the home team's dugout and saw Turnbull beaming as if he'd just won a trip to Alpha Centauri.

I helped Jerry up and he jogged to first base. I could see a flush of pink on the back of the usually-pale neck. I wondered whether the color was due to rage or embarrassment. I had Dana give him the "steal" sign, but the redhead popped up to the catcher on the next pitch.

We held them scoreless in their half, despite Ted's getting a triple. My heart was pounding like a kid's toy drum on Xmas Day, but I couldn't let the players know I cared one way or the other. When we got that third out, I calmly gave the kids high fives as they came off the field. Sure, this was just another game like the Mona Lisa was just another painting.

So it went for another couple of innings, with no runners getting past second. Jerry got beaned on the helmet his next trip up. The crowd was cheering like mad as he fell. I looked out at the mob sitting in the bleachers, and the scariest thing was that it wasn't just our opponent's fans who were applauding.

There was the sheriff, pumping her fist in the air. The mayor looked around secretively, checked the majority opinion, then added his jeers to the din. Biff's mother almost wriggled out of her tank top, she was screaming so enthusiastically. A little old lady in the front row was bellowing death threats through her megaphone.

I protested the beaning to the umpire. He was a plump guy, his face melted by gravity. He looked like he'd umpired back before the days of protective masks and had taken a few foul tips to the nose.

"You've got to warn the pitcher against throwing at my players," I said.

"Can't hurt a vampire, so what's the point?" the umpire snarled, spitting brown juice towards my shoes. So that was how it was going to be.

"Then you should throw the pitcher out of the game because of poor sportsmanship."

"And I ought to throw you out for delay of game." He yanked the mask back over his face, which was a great improvement on his looks.

I squeezed Jerry's shoulder and looked him fully in the eyes for the first time since I'd known him. Maybe I'd been afraid he would mesmerize me.

"Jerry, I'm going to put in a pinch-runner for you," I said. "It's not fair for you to put up with this kind of treatment."

I'd said the words that practically guaranteed losing the game, but I wasn't thinking about that then. The decision was made on instinct, and instinct is always truer and more revealing than a rationalizing mind. Later on, that thought gave me my only comfort.

I signaled Dana to send in a replacement. But Jerry's eyes blazed like hot embers and his face contorted into various animal faces: wolf, bat, tiger, wolverine, then settled back into its usual wan constitution.

"No," he said. "I'm staying in."

He jogged to first before I could stop him.

"Batter up," the umpire yelled.

I went into the dugout. Dana gave me a hug. There were tears in her eyes. Mine, too, though I made sure no one noticed.

Jerry stole second and then third. Wheat Bran was at the plate, waving his bat back and forth. I knew his eyes were closed. Two strikes, two outs. I was preparing to send the troops back out onto the field when Wheat Bran blooped a single down the line in right. Jerry scored standing up.

Elise shut out the Claw Hammers until the bottom of the sixth. She was getting tired. This was ulcer time, and I'd quit pretending not to care about winning. Sweat pooled under my arms and the band of my cap was soaked. I kept clapping my hands, but my throat was too tight to yell much encouragement.

Their first batter struck out. The second batter sent a hard grounder to Jerry. I was mentally ringing up the second out when someone in the stands shouted, "Bite me, blood-breath!"

The ball bounced off Jerry's glove and went into the outfield. The runner made it to second. Jerry stared at the dirt.

"Shake it off, Jerry," I said, but my voice was lost in the chorus of spectators, who were calling my shortstop every ugly name you could think of. The next batter grounded out to first, advancing the runner to third.

Two outs, and you know the way these things always work. Big Ted Turnbull dug into the batter's box, gripping the sharpened wooden bat. But I wasn't going to let him hurt us. I did what you always do to a dangerous hitter with first base open: I took the bat out of his hands. I told Elise to walk him intentionally.

Roscoe Turnbull glared at me with death in his eyes, but I had to protect my shortstop and give us the best chance to win. Ted reached first base and called time out, then jogged over to his team's bench. Roscoe gave me a smile. That smile made my stomach squirm as if I'd swallowed a dozen large snakes.

Ted sat down and changed his shoes. I didn't understand until he walked back onto the infield. The bottom of his cleats were so thick that they resembled those shoes the disco dancers wore after disco made its fourth comeback. The shoes made Ted six inches taller. The worst part was that the spikes were made of wood.

I thought of Ted's ancestor, Ty Cobb, how Cobb was legendary for sliding into second with his spikes high. I rocketed off the bench.

"Time!" I screamed. "Time out!"

The umpire lifted his mask.

"What now?" he asked.

I pointed to the cleats. "Those are illegal."

"The rule book only bans metal cleats," he said. "Now, batter up."

"Second baseman takes the throw on a steal," I shouted as instruction to my fielders.

"No," Jerry shouted back. He pointed to the plate. "Left-handed batter."

Shortstop takes the throw when a lefty's up. The tradition of playing the percentages was as old as baseball itself. Even with the danger, I couldn't buck the lords of the game. Unwritten rules are sometimes the strongest.

I sat on the bench with my heart against my tonsils. The crowd was chanting, "Spike him, spike him, spike him," over and over. Dana sat beside me and held my hand, a strange mixture of accusation and empathy in her eyes.

"Maybe the next batter will pop up," she said. "There probably won't even be a play at second."

"Probably not."

She didn't say anything about testosterone or my stubborn devotion to the percentages. Or that Elise was getting weaker and we had no relief pitcher. Or that we had to nail the lid on this victory quick or it would slip away. I knew what Dana was thinking, though.

"I'd do it even if it was my own son out there," I muttered to her. I almost even believed it.

They tried a double-steal on the next pitch. It was a delayed steal, where the runner on third waits for the catcher to throw down to second, then tries for home. Not a great strategy for the game situation, but I had a feeling Turnbull had a lower purpose in mind.

Biff gunned a perfect strike to Jerry at second. The play unfolded as if in slow motion. Ted was already leaning back, launching into his slide.

Please step away, Jerry, I prayed. The runner on third was halfway home. If Jerry didn't make the tag, we'd be tied and the Claw Hammers would have the momentum. But I didn't care. I'd gladly trade safe for safe.

Jerry didn't step away. His instincts were probably screaming at him to change into a bat and flutter above the danger, or to paralyze Ted in his tracks with a deep stare. Maybe he knew that would have caused us to forfeit the game and the championship. Or maybe he was just stubborn like me.

He gritted his teeth, his two sharp incisors hanging over his lip in concentration. Ted slid into the bag, wooden spikes high in the air. Jerry stooped into the cloud of dust. He applied the tag just before the spikes caught him flush in the chest.

The field umpire reflexively threw his thumb back over his shoulder to signal the third out. But all I could see through my blurry eyes was Jerry writhing in the dirt, his teammates hustling to gather around him. I ran out to my vampire shortstop, kneeling beside his body just as the smoke started to rise from his flesh.

He gazed up at me, the pain dousing the fire in his eyes. The crowd was silent, hushed by the horror of a wish come true. The Red Sox solemnly removed their hats. I'd never heard such a joyless championship celebration. Jerry looked at me and smiled, even as his features dissolved around his lips.

"We won, Coach," he whispered, and that word "we" was like a stake in my own heart. Then Jerry was dust, forever part of the infield.

Dana took the pitcher's mound, weeping without shame. She stared into the crowd, at the umpires, into Turnbull's dugout, and I knew she was meeting the eye of every single person at Sawyer Field that day.

"Look at yourselves," she said, her voice strong despite the knots I knew were tied in her chest. "Just take a good long look."

Everybody did. I could hear a hot dog wrapper blowing against the backstop.

"All he wanted was to play," she said. "All he wanted was to be just like you."

Sure, her words were for everybody. But she had twenty-two years of experience as Mrs. Ruttlemyer. We both knew whom she was really talking to.

"Just like you," she whispered, her words barely squeezing out yet somehow filling the outfield, the sky, the little place in your heart where you like to hide bad things. She walked off the mound with her head down, like a pitcher that had just given up the game-winning hit.

So many tears were shed that the field would have been unplayable. People had tasted the wormwood of their prejudice. They had seen how vicious the human animal could be. Even vampires didn't kill their young, even when the young were decades old.

There was no memorial service. I wrote the eulogy, but nobody ever got to read it, not even Dana. There was talk of filing criminal charges against the Turnbulls, but nobody had the stomach to carry it through. What happened that day was something that people spent a lot of time trying to forget.

But that victory rang out across the ensuing years, a Liberty Bell for the living dead in Sawyer Creek. Vampires were embraced by the community, welcomed into the Chamber of Commerce, one was even elected mayor. Roscoe Turnbull has three vampires on his team this season.

That Sawyer Cup still sits on my mantel, even though I never set foot on a diamond after that day. Sometimes when I look at the trophy, I imagine it is full of blood. They say that winning takes sacrifice. But that's just a myth.

Still, all myths contain a kernel of truth, and even a myth can make you shiver.

###

THIRST

Sally hadn't rained in days.

She hid under the porch when Mom opened the screen door. The wood of the porch bent and groaned above her head. Mom's shadow fell across the sunlit cracks between the boards, and Sally knew it was time. She hated being one of the stupid old rain people.

She wanted to be like Melanie, with a blue dress and fine yellow hair and no freckles and skin that didn't turn pink on the first spring day. But Mom said Sally was a rain girl, and that was that. Rain girls weren't supposed to be pretty, even with rainbows in their hair.

And raining was so much trouble. How could you have fun when you had to fight the sun and mash the clouds together and wring the drops out of the sky? She had to worry about the trees, the flowers and shrubs and vines and thorns and all of them screaming and whining for water. And the people, too. Mom had told her a million times that she had to care about people she didn't even know. Stupid people with their stupid thirsts.

It was so grown-up, all this worry. She wanted to spend her summer catching the frogs that hid in the grass beside the ditch, racing boys down the street on her bicycle, running through butterfly fields with her arms spread wide as the colors dodged and blurred at the edge of her vision. She longed to sit under the stars at the foot of an old oak and just breathe the big air and not think about whether the soil was moist enough. She wanted summer nights, holding hands with Jason if she could gather the nerve.

"Come help me, Sally Ann," Mom called. "Got chores to do."

Mom was on the porch steps now, and Sally could see the veins in her ankles. Mom was dehydrating. Her eyes were faded and rinsed, her face creased with arid distress, her hands cracked like an ancient washwoman's. Mom had started driving the rain at an early age, younger even than Sally. And now she was worn, shriveled, like a sponge that had soaked up too many spills.

The shady space under the porch was a tiny separate world. Outside it, the maddening sun baked the earth and asphalt ran like a river between the neighborhood houses. Sally wished she could lie there forever on her belly in the cool dirt. But it was early afternoon in July, and that meant only one thing.

Time for thunderstorms.

"Sally?" Mom called again.

"Coming, Mom." She skinnied out from under the porch, catching a cobweb with one of her pigtails. Her mother smiled down, her lips a pinch of gray.

She's so tired, Sally thought. Why doesn't she just QUIT?

"That's my good girl," Mom said.

"It must be time, huh?" Sally sniffed the air for rain, but it was too early. Mom's eyes were dry.

Mom turned and walked into the house without answering. Sally followed, letting a couple of flies into the house before slamming the screen door closed. She'd heard that flies bit more before a storm, but she didn't believe the saying was true.

Dad was sprawled on the couch, fanning himself with a newspaper. The paper was opened to the sports section. For a spiteful moment, she felt like raining out a few baseball games.

Dad was a demolition man. He ran a wrecking ball and worked as a dynamiter when he had the chance. But there weren't a lot of buildings to tear down in this dying town. Nobody wanted to build here. Too hot. The concrete clung to steel bones and waited, waited, waited, while the windows and doors held their breath.

Mom sat at the table and folded her hands. Sally wished Mom wouldn't wear those ugly scarves on her head. They made her look like a gypsy. People talked enough the way it was, without giving them more whisper ammunition.

Dad rolled to his feet and flapped the papers, then threw them to the floor. He growled and kicked the edge of the couch. Mom closed her eyes and turned down the corners of her mouth and her eyelashes flickered like electric moths. Outside, the sky grew darker.

Across town or country, one of the wind people was at work, sending chapped leaves and candy wrappers skittering across parking lots and sidewalks. Sally sat at the table across from her mother as the breeze rattled the screen door.

Dad pounded the walls with the bottom of his fists.

The sky grew charcoal gray.

Mom whimpered.

A raindrop fell, ticking off the shingles like a small stone.

"Come on, Sally. Come on and cry," Mom said.

But Sally wasn't the least bit sad.

"I need help, honey. I can't do it alone." Mom's voice nearly broke. She clenched her parched hands.

Sally didn't want to mourn. Why should she weep just so the dumb grass could grow and puddles could fill and cows could drink and the world could be blue and cool?

Dad knocked over the lamp. Thunder whimpered in the distance.

"Sally, please," Mom whimpered. She was too eager to serve. Just a dishrag too soon threadbare, a gray mop-head limp from swabbing, a puckered lemon squeezed dry of juice. Sally grew more angry than sad when thinking of Mom's years of sacrifice.

Dad put a boot through the sheet rock wall and lightning flashed and thunder split the sky. Sally wanted to be like him and bring the thunder. That was braver and crueler. None of these foolish tears.

Mom was behind schedule, not matching Dad's ruckus. Her weakness threw her timing off. Soon it would all be up to Sally. And that made Sally damp with rage.

She closed her eyes and thought of Mom, who was barely able to summon a good dew. Mom was failing and fading. Just as Sally would be in twenty-five years. And with that realization, the tears came, slowly at first, then faster.

Drops rattled off the roof and Sally looked out the window. Through her tears she saw streaks of silver-gray, the small diamond drops bouncing and breaking on the earth, the ground drinking the gift she had made. Mom had stopped trying to cry, only sat and watched with a pleased smile, proud to have a daughter who was her spitting image.

Sally cried rhythmically and easily now that the clouds had burst. Dad stormed up a storm and rumbled his rage and the sky echoed his anguish. Sally cried until she was weary from weeping. Rain fell and the plains refreshed themselves, pricked up its corn, stiffened its marigolds and shivered its thick trees.

Then the wind person must have grown tired of puffing and blowing, because the clouds broke apart and spread out like wool jam on gray bread. Dad fell on the couch, exhausted, the summer heat of effort making his forehead bead with sweat.

Sally sniffed and blinked. She dried her eyes with the corner of the tablecloth. At least Mom hadn't sliced onions, as she had done last week when Sally's tears refused to fall.

Outside, the sun came, and the last drips fell from the rusty gutter onto the porch. The air was scrubbed clean, its molecules full of fresh green, smelling of renewed life. Dad returned to the couch.

"Good job, honey," Mom said, patting Sally's hand. "I'm afraid I'm just not much help these days."

"Why do you keep on, then? Why can't—"

"—someone else do it? There is no one else, at least in this part of the country. Only me. And now you, dear."

"But it's not fair. Making the rain is hard work. Melanie Higgins doesn't have to do it. Vince and Selena don't have to worry about crying when the sky needs them. And Jason—"

"But you're not like them."

"Why not?"

Mom shrugged. "The world needs rain. We bring it. Who are we to know the reason for such things?"

"Could be worse." Dad had opened the paper again and spoke from behind the rumpled pages. "Them in the Sahara, the Mojave, the Painted Desert, the Gobi , places where the rain people died out, them folks are suffering. We ain't so bad off here. We got shade trees and a roof over our heads."

"But—"

"No more buts, ifs, or druthers, young lady," Dad said, dipping the newspaper to send his stormy glare at Sally. "You'll do as your mother says."

"But I want to be like everybody else." Sally stood and stamped her foot. "I won't be a rain girl for the rest of my life. I won't, I won't, I WON'T."

Sally ran to her room and threw herself on the bed. She put her head under the pillow and sobbed. The rain started again, mad on the windowsill. It poured until Mom came in an hour later to soothe her.

"What do you want to do?"

"I don't know. What do you want to do?"

What Sally really wanted to do was exactly what they were doing now. Nothing.

Jason skipped a rock across the creek, a four-hopper. He looked coolly at the sky, at the fat orange gob of sun sinking toward September. Sally watched him. She liked to watch him.

He had blue eyes and a flame of hair, and his shoulders were starting to broaden. His voice was deeper than those of the other boys on the block. He was different, better than the others.

They sat on the smooth black rocks and watched a crawdad make a milky mud-trail on the bottom of the creek. The shade was pleasant. The high trees fanned them. Or maybe one of the wind people was breathing hard.

"School starts in a few weeks."

"Yeah," Sally said. "Where has summer gone?"

"Where did it even come from?"

Sally looked at him closely. Did he know? Or was he just guessing? She decided he was just making strange talk. He couldn't know about the season people, about the tug-of-war between the spring folks and the summer hotheads, the nerveless winterers and the brown brittle autumn makers. Ordinary people didn't know the true workings of nature.

Sally hugged her knees to her chest. Jason, eyes of ice, she thought. You should be a winter boy. Because your eyes are cold and blue and you see the end of things.

But she said nothing, only listened to the music that some creek minder was playing, a tinkle here, a glug and gurgle there, a soft swallowing splash and a fishy laugh.

Jason was tossing a mudball in the air, spinning it in his quick hands.

"Seventh grade next year. That means we'll have Miss Fenwick. It's going to be a long year." Jason's head bobbed as he followed the path of the mudball.

"She's not so bad," Sally said. They sat in the long shadow of evening for a while without speaking.

Then, "Jason?"

"Hmm?"

"Is Melanie going to be your girl next year?"

The mudball stopped, held in one hand. "Melanie?"

"I saw you kissing her on the playground last spring."

The mudball started again, more slowly. "That was just kissing. I don't want Melanie to be my girl."

"But Melanie says—"

"Melanie says a lot of things."

Another silence, shorter this time, and the gap was filled with the first night noises as the man who tucked in the sun started his daily labors. The insect conductor lifted her arms somewhere, counting out the beats with a dandelion wand. Crickets and late birds played their notes, and a beagle across the meadow flubbed its lines.

Sally's heart was beating fast, like Dad's during a thunderstorm. "Are you going to you...you know-- have a girl?"

"Been thinking about it."

The mudball landed in the black water of the creek. Jason moved from his rock to sit beside Sally. The stone cooled beneath them.

"Been thinking, maybe you. If you want to, that is." Jason's breath was close, an odd whispering wind, warm but fresh on her cheek, followed by lips on hers, all as mysterious as night.

Sally skipped into the living room, whistling.

"You've been chipper lately," Mom said.

"It's autumn. I don't have to do those stupid afternoon rains anymore."

Mom put her hands on her hips. "Now, I can tell it's more than that. I was a girl once, too."

Sally found that hard to imagine, looking at Mom now. A thousand years of sorrow were etched on her forehead. "Well, anyway, thunderstorm season is over."

"It's been weeks since a rain, though. I think we'll need one later this evening. Getting a little dusty outside."

That evening, Dad pitched his usual fit. Sally tried to squeeze some tears out of the corners of her eye, but it was no use. Her heart was too light, a helium balloon, a seagull, pink cotton candy.

Mom sliced two onions. No good. Thunder shook the windowpanes, but the sky kept its bottom and hoarded its liquid jewels.

Weeks passed. School had started, the fields withered, dwarf corn shriveled, peas rattled in their pods, oldtimers leaned on fences and recollected the great droughts of their youth.

Sally tried every night, tried to be sad, tried to weep. She sniffed onions and thought of sick puppies and broken toys and funerals and other sorrowful things. Once she even poked herself in the eye. Still the fields lay dry and aching.

She saw Jason every day at school, and they walked holding hands every afternoon, kissing by the creek when the other children weren't around. The creek was thinner now, weak between the smooth stones, quieter and less merry. The sky was cloudless.

The autumn makers rolled out golden rugs, applied their red and orange brushstrokes, underpinned the landscape with brown. The trees thirsted and gave up their leaves too soon. The ground cracked and sighed. Still no rain.

October came, on dried batwings.

The Halloween dance was coming up at school. Sally sat at her desk, excited by the chaff in the air and that sweet melancholy aroma the grass gave off just before the winter women put it to sleep. Sally cut her paper pumpkins and bundled her corn by its bleached husks. She wanted a drink of water, but the school principal had shut off the fountain because of the water shortage.

Sally didn't feel guilty. So what if the pumpkins were shrunken and scarecrows withered at their posts? She had tried to rain. It wasn't her fault that all those stupid people shook their fists at the sky and sent up airplanes with silver iodide and cast their hopeful doomed eyes at each occasional cloud. She hadn't asked to be a rain girl, anyway.

Classes were dismissed early for the holiday, but Sally stayed to finish the decorations that would hang in the gym on twisted orange and black streamers. She stood to stretch her legs. Her fingers were sore from scissoring. But she didn't mind. Tonight she would be dancing with Jason.

She walked down the hall on the pillows of daydreams. She had a new dress to wear, one her mother had made as Sally sat at the table each evening and tried to drum some rain. Mom had worked the needle and kept looking up at Sally, her eyes red and dry and hollow. Dad had cursed, but only managed to summon some heat lightning.

Sally opened the school door. Even the sunshine didn't bother her. She thought of the dress that was waiting at home. It was blue, the color of a mean sky, and she couldn't wait to wear it. Even Melanie never had a dress like it.

Four steps across crisp grass.

Shapes over by the swing set.

Somewhere, the wind people gasped.

Jason was kissing Melanie.

Sally stared, disbelieving.

The shapes blurred, shimmered in her damp eyes.

"Sally, wait," Jason called. Melanie laughed.

Sally ran toward home without looking back.

The sky opened its throat, empty of clouds but spewing a silent silver grief. Her heart was as leaden as the air. Her drenched clothes clung to her like a second skin.

She found home and bed and Mom, but still the ache tore at her heart.

"What's wrong, honey?" Mom said, sitting on the bed. Beneath the concern in Mom's voice, Sally heard elation and relief. Rain pounded on the shingles, steady and untiring and passionate. Puddles stretched themselves outward and rivers swelled with Sally's hurt. Shriveled apples were knocked from their branches and umbrellas collapsed like tissues.

Ordinary people watched from their windows as the sudden rain fell. Minutes before, not a cloud had dotted the sky. But in the people's happiness they forgot all about the oddness of it, too joyful that the dry spell was broken. They stuck out their tongues and quenched themselves.

The rain kept on into the night and throughout the next day, soaking all the kids who went to the Halloween dance. Then two more days without pause, the ground saturated and the ditches swollen, brown water churning over sewer grates, all pulled by the gravity girl toward the far gulf. The creeks bloated, and the creek minders wrung their hands, flustered by the loss of control.

On the fourth day, when the rivers leapt their banks and people evacuated their front porches in rowboats, when everyone huddled in yellow slickers and no dry socks remained, then, then, they started worrying.

Young hearts are slow in healing.

Sally drowned November.

###

WHEN YOU WEAR THESE SHOES

When you wear these shoes, you go places.

Oxford shoes, these are. Sure, that may sound fancy, but take a look. Just plain shoes, really.

Scuffed all across the top of the toe box, heels about worn down to the tacks, tongues hanging out like a hound dog's on a hot August day. Insoles nearly worn through, meeting up with my skin where the holes in my socks are.

But my feet never blister, nosiree. Never had a corn or bunion one. And I've put many a mile on them. Tens of thousands, if you can believe it. But I see you don't.

I'm just getting these shoes broke in, in fact. You take a new shoe. It's hard and stiff as a brick and the leather smells like it's still got cow inside. You got to pry it on with a metal shoe horn, then squeak around with miserable toes for a few months. Strings are brittle, too, won't hardly stay tied. You end up doing more bending over than walking.

And walking's what it's really all about, ain't it? Racking up miles, one shoe in front of the other. That's what brings our kind out to these hiking trails. Ain't it funny how they have to set aside places where you can walk these days? You can't just up and hoof around any old place.

And in country like this, out in the middle of nowhere with the sun long gone, not many people would let a stranger even so much as speak to them. But I reckon a strapping young fellow like you don't scare easy.

I can tell you're a traveler, same as me. You with your backpack and two hundred dollar boots with cleats so deep you can walk on marbles. Them boots are designed by computer, I hear, what is it they call that brand? Oh, yeah, "a unique combination of comfort and durability." Them words add about eighty bucks to the cost, I'd imagine.

Now, don't look at me like that. I read things. I may not seem like much, just like these old shoes don't seem like much. But you ought not judge a book by its cover. Since you don't mind me sitting here and sharing your fire, I might just open up this old book. Meaning my story, that is. Or more rightly, the story of the shoes.

Ah, there we go. I still like to rest my feet a little now and then. Something to eat? Why, yes, thank you kindly, that would hit the spot. Tuna fish is good energy food. Only, don't mind me if I slip up and talk with my mouth full now and again.

I was about your age, more or less, when I walked into the little town of Seymour, Indiana. I worked the fields, a harvest hand, moving from crop to crop with the seasons. It was a good, carefree life for a young man back then. A lot of my old school chums went straight into business, bought vests with shiny black buttons and pairs of fancy Florsheims. But I never had that sort of ambition.

I wanted to poke about, see the world a little, sleep under the stars at night. Now, in all the miles I've walked, all the different places I've been, those stars are the same as the ones that are starting to wink on up there right now. It's comforting to me, lying down with the earth snug at my back and knowing those stars will be the same day after day and mile after mile.

It was in Seymour that I bought these shoes. I was flush, had a pocketful of green from a good corn haul, and it was burning a hole in my pocket. I wasn't the reckless sort, I never got much joy out of blowing two weeks of work on a night at the happy house. Now, I'm not against a drink now and then, or a little professional companionship, but I like to make my memories stretch out, same as my walking legs.

If I was careful, I could make a payday last me a few weeks, weeks I wouldn't have to sweat under the Midwestern sun with chaff cutting at the back of my neck. There was this little second-hand store in Seymour, the kind of place where you can pick up a few goods on the cheap. I found a couple of pairs of denim jeans, which wear out fast doing farm work, let me tell you. I suspect you've never done much farm work, have you?

Now, you can take that look off your face. If a man's smart enough to get out of bone-wearing work, I say more power to him.

Anyway, I got those jeans and a cotton shirt that had only one elbow patched, and I found a good wide-brimmed hat. I figured that was about all I could fit in my rucksack. I liked to travel light then, same as I do now. I was going up to the counter to pay when I saw the shoes.

I wasn't crazy about shoes back then. I thought one pair was pretty much like any other. And that black mud of Indiana found ways into any kind of shoe, let me tell you. If you didn't have a hole between the toes, it would work through the string-holes and down the tongue until it found skin to bother. If you had on boots, it would squish up and climb your leg, then sneak on down from there.

Anyway, I saw these shoes, sitting on the floor beside a pasteboard box full of rotted harness parts. They were kind of off by themselves, away from the rest of the footwear, almost like they got up and walked there. I stooped over and picked them up, and as soon as I ran my fingers over their dusty stitches, I knew I had to have them.

You ever had that kind of feeling? Like you suddenly want something you could live very well without, but it's almost like it's choosing you instead of the other way around? Then you have to have it, no matter the cost in money, pain, or pride? I expect a lot of bad marriages are made in just that fashion.

But this was just an old pair of shoes, and the price was right, or so I thought. The clod-hoppers I was wearing at the time were more hole than shoe anyway, so I went out and sat down on the old wooden porch of that store and took them off. I shucked my socks and let my toes see a little sunshine for a change. They were blanched white and kind of wrinkly, like they'd been in the water too long. But a breeze came down from Dakota-ways and perked them right up.

When my feet were feeling refreshed, I put on my other change of socks. Then I tossed them old clod-hoppers under the porch for the mice to nest in. I picked up that pair of shoes I had bought, kind of like you pick up a kitten, and held them up to the sun. They were solid, built to last, the way things were made back then.

I slipped on the right one first. It was like that shoe sucked my foot inside the way it went on so easy. You know how some shoes will squeeze your toes together so the toenail cuts into the toe beside it, all the way down the line? Well, these had plenty of wiggling room, and the shank curved up just right under my arch—now you're giving me that look again. Well, I've studied up on shoes, let me tell you. Call it a hobby of mine.

Then I tied the string, and it was almost like it tied itself, it looped together so easy. I put the other one on the same way. Another snug fit. I don't know if you know it or not, but a lot of people's feet are different sizes from each other. And a shoe don't always match up perfect with its mate. But these were lucky shoes.

As soon as I got them on and stood up, I felt like a teenager again. I mean, my feet felt young. I could have danced for a month of Sundays. Out of the blue, I got a notion to walk up and see Lake Erie. I had the money and, Lord knows, I had the time. I gathered up my things and balled them up in my rucksack and I was on my way.

I walked days, not stopping at all. At night, I'd lay down and sleep, take off my shoes so both them and my feet could air out a little. Food was easy to come by, it was the tail end of the harvest season, and back then practically everybody had a garden out back of the house. Who would notice if a cabbage head or acorn squash walked off in the night? And, of course, thanks to that other famous traveler, Johnny Appleseed, there was always apples.

Johnny Appleseed's a made-up story, you say? Well, I used to think so myself, only now I'm not so sure.

I made about forty miles a day. Yeah, that's a lot, but the miles roll on by when your feet keep working, when your shoes are putting one in front of the other right steady. As soon as the sun went down, I could rest, although I wasn't ever really tired for some reason. It was almost like the shoes had charged up my feet, given them fresh energy.

Well, I reached Erie in four days, and I looked out across that blue sparkly water while that fishy smell played around in my nose. You been there? Yeah, it's brownish now, kind of scummy-looking last time I saw it, but it was blue back then. Anyway, I thought I'd better find a little work there, maybe loading barges, to keep a little coin coming in. But I got the urge to walk on around the lake, up to the canals, then over to Niagara Falls. Now, there's a pretty place. I wish I could have stood there forever, watching that old water roaring down in a billion silver streaks and that cool mist settling on my skin.

But I didn't stay. I had to get to the Adirondacks, because the leaves were just starting to change over for autumn. Did you know Adirondack is a Mohawk word that means "they eat trees"? When you get around, you learn things. Well, I dogged around up in them old worn mountains that looked like they were covered with a quilt, there was so many patches of red, purple, and gold. I went down through the Catskills, then over to New York City to see the Statue of Liberty. That's one beautiful lady, that is. Symbol of freedom.

I like freedom and all the things that stand for it. So I went down to Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell, and it really was cracked just like I'd heard. Then it was a hop, skip, and a jump over to D.C. with all its monuments and historic places. Walking days, sleeping nights, not working, but somehow never going hungry. Seems like food just kept coming my way. Like that tuna fish you gave me.

So I kept on down the coast. With winter coming on and all, I figured it would be best to make for the Gulf of Mexico. I hoofed through these here Appalachian Mountains, oh, yes, I've been through them three times now, only back then there wasn't one long trail like there is now. You kind of had to make up your way where you found it. But the shoes didn't seem to mind.

I went down through Atlanta, followed Sherman's tracks for a while,, then veered on over to Mobile and New Orleans. I spent the winter between Beaumont and Lubbock by way of San Antone, just walking under those wide open skies with the smell of cattle and trail dust in my nose, acres and acres of sun-scorched mesquite and tumbleweed with barely a soul to bother me. I covered some of those old pioneer trails, you could still see where the wagon wheels had carved ruts in the red clay.

I saw the sun sparkling fire off the snowcaps of the Sangre Cristo Range and I threaded up through the Rockies following the Rio Grande and the Gunnison. Boy, my toes just about froze off. It was like these shoes had two dead tree-stumps in them. But the shoes just kept on, one in front of the other, except at night, like I said.

Let me stop here for a minute and slip off these shoes. Here, see how easy they slide off, smooth as kid gloves, I tell you. I invite you to hold them, rub your hands over them, smell the leather, no, not the inside, I'm not that mean. Just soak in their history and all the places they've been, all the dirt they've kicked up.

Now, go ahead, try them on, just so's you can get a real feel for them. Go ahead. Don't be shy. They won't nip at you.

See? See how easy they go on? Never felt something so comfortable, have you? Not even your fancy boots match up. Go on, wiggle your toes some, so you can explore their history a little. Because all the miles have touched them, and changed them, and become a part of them.

Thought they would be too small, did you? Well, I'm not surprised they fit even your big old feet. They got a way of stretching out and making themselves at home, no matter what feet they're wrapped around.

Now where was I? Oh, yeah, then it was over to the Great Salt Lake and around the desert, which was like a lake, only holding yellow and white sand in its banks instead of water. My feet burned like I was walking on the hot coals of hell, but the shoes never quit. On up north to the Matterhorn and Walla Walla, then along the Columbia River over to the foggy Oregon coast. I followed those stormy Pacific cliffs down into California.

At that point I'd been walking for nearly two years, ran, shine, snow, or sleet, like a mailman only without the pay. Every single day I was putting one shoe in front of the other. Every night I took them off and rested, wondering if I really wanted to walk anymore, if it was time to settle down and grow some roots. But in the morning it would be up with the sun and back on with the shoes, and more miles of country laid out in front of me.

I rubbed up against a world of natural wonders along the way, plus lots of things that will never be wrote down in books. And I've met many a fine person along the way, too. Maybe that kind of traveling ain't as romantic as a rich man's with his jet planes and yachts and all, but it gets you more in touch with the salt of the earth.

So I went through California down to the Baja and then back out to the Midwest to hit the corners of the country I'd missed the first time around. And I just kept on and on, all these years.

I see I'm losing you now, you're thinking maybe I'm crazy after all. Well, you see, the walking wasn't my doing. I was just the flesh, the legs and feet. I was just the means of transportation, same as a car or boat.

What it was, was the shoes. The shoes wanted to go places. The shoes made me keep walking, putting one foot in front of the other every single day. The shoes that got themselves on my feet every morning at daybreak and wouldn't let me walk away from them at night.

You laugh. Just an old pair of shoes, you say. Just a crazy old coot spinning a yarn for his supper. Go on and laugh.

My, how I've rambled on. Plumb talked the night away. Look yonder at the sun just starting to pink up the sky, slipping over them mountains. Time just flies when you're caught up in a good story.

Now, in all that walking, and all those miles, I've had plenty of time to think. And I'm thinking that these shoes need some new feet. I'm thinking that these shoes ain't even begun to travel.

And now that the sun's up, don't you feel like they've made themselves at home? Don't you feel like they've grown right on your feet? Ain't they just itching for you to start putting one in front of the other? Remember what I said about things choosing you?

You don't?

You're taking them off?

Drat darn it amighty.

I was looking forward to resting a spell. Nothing personal, mind you. I just have to try that every month or so, in hopes that these shoes are ready for a change. But maybe you ain't got it in you. Maybe you don't know how to wear them like they ought to be worn.

So you just put on your fancy boots and curl up your shiny sleeping bag and get on with your high-dollar walking. At least your trail's got an end to it. At least you got a choice.

Me, I expect I'm heading down to Florida. The shoes feel like touching a bit of Gulf water. Mind your step, and thanks for the grub. What's that the poet said, about miles to go?

See, one shoe in front of the other. That's how you go places. That's how you get there. When you wear these shoes, you know.

###

INVISIBLE FRIEND

The evening was Halloween cool, the sun creeping toward the horizon. It would be dark soon, and the games would be over. Margaret could stay out as late as she wanted, but not Ellen. Ellen had a mom and a bed and a life to worry about.

"Come out," Ellen called.

The scraggly shrubbery trembled. Margaret was hiding under the window of the mobile home where Ellen lived. For an invisible person, Margaret wasn’t so good at hide-and-seek, but she loved to play. Maybe you got that way when you were dead.

The mobile home vibrated with the noise of the vacuum cleaner. Mom was inside, cleaning up. Taking a break from beer and television. Maybe cooking a supper of sliced wieners in cheese noodles.

"I know you're in there," Ellen said.

She stooped and peered under the lowest brown leaves of the forsythia. Vines snaked through the shrubbery. In the summer, yellow flowers dangled from the tips of the vines. Ellen and Margaret would pull the white tendrils from the flowers, holding them to the sun so the sweet drops of honeysuckle fell on their tongues. They would laugh and hold hands and run into the woods, playing tag until night fell. Then they would follow the fireflies into darkness.

But only in the summer. Now it was autumn, with the leaves like kites and November rushing toward them from Tennessee. Now Ellen had school five mornings a week, homework, chores if Mom caught her. Not much time for games, so she and Margaret had to make the most of their time together.

The bushes shook again.

"Come out, come out," Ellen called, afraid that Mom would switch off the vacuum cleaner and hear her having fun.

Margaret's long blonde hair appeared in a gap between the bushes. A hand emerged, slender and pale and wearing a plastic ring that Ellen had gotten as a Crackerjack prize. The hand was followed by the red sleeve of Margaret's sweater. At last Ellen's playmate showed her face with its uneven grin.

"Peek-a-boo," Margaret said.

"Your turn to be 'it.'"

The vacuum cleaner suddenly switched off, and the silence was broken only by the brittle shivering of the trees along the edge of the trailer park. Ellen put her index finger to her lips to shush Margaret, then crawled into the bushes beside her. The trailer door swung open with a rusty creak.

Mom looked out, shading her eyes against the setting sun. Ellen ducked deeper into the shrubbery, where the dirt smelled of cat pee. Margaret stifled a giggle beside her. Everything was a game to Margaret. But Margaret wasn't the one who had to worry about getting her hide tanned, and Margaret could disappear if she wanted.

Mom had that look on her face, the red of anger over the pink of drunkenness. She stood in the doorway and chewed her lip. A greasy strand of hair dangled over one eye. Her fists were balled. The stench of burnt cheese powder and cigarettes drifted from the trailer.

"Ellen," Mom called, looking down the row of trailers to the trees. Mom hated Ellen's staying out late more than anything. Except maybe the special teachers at school.

Ellen tensed, hugging her knees to her chest.

"She looks really mad," Margaret whispered.

"No, she's probably just worried."

A thin rope of smoke drifted from the trailer door. "She burned supper," Margaret said.

"It's my fault. She's really going to whip me this time."

Mom called once more, then slammed the door closed. Margaret rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue out at the mobile home. Ellen laughed, though her stomach felt full of bugs.

"Let's go to my place," Margaret said.

"What if Mom sees me? She can see me, even if she can't see you."

Margaret started crawling behind the row of dying shrubbery. "Your mom won't find you there."

"She always finds me anywhere." Ellen hung her head, near tears.

Margaret crawled back and poked her in the side. "Don't be a gloomy Gus."

Ellen slapped Margaret's hand away. "I'm not no gloomy Gus."

"Why don't you let me get her? I can make her hurt like she makes you hurt."

Ellen folded her arms and studied Margaret's brown eyes. Margaret would do it. She was a good friend. And in her eyes, behind the sparkle, was a darkness buried deep. Maybe you looked at things that way when you were dead.

"No. It's better if we keep you secret," Ellen said. "I already got in trouble at school, telling the special teachers about you."

Margaret poked her in the ribs again. Ellen smiled this time.

"Follow me. Hurry," Margaret said.

Margaret scrambled ahead, staying low beneath the hedge. Ellen looked at the trailer door, checked for any sign of movement in the windows. Then she crawled after Margaret, the dead twigs sharp against the skin of her palms and knees.

From the end of the hedge, they dashed for the concealment of the forest. Ellen half expected to hear Mom's angry shout, telling her to get inside right this minute. But then they were under the trees and lost among the long shadows.

Margaret laughed with the exhilaration of escape. She ran between the oaks with their orange leaves, the silver birch, the sweet green pine, ignoring the branches and briars that tugged the fabric of her sweater. Ellen followed just as recklessly, her footsteps soft on the rotting loam of the forest floor.

The girls passed a clearing covered by crisp leaves. Margaret veered away to a path that followed the river. The air smelled of fish and wet stones. Ellen stumbled over a grapevine, and by the time she looked up, Margaret had disappeared.

Ellen looked around. A bird chittered in a high treetop. The sun had slipped lower in the sky. Purple and pink clouds hung in the west like rags on a clothesline. She was alone.

Alone.

The special teachers at school told Ellen it was worse to be alone than have invisible friends. "You can't keep playing all by yourself," they told her. "You have to learn to get along with others. You have to let go of the past."

When Ellen told the special teachers about what happened at home, the teachers' eyes got wide. They must have talked to Mom, because when Ellen got home that day, she got her hide tanned harder than ever. Someday Mom was going to lose her temper and do something really bad.

Ellen thought of Mom, with fists clenched and supper burnt, waiting back at the trailer. Ellen shivered. She didn't want to be alone.

She put her hands to her mouth. "Margaret!"

She heard a giggle from behind a stand of trees. The red sweater flashed and vanished. Margaret was playing another game, trying to make Ellen get lost by leading her deeper into the woods. Well, Ellen wasn't going to be scared.

And she wasn't going to cry. Sometimes the girls at school made her cry. They would stand around her in a circle and say she was in love with Joey Hogwood. Well, she hated Joey Hogwood, and she hated the girls. Ellen wished that Margaret still went to school so that she would have a friend to sit beside.

Margaret wouldn't want her to cry. Margaret would just pretend to be bad for a little while, then pop out from behind a tree and tag her and make her "It."

Laughter came down from the hill where the pines were thickest. To the left, a sea of kudzu vines choked the trees. A run-down chicken coop had been swallowed by the leaves, with only a few rotten boards showing under the green. That's where Margaret was hiding.

Ellen ran across the kudzu, the leaves tickling her calves above her socks. She could read Margaret like a book. That was the best thing about invisible playmates: they did what you wanted them to do.

Right now, Ellen wanted Margaret to go just over the hill, into the new part of the forest. She reached the pines and started down the slope. Half a dozen houses were sprinkled among the folds of the hill. A highway ran through the darkening valley, the few cars making whispers as they rolled back and forth. The headlights were like giant fireflies in the dusk.

"Margaret," Ellen called.

A giggle floated up from the highway. Margaret was there by the ditch, waving her arm. Ellen smiled to herself. Margaret wouldn't leave her. Ellen picked her way down the slope, almost slipping on the dewy fallen leaves, until she reached the ditch.

"Tag, you're 'It,'" Margaret said, touching Ellen's shoulder.

Margaret's golden-white hair blazed in the lights of an approaching car. She spun and raced across the highway, the roar of the engine drowning out Ellen's scream. The car passed right through Margaret, not slowing at all. The red eyes of the tail lights faded into darkness. Ellen hurried across the road.

"You're a crazy-brain," Ellen said.

Margaret shook her head, her hair swaying from side to side. "Am not."

"Are, too."

"You're still 'It,'" Margaret said, running away. The darkness was more solid now, the sun fading in slow surrender. Margaret climbed over the low stone wall that bordered the highway.

"Crazy-brain." Ellen scrambled over the wall after her, into the graveyard. The alabaster angels and crosses and markers were like ghosts in the night. Margaret had vanished.

"Margaret?"

Laughter echoed off the granite.

Invisible friends didn't disappear unless you allowed it. They didn't hurt you or scare you or make you cry, at least not on purpose. They didn’t tease you about Joey Hogwood, or make you sit in a chair and listen to all the reasons why invisible friends couldn’t exist.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," Ellen said. She scrambled between the cold gravestones. The grass was damp and full of autumn, and the air smelled of fall flowers. A sharp curve of moon had sliced its way into the black sky.

Ellen found Margaret beside a church-white marker.

"Mom's going to be mad," Ellen said.

"She's just an old meanie."

"She's really going to kill me." Ellen sat in the grass beside Margaret and the dew soaked her dress.

"Don't go back," Margaret said.

"I have to go back."

Margaret folded her arms across her chest and stuck out her lower lip. "In the summer, we got to play until way late."

"It's not summer anymore," Ellen said, looking at the sky. Three stars were out.

"Is that why the fireflies are gone?"

Ellen laughed. "You're such a dummyhead."

The moon was higher now, pale on Margaret's face. Her eyes were dark hollows. "I'm not no dummyhead."

"Yes, you are," Ellen said, her voice sing-songy and shrill. "Margaret is a dummyhead, Margaret is a dummyhead."

Margaret leaned back against the marker. Her shoulders trembled and thin lines of tears tracked down her cheeks. Ellen stopped teasing. With invisible playmates, you always felt what they felt.

"I'm sorry," Ellen whispered.

Margaret was bone silent.

"Hey," Ellen said. "Now who's the gloomy Gus?"

She poked Margaret in the side, feeling the hard ridges of her friend's ribs. It was funny how invisible friends could be solid, if you thought of them that way.

"Sometimes it's hard to remember," Margaret said, sniffing. "You know. What it was like."

Ellen poked again. "It’s not that great."

Margaret twitched and tried to hold back her smile. Then the laughter broke and she blinked away the last of her tears. They watched the moon for a while and listened to the rush of the passing cars.

"I miss summer," Margaret said.

"Me, too."

"You don't have to go back."

They could play hide-and-seek all night and never have to hide in the same place twice. A few gnarled trees clutched at the ground with their roots, perfect for climbing. Honeysuckle vines covered the walls and gates, waiting for summer when they would again sweeten the air. Best of all was the quiet. Here, no one ever yelled in anger.

But Ellen didn't belong here. Not yet.

"I'd better get home," Ellen said. "I'm going to get my hide tanned as it is."

Margaret tried a pouty face, then gave up. All playtimes had to end. Ellen waved good-bye and started back over the stone wall.

"See you tomorrow?" Margaret called after her.

Ellen turned and looked back, but her friend had already vanished.

Margaret's voice came from everywhere, nowhere. "It won't hurt."

"Promise?"

"Even if it did, I would tickle you and make you laugh."

"Good night."

Ellen paused at the edge of the highway and waited for the next car. She could step out before the driver even saw her. Margaret had promised it wouldn't hurt. But maybe dead people always said that.

A car came over the hill, its engine roaring like a great beast, the headlights prowling for prey. Ellen ducked into the ditch and waited. Five seconds away, maybe. One jump, a big bump, and then she could be with Margaret.

Her lungs grew hard and cold, she couldn’t breathe, and the car was maybe three seconds away. She told herself it was only another game, just hopscotch. She tensed. Two seconds.

Margaret whispered in her ear. "I lied. It really does hurt."

One second, and the car whizzed past, its exhaust lingering like a sigh.

"See you tomorrow?" Margaret said, sitting on the stone fence, pale under the scant moon.

"I guess so."

"You get this way," Margaret said. "When you’re dead, you want to play games all the time."

"I guess I’ll find out someday."

Ellen crossed the highway and tried to drift through the trees the way Margaret could. But it was no use. She was too solid, too real, she belonged too much to the world with its hard wood and hard people and hard rules. If only she were someone's invisible playmate.

But she wasn't. She forgot games, laughter, the red sweater that Margaret had been buried in. Her thoughts were of nothing but Mom and home.

Ellen moved onward through the night, only half-dead, not nearly dead enough.

###

THE NIGHT THE WIND DIED

The wind was heavy.

Too heavy for Wendy, who was only fourteen and didn’t like dry lips. But Mom said Wendy had to blow, push air out of her lungs and past her throat and over the pink rug of her tongue until the sky gave way.

Wendy would rather breathe shallowly, taking tiny sips of air as if it were some bubbly soft drink. She wanted to flare her nostrils delicately, like one of those thin glamorous models in the smoking advertisements, though smoking was totally gross. Wendy would deal with a little ickiness in order to be ladylike and dainty for a half a minute or so.

But, no, she was the wind girl, and there was nothing for it but to purse her lips, gulp and grab the air, suck in like a starving fish, swallow, suck some more, and then hold it, heavy as gold, inside her chest until the moment was just so.

Sometimes the moment was close, sometimes the moment was days away. Waiting, that was the worst part. If it were up to her, she would draw it in and spit it right back out. But sometimes Mom said she had to suffocate until the rain girl or the cloud man or Mister Thunder was ready.

Take today, for instance. Here she was, minding her own business, thinking of her two best friends. Beth and Sue Ellen had been teasing each other all day at school about a boy named Randy. They had met him yesterday at the pool, and of course Wendy wasn’t there, Wendy had to come right home after school and sit on the back porch and huff and blow.

Mom opened the door. "No sign of the rain girl cutting up?"

"She must be happy today."

"Not a cloud in the sky. Still, it’s March, and you’re supposed to blow."

March made Wendy’s mouth tired and her cheeks chapped. March, March, March, which was almost as bad as November, except November was colder, but then you only had to wait for the Snow Boy or his cousin Frost. In March, you had the creek minders and the season people and the rain girl and Mister Thunder and a bunch of ice makers from the Antarctica breathing down your neck, trying to make everything move in its proper patterns.

If only there were one big weather creature, somebody to run all the elements and make the world spin. Then maybe Wendy and all the other makers could be normal again. Why not even leave it to the humans to worry about? Surely a computer was smart enough to do it, if somebody pressed the right buttons.

"Mom, I can feel the bones of my ribs," Wendy said. "Can I let go now?"

Mom cupped her palm over her eyes and studied the horizon. Over the last few days, the edge of the earth had turned from brown to green. "Not a sign of the others."

"Can’t I just go by myself? I promise to only make it a little wind, so that not too many leaves get on the lawns of the people who are already mowing their grass."

"This is March. A lot of makers need to join together, at least here in the early days of the month."

Wendy told herself to just remember the "lamb" part. In like a lion, out like a lamb. Come to think of it, why couldn’t animals run the wind and sun and moon and water? That would work so much better.

Then November could be in like bird, out like a turkey. December could be in like a dove and out like a polar bear, and so on. Then Wendy wouldn’t have to be the wind girl and could hang out with her friends.

But right now there was nothing but the stupid waiting.

While Beth and Sue Ellen were chatting with Randy.

Oh Randy, who no doubt was gorgeous, most certainly a life guard, with muscles and water-resistant hair and probably his driver’s license already. And here Wendy was, stuck on her back porch, choking herself, her lungs as swollen as balloons, while Beth was probably saying something like, "Randy, do you know how to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?"

Beth was the flirty one, she would giggle when she said silly things, and Sue Ellen was already doing a decent job of stretching out a bathing suit, so Wendy would have no chance anyway. She never had a chance, because all the other boys wanted "normal" girls.

Who would ever want to kiss a girl who would probably ram his tongue all the way down her throat until he tasted whatever she’d had for lunch? Who wanted to sit around and hold hands while the girl beside him gasped and wheezed like a sick whale? What guy would put up with Wendy’s Mom standing beside them on the porch, asking if they wanted lemonade and telling the boy he couldn’t stay too much longer because Wendy had chores.

Oh, how she wished she could just let the wind fall, leak out on the plains and oceans of the world. Let the wind slither down the mountains, let it sink in the valleys and trickle down along the creeks until it disappeared into all the little holes in the ground. Why couldn’t wind just shut up, just lie down and sleep and let the clouds be still and never never never bother Wendy again?

"My belly feels full," Wendy said to Mom.

"What did you have for lunch?"

"A peanut butter sandwich and a bunch of grapes. And air, so much air that it makes me sick."

"Wendy, don’t talk like that."

"I want to throw up."

Mom put a worn hand on Wendy’s shoulder, brushed her hair out of her face. "It’s a hard job, honey, but—"

"I know, I know. Somebody has to do it. Lucky me."

"I was the wind girl, too."

"A long time ago. At least you’re through. You get to rest now."

"And you will, too, someday."

Someday. Didn’t Mom know that someday was a million years away? What did grown-ups know about "someday," anyway? You’d think the longer they lived, the more they should realize that time doesn’t last forever. And meanwhile, Randy was all smiles with Beth and Sue Ellen.

"There’s a cloud, Mom," Wendy said, trying to stifle the hope in her voice.

Mom squinted, now that the boy who saw fire was putting the sun to bed and the sky was orange in the west. A lot of the March storms arose as the night came, and that was almost not so bad, because then Wendy could push the air out of her lungs and inhale through her nose and smell the first sprinkles and the thirsty flowers and the freshly-plowed gardens and the silver wetness of clouds.

And, best of all, when the storms came on fast, Wendy could just throw all her breath at the sky and be done with it.

"I don’t think that’s a cloud," Mom said.

"Please let it be a cloud."

The boards of the porch trembled slightly, or at least Wendy thought so. "Aha. Mister Thunder, coming this way."

"I believe that was a truck, honey."

The air grew heavier in Wendy’s lungs. She might be fifteen before the next storm. Why, Beth or Sue Ellen would be practically married to Randy before Wendy even got to meet him.

Mom had been married once. It was something Mom didn’t like to talk about. But why should Wendy be the only one who was uncomfortable?

"What happened to Daddy?" Wendy asked, since it looked like they would be in for a long wait and Mom would have to come up with another creative lie.

Mom sighed and almost stirred a small breeze, but her lungs were too soft, too thin and weak. "Maybe you’re old enough for me to tell you the truth."

"I’m almost fifteen."

"Almost fourteen-and-a-half, you mean."

"Same thing."

"Don’t be in such a hurry to get old, Wendy. I know all your friends make a big deal—"

"Friends? I don’t have friends. I have stupid air in my lungs because everybody thinks the world needs wind. Well, whoop-de-doo, let the flags go limp for all I care." "That’s the same thing I said, back before I met your father."

Wendy had seen pictures of him, a sullen, gray man with small eyes. Mom, at different times, had said he was a sailor, a carpenter, a preacher, and a bank robber. Wendy had no idea which of those were meant as jokes, because Mom was always sad when she talked about the man in the pictures.

"He left us, didn’t he?" Wendy said.

Mom looked off toward the setting sun. Somewhere the fingers of the night maker were preparing to cast a black sheet over the sky. A star shaker had dashed the first tiny dots of light against the darkness. The moon girl was tugging the greenish-white crescent up the opposite horizon from the sunset. This would be a perfect night, if not for Wendy having to hold her breath and Mom turning so quiet and serious.

"He left me," Mom said. "I don’t think he ever left you."

Left. Like Wendy would leave all this blowing-the-wind business in a heartbeat. "Didn’t he love us?"

"Love comes in many ways, sweetheart. You’ll have to find that out the hard way. I could tell you and tell you, but I don’t even know half of the ways and I’m probably wrong about the half I do know."

"So he loved you enough to have me, but not enough to stay."

"He was a good man. But he was just that—a man. He could handle the good times, but responsibility scares even the best of them."

"You mean he left because you were a wind girl?"

"We were different. There’s no plainer way to say it than that."

"Can’t people love people who are different?"

"I think it’s happened before. Mrs. Seaver next doorlikes cats and puzzles and Agatha Christie, while Mr. Seaver likes snakes and football and Stephen King. But it’s different when the two different people are both of the same kind. Makers and people don’t seem to mix too well."

Did that mean Wendy could never even think about kissing Randy? Or any of the boys she knew? Did this wind business have ways of hurting that even love hadn’t invented yet? If she had to give up kissing before she’d even started, she wanted to get unmade from being a maker, and fast.

"So how come you tried?" Wendy asked. "Even when you knew it wouldn’t work."

"Because you always have to hope that it does work. That’s what it’s all about. Even when it seems impossible."

"Is love ever possible?"

Mom stood behind Wendy, lightly rubbing her shoulders. "I needed a child, too. And we needed somebody to run the wind because I knew I wouldn’t be young forever We thought that having you would solve everything, you’d be the magic that kept us together."

"You didn’t answer my question. Is love ever possible?"

The sky was darker now, a bruised shade of purple. More stars had been shaken out and the moon girl was right on schedule.

After a cricket chirped in the stillness, Mom said, "I suppose."

At that moment, Wendy wished she were a rain girl, so she could cry and be done with it. Where were the clouds? Where was that dumb thunder? She wanted to get rid of this wind in a hurry.

Voices came from down the sidewalk. Under the streetlamp, Wendy saw three shadowy figures, then heard Beth’s giggle. The three stepped into the light, Beth on one side, Sue Ellen on the other, and in the middle—oh, sweet mother maker, it must be Randy.

Randy, who was even taller than she imagined, and even in the bad light and him thirty feet away, she could see that his eyes were big and bright and were those dreamy kind that probably looked at you when you talked instead of walking all over your body.

Sue Ellen was closest, and she waved to them on the porch. Sue Ellen was in her blue wool sweater, the one that showed off her fast-developing figure. Wendy hated Sue Ellen at that moment, because Wendy was stuck like a lump in her rocking chair, waiting to make some stupid storm, and was wearing a ratty old sweatshirt.

Beth had her arm locked in Randy’s. Beth had to walk off-balance and kind of leaning over, because Randy was so tall. Beth didn’t seem to mind too much, because she kept falling over and bumping into Randy.

"Hey, Wendy," Beth said, when they were closer. "Hi, Mrs. Wells."

"Hi, girls," Wendy’s mom said.

"Hey," Wendy said, barely a whisper, but the plastic lawn bird spun its wings.

"Randy wanted to meet you," Beth said. Wendy couldn’t tell if Beth was joking. Or maybe she was showing off, because she managed another of her four-star giggles.

"Hi." Wendy flipped her wrist in greeting as if she could care less whether Randy turned away or whether he came closer with those big eyes that didn’t look like they could hurt you.

"Hi, Wendy," Randy said. He was wearing a T-shirt, even though the night was cool, and his forearms had real muscles, not like the arms of ninth-grade boys.

"We’re going for a pizza," Sue Ellen said. "Want to come with us?"

Pizza. With Randy. That meant she’d have garlic breath and there would be no way to kiss him and, anyway, when they slid in the booth it would be Sue Ellen and Wendy on one side, Randy and Beth on the other. Suddenly-clumsy Beth, who would manage to fall into him at least four times before the waitress even brought the pitcher of tea.

But for an hour of those eyes across the table—

"Can I go, Mom?"

"Sorry, honey. You have chores, remember?"

Wendy gazed at the black sky, the clear stars, the moon with no cloud touching it. Perfect weather. Perfect for everything but Wendy getting to do something fun for once.

"I—I’ll see you guys at school tomorrow, I guess," Wendy said, as if she were the last puppy in the pound.

"You sure?" Sue Ellen said, secretly rolling her eyes toward Randy as if to say, "How can you pass up a chance with this dream machine?"

"I have stuff to do. Maybe some other time."

Some other time, right. After Beth was wearing Randy’s ring, and it would shine with real stones, because you could just bet that a guy with a smile like Randy’s had a way with money. Or Sue Ellen might lure him away by wearing one of those blouses that showed off her belly button.

And here Wendy would sit, a stupid old lump.

"Sorry, girls," Wendy’s mom said.

"Too bad," Beth said, and almost managed to sound like she meant it.

"Maybe I’ll see you around," Randy said to Wendy.

"Maybe." She felt swollen and strange, holding in all that wind while trying not to talk like a dork.

The three continued down the sidewalk, Sue Ellen actually skipping, Beth stumbling artfully, Randy walking with his shoulders straight as if he didn’t care whether Wendy was watching him or not.

And he probably didn’t care.

Who would waste time on a stupid wind girl, who could do nothing right but stir the sky?

What guy in his right mind would fall in love with a maker?

And even though she knew it was probably not possible, that Randy could never love her long, she also knew how Mom felt all those years ago. You have to breathe, you have to inhale, you have to walk through the air.

You must use whatever you have to grab whatever you can.

And so she relaxed her throat, clenched the muscles of her stomach, and drew an extra whiff of atmosphere through her nostrils. Now the wind would come, no matter that the cloud girl and Mister Thunder were miles away from getting their work done.

"Wendy, it’s not time yet," Mom said.

"It’s time. It’s either now or never."

The words came out with a soft wheeze, and behind the syllables a true bluster broke forth, rising from a whistle to a screech to a keen to a scream.

Wendy exhaled, and the sky ripped apart. Mom shouted something that was lost in the wind. A soda can rattled along the street. Leaves flapped like a thousand birds lifting, branches bent, the tongue of the mailbox fell open.

And still Wendy let loose, pushing out her anger and her desire, freeing shingles on the houses across the street, making the streetlamp sway. Beth shouted and lost her balance so thoroughly that she fell to the ground.

Sue Ellen spun around and caught her sweater in Mrs. Seaver’s rose bushes. Randy turned and faced the gale, his hair barely tousled even though hedges leaned and shutters knocked wood.

Randy fought against the force of Wendy’s breath, and Wendy kept blowing even as she thought how strange this was, attracting a guy by pushing him away. But he was as strong as he looked and kept coming, elbow raised across his face.

This was the biggest storm Wendy had ever thrown, and all by herself, too. Sure, the lightning woman and Mister Thunder would have helped the show, and a thick rain would add some color, but Wendy was giving it all she had. The wind poured out of her chest and through her mouth and she had never shrieked as she did now.

Randy reached the fence, hanging onto a post as the wind whipped his clothes. He held on until at last Wendy’s lungs were empty.

"Wow," Randy said. "Did you do that?"

Wendy nodded.

"You’re different."

"I’m nothing to sneeze at," she said.

Mom was getting upset, but Wendy didn’t turn around to look at her. Instead, she looked at Randy as Sue Ellen and Beth gathered themselves from where they had fallen.

"Do it again," he said, right to Wendy, his dreamy eyes crinkling as he smiled.

Wendy said, "Will you wait?"

He nodded.

The wind fell off in small currents and eddies, floated between the exhausted trees, settled on the skin of the land. The wind died like an impossible love.

Wendy inhaled, so softly that March seemed September.

And she held her breath.

###

SCARECROW BOY

The sun raised a sleepy eye over the north Georgia hills. Short-leafed pines shivered here and there in the breeze, surrounded by the black bones of oak. Ground mist rose and waltzed away from the light. A stream cut a silver gash in the belly of the valley on its way to the Chattahoochee, the only thing in a hurry on the late-autumn morning. Inside a warped barn, the scarecrow boy rose from its dreams of brown fields and barbwire.

Jerp rubbed his eyes to wipe away the glare of dawn as he walked with his grandpa to the barn. The grass crunched under his boots and his breath painted the thick vapor in the air. A banty rooster bugled a reveille. Wrens fluttered from under the tin eaves of the barn, on their way to scratch earthworms from the hard ground. The sky was ribbed with clouds, a thin threat of snow.

Jerp glanced at the second-story windows of the barn. No scarecrow boy yet. But Jerp knew it was in there somewhere, flitting between cracks with a sound like dry paper crumpling. But maybe it only came alive at night, when the darkness kissed its moon-white face.

"Quit your daydreaming, boy. Got chores to do." Grandpa roped a stream of tobacco juice onto the ground. Steam drifted from his spit and he shifted the bucket from one gloved hand to the other.

Jerp wanted to tell Grandpa again about the scarecrow boy. About how it smiled at him when he was alone in the barn, how it danced from its nail on the wall, swinging its ragged limbs as if caught in a December crosswind. About how Jerp got the feeling that the scarecrow boy wanted something, a thing that only Jerp could give it. But Grandpa would say, "Got no time for such foolishness."

Grandpa held open the barnyard gate and waited until Jerp followed him inside, then closed the gate as carefully as if he were performing a ritual.

"Always close up behind you. We do things right around here." Those were the same words he had said every morning and night when they came down to do chores.

Grandpa passed the bucket to Jerp and removed his gloves. Jerp watched as the big-knuckled hands slammed the hasp into place. The noise echoed across the hill, maybe waking the scarecrow boy.

The milk pail banged against Jerp's knee as he followed Grandpa across the barnyard. A sow grunted under her breath in one of the side pens, mistaking the sound for the arrival of the slop bucket. She rolled over in the marsh of her own waste and glared at Jerp. Jerp wasn't scared of her. He was more worried about the scarecrow boy who would be waiting in rafters or cribs or dark corners for Jerp to step within reach.

Jerp followed Grandpa to the front of the barn. Its rough gray planks were split from decades of harsh weather and ten-penny nail heads stuck out like little brown eyes. Grandpa slid open the heavy door, which hung from wheels that rolled across a steel track overhead. They ducked under the oily ropes that had been dipped in chemicals and stretched across the barn opening. The horse and cows liked to rub their backs against the ropes and the chemicals were supposed to keep the flies away, but the flies were like the sun, reliable and stubborn.

"Gonna be a real corker of a day, Jerp." Grandpa crinkled his eyes, the closest he ever came to smiling. "Maybe we can get some work done around here."

"Yes, sir," Jerp said, checking the barn windows once more for any sign of the scarecrow boy. The windows were empty.

The barn air smelled of hay and dust, manure and animal hair. The cows mooed from their stalls, in a dull hurry to be turned out. Grandpa took a three-legged stool down from the wall and carried it to the milk cow's stall. He sat on the stool and reached underneath the cow and began tugging up and down as if picking fruit. Jerp held the pail so that the cow couldn't kick it over, watching the shadows for the scarecrow boy until at last the pail was full.

"Fetch some ears of corn for the chickens, and I'll meet you back at the house," Grandpa said. He was going to leave Jerp alone in the barn. No, not quite alone.

"But what about—" Jerp knew he was going to sound like a whimpering little city boy. He gulped and finished, "What about breakfast?"

"We see to the animals first. You know that." Grandpa juddered his head as he drew up to spit again. Jerp nodded and turned, walking to the corncrib with feet as heavy as International Harvesters. He heard Grandpa teasing the sow out in the barnyard. Jerp put a trembling hand on the latch.

He turned the latch and the door creaked open. Rats and their shadows scurried for the corners, their rustling making them sound as big as bobcats. He looked under the stairs that led to the hayloft, searching the darkness for movement. At first he saw only rotted pieces of harness and a broken cross-saw blade, its teeth reddened with age. Then he saw the scarecrow sitting among the sun-bleached husks. A smile stitched itself across the faded face. The scarecrow was looking at Jerp as if one of them was a mirror, with eyes as flat as old coins.

It was the boy in the barn, the one he had tried to tell Grandpa about. The one he had seen many times from his bedroom window, through the fog his breath had made on the glass. The scarecrow boy that had swayed like a sheet on a clothesline, its skin glowing sickly in the dark loft. The scarecrow boy that had stared from the barn window as if knowing it was being watched. The scarecrow boy that looked as if it were waiting.

But it's not real, Jerp told himself as he reached down to the grooved skin of the corn husks. The scarecrow boy is not there if you don't see it.

Jerp tried not to look under the stairs, even though the sweat was coming now and his eyes strained toward the corners of their sockets and the sunlight wasn't pouring fast enough through the cracks between the siding planks.

Had it moved? No, it was only a pile of old crumbling rags. Rotten cloth and straw never hurt nobody, just like Grandpa had said. Even though Jerp had seen the scythe of its smile. He gathered an armful of corn to his chest and ducked back, slamming the crib door shut with his foot and elbowing the latch into place.

Jerp's heart hammered in his ears as he shucked the corn and rubbed the grains loose with his thumbs. The kernels fell like golden teeth, and the chickens gathered around his feet, pecking at the grommets of his boots. He was trying to tell himself he hadn't seen the boy in the barn. That the scarecrow boy wasn't wearing a ragged flannel shirt and jeans with holes in the knees. It didn't have skin as white as raw milk and eyes that glimmered with a hunger that even biscuits and hamfat gravy wouldn't ease, nor was its hair as black as a crow nor its teeth as green as stained copper. It hadn't sat there through the frozen night, chattering until whatever served as its bones worked themselves loose.

It had to be a straw puppet, tossed in the corner until growing season. Only weeds and fabric. Only a scarecrow. But Grandpa didn't use scarecrows.

"Scarecrows are for the birds," Grandpa had said. He used pie pans on strings and shotgun blasts and bait laced with battery acid to drive away the magpies and crows. He said every scarecrow he'd ever put out had been covered in droppings by the end of the afternoon. As far as Grandpa was concerned, all a scarecrow did was provide a shady picnic area for the little thieves.

Jerp wasn't going to think about the scarecrow boy in the barn. He had more chores to do, and he didn't want Grandpa to give him the look, the one where he raised one white eyebrow and furrowed his forehead and twitched the corner of his mouth a little. It was a look of disappointment, his wordless way of saying Jerp, you've come up short, can't cut the mustard, maybe you really oughta be in Atlanta with your parents, where you can be just another big-city sissy and everybody can call you "Jerald."

Jerp would rather run through a barn full of thin, silent scarecrow boys than to have Grandpa give him the look.

So Jerp pretended to forget the scarecrow boy as he curried the mare and turned it out for the day, then gathered the eggs that the game hens had squirreled away in their dusty nests. He checked on the two boars to see if they had enough water and dumped a bucketful of mashed grain and sorghum into their trough. Grandpa didn't name any of the animals. He said he didn't think it was right that people gave names to things that they were going to eat.

"What's good for the goose is good for the gander," Grandpa had said, without bothering to explain what that meant. Jerp thought that maybe he meant everything died just the same.

Death was part of life on the farm. Thanksgiving brought a blessing to all but the turkey. Hens who went barren because their eggs were stolen soon steamed on the table, stunted legs in the air. Hogs and cattle found a hundred different uses in the kitchen, baked, broiled, fried, or barbecued.

"God bless this bounty on our table," Grandpa said before each meal. Jerp thought maybe he should do the prayers while the animals were still alive. The way he had done for Grandma.

Jerp had peeked once during the dinner prayer, and saw Grandpa looking out the window to the barn at the same moment he added the part that went, "And, please, dear Lord, spare us from evil."

Jerp shivered with the memory of that word, evil, and the way Grandpa's voice had cracked just a little as he said it. Jerp put away the currying brush and feed bucket, but the chill continued down his spine. Because he heard a soughing, scratchy sound from the hayloft above. He looked up just as a few strands of straw fell through the cracks in the floorboards. He hurried out of the barn, careful to latch the gate just as he had promised Grandma before she died.

Jerp had sat with her one night, when her spark of life was fading rapidly. She looked at him with burning, fevered eyes, looked past and through him to the window, to the long shadows of the barn.

"There’s a season for ever thing," she had gurgled. "The gate..."

Jerp thought she meant the Pearly Gates. He waited for her to say more. But she closed her eyes to the lamplight and slept.

Now Grandma was dead but the scarecrow boy was alive. Last year's piglet had grown plump and earned its place in the kitchen while the scarecrow boy still had its own moldy bristles. The cornfield was a dry graveyard, with not a morsel for the birds to scavenge, but the scarecrow boy still played silent sentinel. In seasons of change, seasons of slaughter, seasons of harvest, the scarecrow boy had patiently held its ground.

As Jerp reached the farmhouse at the top of a slight rise of meadow, Jerp turned and looked back at the barn. It sagged silently to one side, making a crooked face. The two loading bays of the loft were deep eyes and the barn entrance was a hungry mouth with a hay-strewn tongue and stall-posts for teeth. In a high lonely window, Jerp saw the scarecrow boy staring back at him through the chickenwire screen. Jerp's heart clenched as he went inside the farmhouse.

Grandpa was pouring milk into a gallon glass jar so he could tell when the cream was separated.

"Grandpa, do barns have souls?" Jerp asked. Skyscrapers didn't have souls, airports didn't have souls, but maybe barns were different.

Grandpa turned and gave a look that wasn't the look, but it was a look that could be its cousin, one that said I swear to Thee, what'll you think of next? A boy who dawdles in daydreams ain't much good on a farm.

"Barns have animals and hay bales and feedbags and potato barrels and a mighty load of cow patties. But I don't know about souls. That's for them who breathe on God's green earth, and them that's gone on to heaven," Grandpa said, his voice as smoky as a brushfire in an orchard.

"Don't animals go to heaven, too? And if they do, won't God need barns to put them in when the nights get cold? And won't God need somebody to watch over the livestock and the gardens?"

Grandpa finished straining the milk through cheesecloth and screwed the lid tight on the jar. "No need for food where people don't need to eat, Jerp. Up there, the Lord provides. Here, we have to help ourselves."

He said it in a way that Jerp thought meant No wonder you couldn't stay out of trouble back home, what with these kinds of darn-fool notions. But he only added, "Now, how about some scrambled eggs before we work up some tobacco?"

They had a filling breakfast, then went back to the barn. Grandpa opened the door to the corncrib and started up the stairs. Jerp peeked in from the doorway, hoping that Grandpa had seen the scarecrow boy while at the same time hoping the scarecrow boy didn't really exist. Daylight was now breaking through the window and flooding the corncrib, and a thousand specks of dust were spinning in the air. Then Jerp remembered that the scarecrow boy had been upstairs, where Grandpa was now. Jerp heard Grandpa's boots moving across the hayloft floor, causing needles of hay to fall to the packed ground below. Jerp held his breath and hurried up the stairs.

One side of the loft was filled with dried tobacco stalks, speared on poles and hung upside down. The smell of the burley leaf was heady and sweet. Grandpa sat at the makeshift workbench he had made from a piece of plywood and two haybales. He pulled the lower leaves from one of the stalks until he had as much as his hand could hold, then wound a leaf around one end until the tobacco fanned out like a peacock's tail. He tossed the tied bundle into a wide basket, continuing the routine that had occupied them for the past week.

"Tops for cigarettes, bottoms for cigars," Grandpa said, motioning for Jerp to sit down. They bundled in silence for a while, the air around them thick as snuff. When they finished the pile, Jerp went to take another pole from the rack. Each pole held about ten stalks of tobacco and had been too heavy for Jerp to lift back when the leaves were green and sticky and full of grasshoppers. But now the stalks had dried and Jerp could lift them by reaching from his tiptoes and sliding until the pole fell down into his arms.

Jerp put his hands between a row of stalks and parted them like curtains, trying to see how much more they had to do before they could load up the bed of the red Chevy truck and drive to the warehouse in town. His hands were already cracked and rough and his fingers ached. He looked down the long rows that meant days’ more work. Something crackled among the brown leaves. The scarecrow boy was standing among the stalks, staring at Jerp with eyes as dark and unreflecting as tobacco juice.

Jerp froze, his hands gripping two stalks as if they were prison bars. The scarecrow boy didn't say a word, but its mouth turned up in a smile, stretching its pale skin even tighter across the limp bones of its face. It motioned for Jerp to step forward, slowly waving one flanneled arm. The scarecrow boy's fingers wiggled stiffly, like white artificial worms.

Jerp could only shake his head back and forth. His throat felt like a boar's head had been shoved in it. He sucked for air and drew only dust. Suddenly his limbs unlocked and he ran to Grandpa.

"What is it now, boy?" Grandpa said, and didn't say, but didn't have to, I thought you were finally learning how to work, finally getting some use out of those hands God gave you, hands you were wasting on piano keys and poetry and shoplifting, hands that couldn't make a tough enough fist to keep the bullies away.

Jerp said nothing, just looked at the knot-holed floor.

"We're wasting good daylight," Grandpa said, and Jerp heard between the words, They burn them lights twenty-four hours a day in the city, but out here we work at God's pace. Out here we ain't got time for made-up monsters and scary stories.Busy hands touch no evil.

Jerp swallowed a fistful of grainy air.

"Well, sit down and I'll get it myself," Grandpa said, and he really meant And this weekend, it's back to the fancy boarding school that my son spends a fortune on, the school where the teachers make too much money to complain about a no-account troublemaker like you. And from now on, you can eat ham that's wrapped in cellophane.

"No, Grandpa, I'll bring it," he burst out, hoping his voice didn't sound as airless as it felt. "I just wanted to let you know that we're almost finished and we'll soon get it to market."

Grandpa nearly smiled, showing the yellowed stumps of his few remaining teeth before he caught himself. "Good boy. What ye sow, so shall ye reap," he said, trying to quote from a book he had never learned to read.

Jerp went back among the tobacco and closed his eyes and hauled down a pole. He was carrying it to the workbench when suddenly he was hurtling into space.

He had fallen through one of the square holes that Grandpa used to toss hay down to the cattle. The pole was longer than the haychute and caught on the edges, bending like a bow but holding Jerp's weight.

He heard Grandpa yelling as if they were miles apart. He kicked his legs, trying to find purchase in the empty air. Crumbs of tobacco leaves trickled down the back of his shirt. His hands, toughened by a season in the fields, held onto the pole until his body stopped swaying.

"Hold on here, Jerp. You okay, boy?" Grandpa's voice came from somewhere above.

Jerp felt as if his arms had been ripped from his shoulder sockets, the way they had felt when he grabbed the electric fence to see how strong the shock was. He looked down at the barn floor fifteen feet below. The scarecrow boy was standing there, grinning like a turtle eating saw-briars even though its eyes were cold and dead.

"Lordamighty, it's a wonder you ain't broke your neck," Grandpa yelled. Boots drummed down the loft stairs, then the crib door banged shut. Then Grandpa was underneath him, telling him to let go. The scarecrow boy was gone.

Jerp relaxed his hands, and the balls of his feet drove into the dirt floor. Pain shot through his ankles. Grandpa caught him before he fell over.

"You sure you're okay?" Grandpa asked, holding Jerp's shoulders.

Jerp nodded numbly. Accidents happened on a farm. Timber fell on legs, snapping them like dry twigs. Horses kicked out blindly, causing concussions or worse. Plows and harrows sometimes turned more than red clay, sometimes making furrows in flesh and blood.

And accidents happened in the city. Gunmen drove by and filled the street with random hot lead. Drug dealers knifed rib cages because someone looked like someone else through angel-dusted eyes. Airliners sheared off rooftops and spread carnage like confetti. Misunderstood boys were labeled maladjusted and sent to juvenile hall where they learned nothing except how to be real criminals instead of amateurs.

"I'm sorry, Grandpa, I just lost my step," Jerp said as his wind returned. "I'm all right now. Let's get back to work."

Work was the answer. Work would keep evil away. Work would keep thoughts and daydreams and made-up monsters away. Work would make Grandpa happy.

"You sure?" Grandpa asked, and this time there was no threat in the words, only real concern and tenderness. Jerp nodded again and walked to the corncrib door, trying to hide his limp. They went back up to the loft and Grandpa lifted the pole that spanned the haychute.

He let out a liquid whistle and said, "Boy, lucky you fell just right. This thing mighta speared you like a frog on a gig."

The scarecrow boy could have made it happen that way, if it had wanted. But Jerp would work harder now.

They bundled tobacco the rest of the day, until the pile of sheaves was taller than Jerp. Grandpa complained about having a headache, and by the time they had cooked and eaten supper, the headache had turned into a fever. As night rose like a cliff made of coal, Jerp built a fire and Grandpa sat by the hearth, a shawl across his knees.

He looked miserable in his helplessness. "Jerp, I ain't up to doing chores tonight. You think you can handle them?" he said, his voice as chalky as his face.

"Sure, Grandpa." Jerp was anxious to make up for dropping that egg basket, forgetting to slop the hogs that day two weeks ago, and burning the cabbage bed by broadcasting too much fertilizer. "I know what to do."

"Don't forget to put up the cows."

Put up the cows. In the barn. With scarecrow boy riding herd.

"Something wrong, boy? You ain't afeared of the dark, are you?"

Dark wasn't bad. Dark was only black, suffocating stillness. Dark didn't walk. Dark didn't smile.

"No, of course you ain't. And remember to latch the gate when you're done," Grandpa said, his attention wandering back to the fire which reflected off his rheumy eyes.

Jerp put on his coat, his fingers shaking as he fumbled with the zipper. He took a flashlight from the ledge by the front door and went out into the night, under the black sky where stars were strewn like white jackstones. Crickets chirped across the low hills. Jerp's flashlight cut a weak circle in the darkness, and he followed the circle to the gate.

The cows had come in on their own, following the twitching tail of the mare who was smart enough to know where food and shelter could be found. They were milling outside the pen, rubbing against the split locust rails. Jerp walked through the herd, grateful for the warmth the animals radiated. He lifted the latch and they spilled into the barnyard, annoying the sow into a round of grunting. Jerp slid back the barn door and the animals tottered inside. So far, so good.

But now he had to go to the hayloft. Now he had to go through the corncrib and up the stairs and across the loft that was littered with square black holes. Now he had to meet the scarecrow boy on its home turf.

He almost turned and ran back up the hill to the light and safety of the farmhouse, almost let his legs betray him by becoming a whirling windmill of fear. But then he pictured Grandpa asking if all the animals were put up and fed and the chores done proper. And Jerp heard the words that Grandpa had been waiting to say.

I was hoping to leave this farm to you, to let you carry on the tradition that your father abandoned. I was hoping someday the soil would lay claim to you, because busy hands touch no evil. But if the dirt's not in you, you can't plant there.

Jerp squinted in the moonlight that spilled into the barn. He kicked a horse chip across the ground. He took a pitchfork from the wall and walked to the corncrib. He would be part of the farm, not a big-city sissy.

Jerp banged the wooden handle on the door to warn the rats and the scarecrow boy that he was coming and had work to do. Taking a deep taste of air, he slammed the door open so hard that the sweet potatoes rolled around in their bins. He ran up the steps with one hand clenched around the pitchfork.

The haybales were stacked like bricks on the far end of the loft. He tiptoed through the tobacco that hung like long sleeping bats, around the hole he had fallen through earlier, and past the workbench. He was among the hay now, walking down an aisle between the silent stacks. Jerp turned the corner and there was scarecrow boy, sitting on a bale and grinning at him, a straw jabbed between its teeth.

Jerp held the pitchfork in front of him. If the scarecrow boy was stuffed with straw, Jerp was ready to pierce its flesh and shred its muscles and rake its insides out. If the boy had a ragball heart, Jerp would make the heart stop beating. Jerp's own heart was racing like that of a crow that had eaten poisoned corn.

The scarecrow boy looked at Jerp with eyes that were beyond life, eyes that neither flinched nor twinkled in the flashlight's glare. Eyes that were as black as good bottom soil, black as manure. Eyes that had seen drought and flood, lush and fallow fields, harvests both meager and bountiful. Eyes that were seeds, begging to be planted and given a chance to take root, to grow and bloom and go to seed, to spread on the winds and in the bellies of birds, to propagate among the loess and loam and alluvial soils of the world.

"You've been waiting for me," Jerp said. "Always."

The scarecrow boy nodded, its head wobbling on its shoulders like an apple tied to a kite.

Suddenly Jerp knew whose farm this was. It had never been recorded on a deed down at the county seat, but some laws were unwritten and universal. Rights of ownership went to the possessor.

And Jerp belonged here, belonged to the farm and to the scarecrow boy.

The scarecrow boy spread its musty arms as if to hug Jerp. Jerp let the flashlight drop to the floor as the scarecrow boy rose like smoke and drifted through the tines of the pitchfork. Jerp tried to draw back, but he felt as if he had a splintery stake up his spine. His arms went limp and he itched, he itched, his hands were dusty and his mouth was dry. The pitchfork fell onto the planks, but the clatter was muffled, as if he were hearing it through layers of cloth. Jerp tried to stretch the threads of his neck, but he could only stare straight ahead at the boy in front of him.

At the boy with the smile that curved like a blackberry thorn. At the boy who had stolen his face and meat and white bones. At the boy who was wearing his scuffed lace-up boots. At the boy who was looking down at his hands—no, MY hands, his cobwebbed mind screamed—as if the hands were a new pair of work gloves that needed to be broken in.

Then Jerp knew. He had forgotten to latch the gate behind him. Even though Grandpa had told him a thousand times. But Jerp had been so afraid. It wasn't his fault, was it?

Jerp tried to open his mouth, to scream, to tell the boy to get out of his skin, but Jerp's tongue was an old sock. He strained to flap the rags of his arms, but he felt himself falling into the loose hay. He choked on the cotton and chaff and sweetly sick odor of his own dry-rot. And still he saw, with eyes that were tickled by tobacco dust and stung by tears that would never fall.

Jerp watched as the boy now wearing Jerp's clothes bent to lift the pitchfork. The boy tried out its stolen skin, stretched its face into new smiles. Then the boy who had borrowed Jerp's body stepped between the haybales and was gone. Minutes or years later, the barn door slid open.

Jerp tried his limbs and found they worked, but they were much too light and boneless. He dragged himself to the window and pressed his sawdust head against the chickenwire. Jerp looked out over the moist fields that would now and always beckon him, he listened to the breezes that would laugh till the cows came home, he sniffed the meadows that would haunt his endless days. He wondered how long it would be before the next season of change. Already he ached from waiting.

Jerp looked down into the barnyard and saw the boy who wore his flesh walking toward the farmhouse, the pitchfork glinting under the moon, perhaps on his way to punish someone who had shirked the evening chores.

The boy remembered to latch the gate.

###

LUMINOSITY

Born half in darkness, half in hazy light, Kate started out different and stayed different.

Even in ninth grade, when all the girls had grown strange shapes and the boys had started sweating.

Even in a world where ordinary girls were all the rage, when you had to have three silver rings in your ear and another one in a secret, pierced place somewhere beneath your clothes. Somewhere to keep the boys guessing and sweating.

And somewhere for the other girls to wonder about, just in case their rings weren't in as cool a place.

But Kate wore no rings. Kate was brighter than silver, though her eyes were brown. She was so different, she had never dyed her hair. She was so different, she was a princess who had never kissed a frog in hopes of turning him into a prince.

Well, never kissed a frog if you didn’t count Jeremy as a frog. Because Kate had just kissed Jeremy. Under the moon. A moon she had built, looked up and said, "Give me a moon," and there it was, white and blue and cold, and there was Jeremy, big and cute and maybe his eyes were saying hello.

And the night was black and purple, a sprinkle of salt marking stars in the sky, Jeremy, lips, oh God, she couldn't breathe, this was so corny.

Because she didn't want to kiss a guy. Who cared if Jeremy was a junior? She was fourteen and happy. She was out of it. She didn't even own a cell phone.

Kate was the luckiest girl in the world, because she only owned the moon.

"Come on," Jeremy said.

Kate shook her head. Her back was against the bricks of the old movie theater, the streetlights as distant as the bright pinprick of Jupiter.

Jeremy's breath was sardines. "Are you going to kiss me or not? Don't tell me you dragged me all the way out here for this?"

"I just want to talk," she said.

"Talk? I can talk with any girl. And do even more with some of them."

"Jeremy. Don't pressure me."

"Pressure you?" He kissed her again, his tongue like a frog's going after a bug. He pulled away and held Kate at arm's length. Under the moon, his eyes were as dark as beetles.

"I need a little time," she said.

"I'll give you all the time you need," Jeremy said, putting his arms around Kate and pulling her against him. She tried to go soft against his muscles. He was strong. He usually got his way with things.

"Not like this," she said, but his hand was already on her bra strap.

She looked past Jeremy's shoulder at the moon. A moon she had built from dreams and wishes. A moon so far away, yet all in her head at the same time. Kate the moonbeam queen, Mom had called her.

Because she made the moon rise. When all the girls in her class were asleep, she closed her eyes and became far too awake and thought about the moon on its invisible string. She pulled the string and out came the moon, in different sizes every night without fail, except one night every four weeks when Kate was allowed to sleep.

Tonight the moon was easy, a small sliver, just past new.

And it would grow each night, swelling in inches and pounds and light, ever fatter and heavier, until by the full moon Kate would be dragging, with so much on her shoulders. Maybe not the weight of the world, but at least the weight of the moon.

And now the moon watched without a word.

"Give it up," Jeremy said. "You know you want to."

His hug was awesome, his skin so warm. Most girls would give anything to do this. Some had. Brandi, Madison, and maybe Diane, if you believed the whispers in the locker room. Jeremy had stolen a lot of hearts and plundered other things.

Jeremy's hand slid from her bra strap to something else. She shrugged away and faced the bricks. The moonlight filled the cracks, stitching the wall with white. He clasped her, squeezed her.

"I'm not ready."

"You're ready," he said.

"No, really, I'm not."

His hands slowed. "You mean you've never done this before?"

Please don't laugh, she thought. All the other girls were doing it by seventh grade. But she had never been like the other girls. They threw pajama parties and went to restricted movies and lied to their parents and got in bed with boys. They were busy becoming women.

And Kate was nothing but a moonbeam queen. Maybe not even a queen, only a princess. Even though she had the job of making the moon rise, she still didn't feel important. She wasn't one of the popular girls, and she clung to the corners. Which is why she nearly jumped out of her skin when Jeremy asked her out for coffee. Downtown, to the hangout, within walking distance of theaters and dark alleys.

Two cups of decaf cappuccino later, Kate was breathless in his arms. Flattered, dizzy, but still not ready.

The moon climbed higher, hung between the tall buildings. Cars throbbed on the streets, a siren erupted across town. Jeremy's breath drifted warm across her neck. Goose bumps rose despite her nervousness. "I want the first time to be special," she said.

"This is special," he whispered. He pressed against her, and she didn't want to think of the mysterious hardness beneath his clothes. "Don't you feel it?"

"I'm . . . not sure."

"Honey, I've never felt like this about anyone else."

"Not even Brandi and Madison and Diane?"

Jeremy pulled away a little. "They're just friends."

"That's what worries me. You and I haven't even been friends." Before he'd asked her out, Jeremy had spoken to her maybe three times. Usually when none of the prettier girls were around.

"You don't have to be friends when it's something more than that."

"What do you mean, something more?"

"You know exactly what I mean."

"No, I don't."

Jeremy came close again, his arms around her, his hands busy. "I'm talking something really special. I’ve been watching you for a long time."

She circled her fingers around his wrists, trying to slow him down. "I don't know," she said. "It's hard to think when you're doing that."

"Don't think," he said. "Go for it."

He kissed her again, and she closed her eyes and saw blue and saw sparks for stars and saw the night sky spinning and—

She pulled away and looked at the moon.

It had slipped lower in the sky.

She was supposed to be raising it, tugging that invisible string so it made its way from horizon to horizon in synch with the sun. Because, somewhere, the boy who saw fire was hard at work putting the sun to bed and the star children were each winking a light to life and the Night Shifters were busy painting black from horizon to horizon. All the Makers were doing their chores, and the Mother Maker sang the soft and distant hymn that set the rhythm of the universe. All Kate needed to do was think, and the moon would move in its proper circle, its heavy face turned always to the Earth.

But she couldn't concentrate, not with Jeremy so close and his breath against her cheek and his skin warm against hers and oh how she hated letting him go but she ducked under his arms and stared back down the long alley toward the street.

"What's the matter?" Jeremy said.

"I can't."

"You can't." The rasp of a flint wheel echoed off the walls, and Kate smelled tobacco smoke.

"I have homework," she said, a tiny lie, not a huge one, the splash of guilt swept away on the frothy tide of her emotions.

"Homework." The word was spat with a lungful of smoke. Jeremy never did homework, not while Brandi was around to do it for him. Brandi was a C student, but she was nearly fifteen, went to the stylist, had seven shades of lipstick. She was wild, almost a real woman, and not afraid of doing it.

"I'm sorry." Kate tried not to let her voice break. If she kept her back turned, Jeremy wouldn't see her tears.

"No big deal," Jeremy said, in a way that meant it was probably the biggest deal possible in the entire universe.

She turned to face him. He slouched against the wall, deep in shadows, eyes reflecting the red glow of his cigarette.

The cigarette tip grew bright as he inhaled. She threw a quick look at the sky. Even with the city streetlights, the moon was visible, stuck in the sky like an earring. It hadn't moved in way too many minutes, and Kate's slackness was causing problems for the Night Shifters and the Dawn girl and the Makers who were responsible for sprinkling the morning dew.

She said, "You're not mad at me, are you?"

At last Jeremy moved. He flipped his cigarette to the pavement, crushed it out, and walked past her. "I'm not mad," he said. "I don't even care enough to be mad."

He kept walking, and Kate almost ran after him. But what could she do? She didn't want her first time to be in an alley, even with Jeremy, who no doubt knew what he was doing. All the girls said so. All the girls.

Then he was around the corner and Kate could only look at that cruel moon and cry. What was so important about the moon, anyway? Who cared what Mom said about all the bad things that would happen if the moon didn't shine, or slipped in its tracks, or rotated a few times? Who cared if she let Jeremy do all that wild and wonderful stuff? Nobody would know but the two of them and the watching moon.

She ran to the end of the alley. Jeremy stood there, hunched, looking down the sidewalk toward the lights of the coffee shop. No doubt several other girls were hanging out, girls who might not be as stubborn and stuck-up as Kate.

"Jeremy?" she said.

"What?" He didn't turn around.

"I . . . I changed my mind."

He stood straighter. Two cars passed, one of them a cop car, but cops never noticed the kids unless they were smoking. It didn't really matter what the kids did, as long as they kept it off Main Street.

Jeremy smiled, teeth yellow in the streetlights, then took her by the arm and led her back into the shadows. He kissed her, more roughly this time. He had just a little bit of fuzz on his chin, not enough to shave but enough to tickle. She giggled, and in her fright, the sound came out like the whinny of a sick horse.

"Mmm, you're going to enjoy this," Jeremy said.

If only she could believe it. She closed her eyes, hoping it wouldn't hurt. If she didn't watch, maybe she could pretend it wasn't happening. His fingers fumbled at the buttons of her blouse.

One undone, two, then his hand cold on her stomach. She giggled again, but this time no sound came. Why couldn't she breathe? This was supposed to be fun, all the girls said so. Relax and let it happen, everybody said.

Everybody's doing it.

Why couldn't she believe it?

Kate opened her eyes and saw that the moon had slid so far down the sky that only a nip of it hung above the concrete horizon. The moon was sinking too fast, its arc accelerating with her heartbeat. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. She decided that holding on would be best. She couldn’t hold on to the things inside, so she grabbed Jeremy’s shoulders and squeezed hard enough for him to yelp in surprise.

"Take it easy," he said. "It won’t hurt a bit."

Mom had explained to Kate about the moon and womanhood and the bleeding that made girls into women. Kate had never bled that way, and Mom said maybe she never would because she was the heart of the moon. The Makers weren’t like normal people, though they had to walk among them, go to school, eat, and sleep. And fall in love.

That was the meanest part. Moonbeam queens should never have to love normal people, because normal people couldn’t understand the job of making the world work. Makers brought sunshine and rain, and Kate wished she could tell all her friends about her job dragging the moon, because then she’d be cool and popular and Jeremy would probably hang out with her even without the stuff he was doing now.

He had the front of her shirt open and the night air was cool on her skin. She looked down at her own paleness, her belly slightly rounded like the moon. He kissed her neck. She could tell he’d had lots of practice, smooth moves, making her feel as special as he’d made all the others feel. His hands were crawling again, quick as spiders.

She twisted and writhed, summoned air into her frozen lungs. "Jeremy."

"Mmmm," he said. "That’s right, baby. That’s good."

Baby. Mom said these things caused babies—

"I’m still not ready. Can we just hold hands for a little while?"

"This is the night, honey." His voice slid off the brick walls and clattered around the gutter pipes and fire escapes. "The one we’ve both been waiting for."

His hands moved again, to the back pockets of her jeans, then quick around to the button. Jeremy seemed to have eight hands and three mouths, and she was lost, not knowing which sensation to focus on. He had somehow nudged and shifted her until they were deeper in shadows, and she lost sight of the moon.

Kate found herself on her back, in the scratchy stretch of what had once been landscaping. The bones of dead shrubs surrounded them and the sounds of the street blended into a rough and distant whisper. Brick walls rose above her, windows black and rectangular, the tops of the buildings wore blue haloes of halogen light. Jeremy pressed on top of her, warm and strong and confident, an animal in its natural habitat.

But Kate was cut off from her own habitat. She couldn’t track the moon, had no way of knowing whether it was on the horizon or over Japan, or whether it had completely slipped its tethers and drifted toward the black sea of deep space. She tried to sit up, but Jeremy was all over, his own shirt gone, and her bare belly sizzled with his heat. His hands moved over her again, and part of her wanted to surrender to their gentle roughness.

"Jeremy, I’ve got to tell you something."

"Let your body do the talking, honey."

"No, really. I’ve never—"

He paused in his serpentine writhing, and in the scant light his eyes flashed above her face. "First time, huh? That’s fine, baby. Just relax. First time for everything."

And a first time for losing the moon. How could she ever explain it to her mom? How could she pick up the telephone when the Mother Maker called? What sort of apology could she make to the rest of the Makers, who had made their sacrifices and done their chores, who had kept the world right on schedule while she was off indulging in a selfish whim?

Jeremy must have sensed her hesitancy, because he pressed his advantage, somehow managing to kiss her at the same time his arms were everywhere. She felt as if a large hole was opening underneath her, as if she were sinking into the Earth and would be forever cut off from the moon she had betrayed. Still, she clung to the piece of sky she could see, mentally hanging on as if it were a rope dangling down a well.

"I love you," Jeremy said, and she released the rope, and she fell, and the blackness swallowed her, and she saw what a night would be like without light, saw the moon eaten by the Night Shifters like so much marshmallow pie. This was a night that had no dawn, and her failure would disrupt the stars and tides and the dreams of sleeping children. She had lost that white and glowing part of herself. A suffocating fear swept over her, and she knew she could never give away that part where her soul and the moon connected.

Kate yelled at the sky, wanting to stop the crazed and aimless arc of the moon she had abandoned.

She pushed and clawed and screamed and wriggled, and the next thing she knew she was sitting up, drawing her shirt closed over her chest.

Jeremy was some distance away, wiping at his face. His shirt askew, his hair mussed, and hunched in the darkness, he seemed smaller and less physically imposing. "Hey, you bloodied my nose," he said, in an adolescent whine.

"I’m sorry," she said, and she really meant it, because she had desired nothing more than to give herself to him. Except the moon needed that secret place inside her that Jeremy demanded. She was a slave to two masters, and both were selfish.

Or maybe she was the selfish one.

"What the hell was that all about?" Jeremy asked from the shadows.

"The moon," she said.

"Huh?"

"A stupid, bleak chunk of rock."

"Have you gone nuts?"

"It’s me. Or maybe not me, only a reflection."

Jeremy wiped his nose again and slipped his arms into his shirt sleeves. "If you didn’t want to do it, why didn’t you just say so? You didn’t have to be a tease."

"Oh, I wanted to do it, more than anything in the world."

Jeremy sulked past her, stabbing a cigarette in his mouth. "Maybe you didn’t screw up my whole night. Brandi’s probably at the coffee shop."

Kate wanted to shout at him, beg him for one last kiss, a fleeting thing to hold in her memory. But he had already turned the corner.

Kate looked up at the slim wedge of moon, her Sisyphus stone. As she looked at that distant face, the one the normal people called "The Man in the Moon," she thought she glimpsed herself. The moon’s light was nothing but a reflection, all of its power and magic only an illusion for poets and lovers. A trick of timing and position.

In every mirror, you give half of yourself away.

But she still had the other half. She was a Maker.

Kate adjusted her clothing and headed for the bright and noisy streets.

###

WAMPUS CAT

Susan should have known better than to head south with a man, especially to the place her grandmother called "the land of legends."

This was the dark heart of the Alleghenies and dusk was pumpkin-colored and the mountains stood like giant petrified beasts against the mist. Trees mingled, black sticks intersecting. The fallen leaves were as sodden as a fraternity carpet. October's rot filled the air.

And Barry was lost. Barry, with a forty-dollar compass and LL Bean hiking boots and a copy of Thoreau's "Walden" in his backpack, was so lost that Saturday morning looked like Tuesday night.

Susan should have said something. Maybe Saturday afternoon, when Barry eased his hook into the Shawneehaw. Barry had read a book on fly fishing, and Ted Williams, the greatest hitter in baseball history, was also a fly fisherman. Barry talked about Ted Williams so much that Susan wished Williams had been a Yankee instead of a Red Sock.

Because Barry was Yankee. Maine Yankee, the worst kind. She was Jersey Shore college by way of Piedmont Carolina, and much of her blood was rock-deep Southern Appalachian, Scots-Irish and paranoid, a little free-spirited and flaky, but that was no excuse to fall for him. He had passed himself off as a real man and reality was subject to change.

Not that all men should automatically be able to kill bears with a hatchet.

But they could at least take a little time and get things right. Like where they were. And who they were with. To Barry, Susan might as well have been AnnaBeth-Mary, the previous temporary girlfriend to follow him on these Appalachian journeys. At least she had her own tent, so she could turn in early every night.

Doubtless, others had preceded AnnaBeth-Mary and Susan. All of them falling in lock-step with Barry, because when the sun hit his hair just right, he glowed like a lion. Tall and tan and crisp, with muscles and a toothy smile.

But after a while, Barry's little flaws started to show. His confusion. His forgetfulness. His obsession with fly fishing. His play-by-play of the year Ted Williams hit .406.

By Sunday evening, Barry had completely thrown Susan over for the creek. Barry put on waist-high rubber trousers and headed for deep water. She watched from the boulders like a dismal cheerleader as currents skirled around his knees.

And Monday was just as dull. Susan read the hardbacked biography of Benjamin Franklin, a book thick enough to impress any man. But Barry stood by the fire with his fishing pole and a dumb grin and he turned in early so he could chase fish for breakfast.

And now it was Tuesday evening, and they were lost.

"It's Monday, isn't it?" Barry said.

"It's Tuesday."

Barry nodded, fumbled through his backpack, and brought out his fancy bottled water. The campfire glinted off the plastic. Barry peered at the bottle. It was as vacant as his eyes.

"Are we in West Virginia or plain Virginia?" Susan hated herself for not knowing. They’d passed through Harper’s Ferry and over the Shenandoah River, then up Loudon Heights where the trail maps showed a meandering thread back and forth across the border. They headed south out of survival instinct, toward warmer weather. Susan hadn't kept track of miles, all she knew was her feet were sore.

She could outwalk Barry any day, and she could pitch her tent faster than he did. Barry had no brain cells that weren't clouded by Ted Williams and trout and AnnaBeth-what’s-her-name.

And now Susan was stuck with him.

In the mountains.

In the fog with dark coming on.

And it was Tuesday evening.

Late October.

In the Southern Appalachian Mountains.

Susan’s grandma, who everybody called "Mamaw," said the mountains were way wilder than what the movies said. The mountains weren’t hillbilly dolls and moonshine stills. The mountains were old as time, and secrets slept under a mile of worn dirt. Mamaw said those who belonged to them always came back, because the trees and rocks and people and animals were all of the same blood, tapped into the same spirit. Mamaw told of the Wampus Cat, the creature that could change from a witch to a cat in order to seek its prey better, and how it had been caught in the middle of its transformation. Now, when the moon was full, it could be seen in human size, howling, dripping saliva from its fangs, its yellow eyes glowing in the fierce furry face.

Susan shook herself awake.

For the second time.

Cold.

Because Barry was curled and snoring in his little pup tent. And she had to use the bathroom—or in this case, the woods. Real bad.

The Appalachian twilight was scary, because she was from Gastonia. Dead factory town, lazy with the letter a and not too proud of it. The mountains were a myth that lay somewhere beyond the pollution belt, the land of legends. But in the dark, the legends seemed far too real. And Mamaw said legends didn’t lie. And dogs didn’t like Mamaw.

Susan shook Barry’s tent. "I've got to go."

"Snurk?"

She shook again. "I've got to go out in the woods. And it's getting dark."

Barry stuck his head out of the tent.

"Sorry, AnnaBeth," he said.

"I'm Susan."

"Sorry."

Men were always sorry.

Especially Barry.

"I've got to go behind a tree. And I don't want to go out there alone." Susan could walk the back streets in factory towns, roll miles on a city subway, take a plane to Pensacola. But the West Virginia woods were a different story. Or were these the Virginia woods?

Barry groaned and crawled out of the tent. He stumbled, groggy from sleep, and went to the fire. He busied himself throwing wood on the pile of embers while she sneaked behind the nearest oak.

As she relieved herself, the chirping of the crickets rose in an uneven symphony. Mamaw said the animals knew songs older than the creek music that trickled between high boulders. And they sang louder in late October, when the magic inside the world seeped closer to the outer skin. Susan heard something in the brush and wiped and zipped before she was completely finished.

Barry sat on a big rock by the fire. The firelight cast him in bronze and he looked attractive again. Then he belched and the wind changed and smoke drifted into Susan’s face. She sat on the ground across from him, as far away as she could manage without freezing to death.

"Are we near Shepherdstown?" she asked. Because Shepherdstown was a real place, a dot on the map, and no doubt had some kind of fast-food franchise. If she ate another handful of honey-sweetened rolled oats, she was going to turn into a diabetic horse.

Barry pulled his compass from his belt. His golden brow furrowed. On Saturday, such a simple gesture would have set her shivering with love. Now she wanted to pull his ears down over his head and cram his compass into his nose.

Barry tapped the compass and rubbed the stubble on his chin. "I think so."

Barry said "think" with the old Barryesque self-confidence. Even in doubt, he was never wrong.

Susan counted the days backwards on her fingers.  "We left on the twenty-seventh, right?"

"Yeah. Parked the car in Maryland. Greenbrier, wasn’t it?" He patted his pocket to make sure he still had the keys. She should have paid attention to little dissonant clues like the Green Party sticker on the bumper of his gas-hog SUV. Clues like AnnaBeth-Mary’s picture taped to the dashboard. But, on October twenty-seventh, Susan couldn't see beyond his blue eyes.

"That makes tonight Halloween," she said.

"Halloween?" His expression switched from confusion to glee.

She looked around at the trees. Had the crickets fallen silent? She shifted closer to the fire. "And we're lost."

"We're not lost."

"Where are we, then?"

Barry waved his hands at the woods surrounding them. "Here. Near Shepherdstown."

Nowhere. With night sliding from the trees like sick shadows. Barry must have mistaken her look of concern for come-hither. He lowered his voice, the way he'd probably heard George Clooney do it in a movie. "And it's just the two of us, honey. Trick or treat."

Yes, just Barry and Susan. Or was it AnnaBeth-Mary, or maybe the half-dozen other girls Barry had mentioned on the drive down south? Mamaw said you were never alone in the mountains, because the woods watched you like a hungry beast. And legends never lied—

Two golden specks flashed against the black face of the forest. Susan shifted closer to the fire. "Did you see that?"

"Huh?"

"Lights. Like animal eyes."

"Might be a deer. Or a raccoon. Coons like to prowl around campsites."

"These eyes were yellow."

"Probably just a reflection of the fire."

Except the fire was mostly orange and red. Not deep yellow like the eyes. And Mamaw said the mountains had eyes, they watched and they waited, and them that belonged always came back.

Barry grinned with those perfect teeth and moved to Susan’s side, dragging the backpack. He rummaged in a zippered pouch and brought out a cigarette. He lit it and passed it to her, but she shook her head.

"I’m scared of cancer."

He took another drag and put his arm around her. "Don't be scared. I'll protect you."

She was wondering who was going to protect her from Barry. That’s when the branch snapped. She hated herself for it, but she snuggled closer to Barry. Mamaw and her stories. Always told as if the strange were true. "That sounded way too big for a raccoon."

Barry tapped the pipe clean on a stump. "Noise carries funny in the mountains, especially at night."

"Do they have bears up here?" Mamaw said bears were almost as bad as the big mountain cats, the "painters," what had big fangs and screamed like women in the hurt of childbirth. But nothing compared to a vengeful and angry Wampus Cat.

Barry gave his hiccup of a laugh. "The Smoky Mountains have more black bears than you can shake a stick at. Huh-huh. Smoky." He stubbed out the cigarette.

"According to the guidebook, this is the Shenandoah National Forest, not the Smokies."

"Whatever. Mountains are mountains."

Her tent looked inviting, but if she crawled inside, she’d be trapped. And the canvas walls looked far too flimsy to hold back a large animal. Or the weight of the mountains. Or the strength of legends.

"Say, I know a good ghost story," Barry said.

"I don't want to hear any ghost stories."

"Hey, come on. It's Halloween."

How could she tell him what a jerk her was without insulting him and losing what little comfort he offered? As much as she hated to admit it, she needed him. At least until they reached civilization, at which point she would happily give back his twangy bluegrass CDs and never speak to him again. He could drive north, she could head south, and the mountains would forget them, go on with the business of being ancient and full of secrets.

The noise came again, louder and to Susan’s left. "Did you hear it that time?"

Barry pointed up through the gap in the trees. "Moon's almost full."

"On Halloween."

"You don't believe in that kind of junk, do you?"

"Spooks and goblins?" she said. "No, not when I'm safe in bed with a deadbolt on the door and the radio going. But out here, it's different. And you never heard Mamaw’s stories."

Stories about the lady with the lamp, who glowed by the river; painters who followed the wood wagon home, screaming all the way; fireflies that stabbed a billion sparks above the creek beds; frost that glittered in the soft ghost breath of morning; legends that grew legs and flesh and teeth and walked the Southern hills. Stuff that got in your blood and owned you.

"These mountains are alive." Barry's idea of poetry. Or his way of scaring her. All the same, with Barry.

"I don't want to hear any more strange noises, thank you." Susan would not allow this idiot to hear her whine. Her discomfort was genuine, deeper than ancient granite and Mamaw’s long line of handed-down stories. "And I don't want to see red eyes in the forest. All I want is a hot bath and a greasy hamburger and some clean sheets."

Barry tried to look wounded, but the expression came off as something an inept president might hide behind during a press conference. He took his arm from her shoulders.

"I thought you were an Earth chick," he said.

"I'm not a chick in any sense of the word. I'm not going to grow up to be a hen, and roosters hold absolutely no appeal. But I’m about ready to ruffle some feathers."

"Don't be like that."

She started to pour it on, dump eighty miles of hiking and their being lost and his two-track-mindedness on him and probably she would end up crying in frustration except, before she could really get rolling, she saw the yellow eyes again.

In front of them, maybe fifteen feet away.

This time, even Barry saw them.

"What was that?" He stood and grabbed a long limb from the fire, held it as a torch.

The eyes disappeared in blackness.

"That wasn't a reflection." Susan picked up the closest rock.

"Looked like yellow eyes to me."

"I told you."

"Shh." Barry waved his hand.

The noise came from the left. And the right. And behind them.

Susan turned her back to the fire. The rock was heavy in her hand. The only direction that didn't seem scary was up, with the stars blind in the glow of the moon. Mamaw said the sky hung heavier in the mountains, that it took your breath and then your soul, because you’re closer to heaven here.

The eyes flashed beside her tent. Branches broke. The laughter of wind swept from the trees.

Halloween. Trick or treat. In the land of legends. Mamaw’s territory.

The campfire grabbed some oxygen and jumped for the sky. Smoke burned Susan's eyes and nose. The forest grew wild, unafraid, with Appalachian teeth.

The night swooped in like bats, the trees bent with knotted limbs, the golden eyes closed in. It was coming, whatever it was.

Susan raised the rock. "Barry!"

He jumped in front of her and waved the burning stick as if it were a flag. Embers fell from its tip. He shouted at the woods. The eyes froze, then faded back to invisibility.

The air grew still again. The fire sputtered. Leaves settled on the ground. Susan's heart, the one Barry had briefly stolen, was now back and working overtime.

She should have known better than to head south with a man. Not into this land that Mamaw said was haunted by ancient things. Especially not on Halloween.

"What was it?" Susan's hands were cold.

Barry had long lost his glow, was now just another guy with body odor and the deep-seated fear that all guys tried to hide but was always just a sniff away. He tugged at the waistband of his jeans. "Mountain lion, I bet."

"Mountain lion? The guidebook didn't say anything about mountain lions."

Barry tried to ruralize his speech, hard to do with the nasally Maine accent. "Supposed to be extinct in these parts. But there's a lot about these woods that people don't know."

"I know, I know, the land of legends." Susan edged closer to the fire. It was burning low. Somebody would have go in search of wood. Somebody named Barry.

"Big cats, they'll come right up to a camp. They're not afraid."

"Barry, stop trying to scare me."

He grinned.. "Best thing to do is get in the tent and hope it goes away."

"The fire's dying."

"So?" He crawled into his tent.

Susan looked around at the woods. Painters could climb trees, couldn't they? Were they afraid of fire? What color eyes did they have? All the cats Susan knew had golden or green or gray eyes, but those were house cats. Maybe mountain lions were different.

Bigger.

Wild things in the land of legends.

Creatures with fang and claw that had stalked here long before the Catawba and Cherokee and Algonquin, long before the Scottish and Irish and German settlers, and long before Daniel Boone, that original tourist, had started the Southern Appalachians on its downward cultural slide. The guidebook writers from New York couldn't know much about mountain lions, painters, and distant legends. And absolutely nothing about Wampus Cats that were forever locked in transformation, caught between two worlds.

Something chuckled in the dark, and it sure wasn't the ghost of Daniel Boone.

Even though this was Halloween.

When midnight made promises.

Susan didn't wait for the yellow eyes to appear. The wet rustling of leaves was all the encouragement she needed. Still clutching the rock, she scrambled into her tent. She listened closely to the quiet. To Tuesday night. To October.

To Halloween.

To a mountain lion that shouldn't exist.

The creature's silhouette was now clear, black against the amber glow of the fading fire.

"Williams faced the Yankees thirteen times in 1941," Barry said from the neighboring tent.

"Barry." She wasn't sure if she had mustered enough air to summon this lost fool of the wilderness. She tried again, glad she had a rock in her hand.

He grunted, alreaady half asleep.

"Barry!" The shadow was bigger now. Something nuzzled her tent flaps.

Something with long whiskers.

And October teeth.

The fire died.

Susan was alone with the night. And a snoring Barry. And whatever was outside. In Mamaw’s land.

She held her breath, hoping it would go away.

It didn't.

She listened to the breathing of the big mountain cat. Soft, at home in the darkness. At ease. Something that belonged in the land of legends.

Barry would protect her. Barry would growl and grab a stick and scream stupid words at the stars.

And the cat would . . . what?

Barry's uneven snoring was an insult to the crickets.

Susan lay on her belly, ear at the entrance to the tent.

The woods sang a mountain song, of Rebel yells and squirrels and rustling laurel thickets. Creeks ran quick and cold in the dark. A cat purred, patient as the moon. Mamaw’s ghost sang a lost ballad of wind in the woods.

Susan whispered Barry’s name, afraid the cat would hear. She flicked on her flashlight, pulled down the zipper of the tent, and peered through the nylon netting. More fervid eyes waited in the October blackness. More mountain lions that shouldn't exist. More wild things. More of Mamaw’s painters. And behind them, a Wampus Cat mewling a folk hymn.

She had been wrong all along. Because Barry had seemed like the wild thing, a beast that she must tame or die trying.

Now she saw that he was the danger. He was tame, and his tameness would build a cage around her. His world was one of baseball statistics and environmental rallies and kayaks and snowboards and an endless stream of trail girls, not rocks and trees. He entered this land of legends like a conqueror, with bottled water and wool socks and Yankee pride.

"Deliverance" wasn't a documentary. The Southern Appalachians weren't savage and cruel. The mountains only resisted what didn't belong here. And maybe she belonged, her blood thick through three generations, Mamaw’s heart still beating in hers. A witch’s spell stretching over generations.

The night chill fell away as she left the camp. The eyes surrounded her, warm breath touched her skin, soft paws played at the ground. This was Halloween, a night of trick or treat, when legends came alive. And the legends had come for her.

The forest called, the mountains waited, the wilderness sent an invitation. Mamaw’s song drifted between the trees, beckoning, haunting, welcoming, with a chorus of "Follow your heart."

Her heart was full of the scent of Barry, the stench of his too-human flesh, and her teeth ached for his taste. But he would be easy to track later. For now, the night beckoned.

Susan ran with the painters, free.

Somewhere in the night she changed. At least, half of her did.

###

THE BOY WHO SAW FIRE

He dreamed of hot things.

Red peppers curled like the tips of elf shoes. Stove eyes, their orange coils glaring menacingly. Asphalt, soft and black and casting ribbons of heat on a summer day. Steam baths, mists of boiling dews. And, at the center of his dreams, the point around which these fiery molten ores revolved, was the golden hell of the sun.

He dreamed of cities on fire, of office-workers stumbling from doorways like animated matchsticks, their hair aflame; of yellow cabs driving down buckling streets, smoke churning from open windows; of sidewalks writhing like ant-covered snakes; of glass melting in towering buildings, the warm spun taffy of slag running forty floors down; of satellite dishes withering like sunflowers in a drought; of hot gases pluming from broken water mains; of pedestrians swelling and dripping grease like plump wieners on a 4th of July grill.

He dreamed of a blanket of black oily smog covering the ground, the sky filled with a billion particles of soot; pillars and mushrooms of gray clouds dancing in celebration, twisting like twinkle-toed tornadoes among the hot coals; dead fogs battling the firelight for shadowy dominance; blistering winds urging the flames to wicked heights.

And as the embers died, as the immolating pyres consumed themselves, as the land lay charred and crisp and barren, he dreamed of spring rains, gentle drizzles that carried off the ash in quiet rivulets, water drops that dissipated and dissolved the thick smoke, the dark charcoal ruins swept away by the dust-broom wind. In his dreams, a new sun hovered, a cool and gentle gift-giver, a bringer of change, a rose-colored harbinger.

This morning, as always, he awoke in a sweat, as if the fires and rains had been at work on the plain of his forehead. The real sun was stabbing through his bedroom window with an accusing eye, reprimanding him for sleeping late. He kicked off the blankets and stood up and stretched, his belly-button yawning between pajama halves. He knelt over and tugged up his socks, which had been flagging out beyond his stubby toes.

"Billy, breakfast is ready," his mom called from downstairs. He rubbed his eyes.

"Be down in a sec," he yelled back, then changed into his blue jeans and T-shirt. The sky outside his window was blue and cloudbare. It looked like it was going to be another scary summer day. He jogged downstairs.

His mom kissed him on the top of his head. "Playing ball today?"

"Some of the guys talked about it yesterday." Billy sat at the table and looked at his plate. Two strips of bacon, a circular sausage patty, and two eggs. Sunny side up.

The eggs were like yellow eyes. "I don't think I'm hungry this morning, Mom."

"Are you feeling okay, honey?" She pressed her wrist against his forehead. "I hope you're not getting another one of those fevers."

"I'm fine."

"You feel a little warm to me."

That's because I dream of fire, he thought. And when I wake up, the fire is hiding behind everything like red shadows. It's there in the big oak tree out in the yard. The top where the leaves catch the sunlight is trying to be a torch.

See that fire hydrant by the sidewalk, just outside the white picket fence? If firemen came by and turned the big plug with their wrenches, lava would spew out and burn the grass. And the driveway is a vein coal, waiting to be lit so it can smolder forever.

"It's probably just because of July," Billy said.

"Hmm. Well, you better take it easy today. Maybe you should stay inside in the air-conditioning."

"Aw, can't I go down and play by the creek?"

"I told you to stay away from that nasty water. I don't care if it is shady down there under the trees."

"But, Mom—"

"No 'buts' about it, young man. You can get your pajamas back on and get right back in bed."

In bed, where the heat came to him from somewhere inside his head or heart. But he knew he couldn't argue with Mom.

He poked at the egg yolks until they bled ochre. He forked off a small piece and put it in his mouth. He swallowed, hoping he wouldn't get burned. After the egg slid down his throat, he smiled at his mom. "Can I eat before I go up? I'm getting a little appetite now."

"Sure, honey. You've got to keep your strength up. An eleven-year-old needs good nutrition."

She crossed the kitchen, her high heels clacking on the floor tiles, and went to the bathroom, probably to check on her make-up before going off to work.

Billy put his hand on his glass of orange juice, then drew back as if he had received an electric shock. The liquid was so—so very orange.

He much preferred milk, the cool white silky smooth drink. White reminded him of the hospital, where he had spent most of the spring, back when the winter breezes had flickered and died and the last snow had melted away. The days had started getting longer and the sun glared like a baleful enemy. And the fevers had come.

An endless round of doctors had poked and prodded him, put the cold discs of their tongue depressors in his mouth. But the fevers went away when he was tucked in the windowless room where the only light came from the weak fluorescent tubes. The greenish light made everybody look sick, even the nurses in their sterile uniforms and flat hair.

After a week, after the needle-marks in his arms were like red constellations from the blood tests, the doctors had shrugged their shoulders and scratched their beards and adjusted their eyeglasses. They sent him home, telling his parents that he needed rest and a good diet, and to let them know if the symptoms recurred. His father held his hand as they walked out the hospital's glass doors.

His father's hand felt like a volcanic mitten. Billy's palm began sweating. And the sun was out that day, high and bright and harmful. He raised his forearm against the light, trying to shield his eyes.

"You'll get used to it," Dad said, smiling down with wide lips. Sometimes Billy saw red specks in his father's pupils, as if ethereal fires were burning inside. But that day, Dad had been wearing sunglasses, and Billy saw only his own pale face staring back.

Mom drove them home, sitting behind the wheel of their Nissan, her brow wrinkled in concern. She looked over at Billy in the passenger seat.

"You're looking a little better, honey," she said, but Billy saw the lie sitting on her tongue between the even rows of her teeth. He nodded weakly when she glanced in the rear-view mirror.

"He'll live. We always have," Dad said.

They brought him home and took him to his bedroom and laid him under the cool sheets. And he sweated away April and May, surrounded by those blue walls. His mother brought his meals on a vinyl tray. His father worked nights and slept most of the day, but always came up to read Billy bedtime stories before leaving for his job. His father would close the book just before the sun dipped below the horizon and the beautiful velvet curtain of night fell over the earth outside the window.

His father would wish him goodnight, wipe his brow, and kiss Billy's forehead, then close the door and leave Billy to his thoughts. And Billy would twist the sheets, curl the pillow against his belly, and fight the heaviness in his lids. He would stare at the ceiling he couldn't see and count the dolphins leaping out of glittering bays, or imagine a waterfall pouring down the walls and battering him with silver-blue drops.

But sleep always won, and the conflagrations roared across his dreams. He was afraid to tell his parents about the dreams. He didn't want to disappoint them. And his mother wouldn't let him play outside if he complained. So the night-fires raged on and Billy suffered in silence and awoke each day with pajamas that were damp with perspiration.

Billy pretended that he was fine, and talked about going to school in the fall. Now he was eating downstairs and sometimes his mother would let him watch television. She was working again and felt that Billy was well enough to stay home with his sleeping father. Billy kept busy all day drinking large tumblers of ice water, wiping the cool dew from the glass against his face and sucking on the ice cubes. But now he had orange juice, and it looked like heat to him.

He picked up his napkin and wrapped it around the glass, then ran to the sink and poured the offending liquid down the drain. Then he snuck back to the table, his socks sliding on the floor. He was just settling back in his chair when his mother returned.

"You've got a big-boy thirst today," she said, fussing with an earring. The tiny ruby in it caught some light coming through the kitchen window and glowed fervidly. Billy winced against the pain and looked across the room until his eyes came to rest on a shadowy corner. When he turned back to his mother, the fire was out and she was walking towards the door.

"I'll be back at noon. Get yourself to bed, now," she called over her shoulder. Billy went up the stairs and listened until he heard his mom's car head down the street. Then he went to his closet and got out his bike helmet with its blue-green visor. He pushed his feet into his sneakers and slid on a pair of black biking gloves. He went downstairs, through the kitchen, and into the adjoining garage.

His Huffy ten-speed was leaning against the wall beneath the tool rack that held Dad's shovel, rake, and hedge trimmers. He rolled the Huffy to the end of the garage and pressed the button that raised the door, hoping the noise wouldn't wake his father. Sunlight poured in like scalding water. He staggered against the light, then regained his balance and mounted the bike, and in a moment he was down the driveway, pumping his legs and hunching over the curved handlebars.

As he turned onto the street and gained speed, the rushing wind cooled his body. The sunlight chased him, but he was moving so swiftly that the beams scarcely had time to settle on his skin. He turned south at the corner and was shaded by a row of old oaks that lined the sidewalks like sentries. He stopped at the next intersection, straddling the bike on his tiptoes as he braced himself for the worst part of his trip.

Before him was a sun-splashed strip of highway, open and cruel and carless, with not a phone-pole's worth of shade. The heat would rip through his body in needles and nails of fiery pain. Even the visor wouldn't fully soften the glare that would prick his eyes. He was sweating now, but it was the sweat of exertion, not the sweat of fevers and dreams. On the other side of the street, the woods beckoned.

Only a child from the urban outskirts would call this patch of scraggly underbrush and jackpine a forest. Honeysuckle vines laced through the scrub locust and kudzu had gained a healthy foothold in the end that bordered the weedy lot of an unsold house. The crooked branches of the pines stretched out and interlaced to form a canopy. The only beauty of the place was in its daylight dark, the wonderful unbroken shadow that stretched under the foliage.

Billy took a deep breath and leaned his weight forward and he was off in a flash. The sun shot ions and light-arrows at him, but most were off the mark. He dodged and weaved, a haggard veteran in the game of survival. Then he was across the swollen river of sunshine, his front tire bumping up at the curb, and he was embraced by the shade of the woods.

He rolled his bike down a small slope and leaned it against a tree. He hung his helmet from the handlebars and walked deeper into the woods, his arms held up to sweep low branches from his face. His feet made no noise on the carpet of pine needles and he could hear a finch chattering somewhere above him. Then he was at the creek and he kneeled down and put his face near the cold water.

A round concrete pipe stuck out of the slope, spilling water from its black mouth. The water gurgled into a pool, splattering off round stones and sending drops of spray arcing into the air. Billy let some of the drops roll down his face like joyful tears. He lay on his stomach and looked into the pool. Water spiders skittered across its surface, leaving pockmarks of tracks that faded in an eyeblink. The damp smell of muddy black leaves and moss filled his nostrils. He was safe. Here, no fire could burn.

Billy rolled onto his back and looked up through the trees. He could see patches of blue sky in the cracks, calm and cloudless. The sun would be up there somewhere, boiling in anger at his escape. He closed his eyes and put sun and fire and red and orange out of his mind. Before he knew it, he was asleep.

He dreamed that he was undersea. Somehow, he knew that he had drowned. He tried his limbs and found they still worked, though a bit awkwardly. The world moved in slow motion, graceful fish finning silently past his ears and sinuous eels winding across the sandy bottom. He looked up from the deep blue belly of death and saw the light high above. He was about to push off and make for it when he remembered the evil sun. Then he was struggling to keep himself from floating, fighting the peaceful drift of nothingness.

He awoke with his back in the dirt and leaves. He looked out at the houses that surrounded the woods and saw by their long shadows that it was afternoon. His mom would be home soon. He ran up the bank to his ten-speed and wheeled it to the street. He hopped on the bike and winced against the daylight, then raced the sun back to the house.

As he entered the kitchen through the garage, his dad's voice called to him.

"Hi, Billy. Where have you been?"

The words seemed to have come from the air, or out of the heating vents, or maybe down the chimney. There was no accusation in them, only curiosity. Billy whirled and saw his dad sitting in a dark corner of the living room.

"Uh—I went for a bike ride."

"Out in the sun?"

"Yeah. Mom said it was okay, and that it would probably do me some good to get some fresh air."

Billy could see his dad's eyes glimmering in the darkness, two bright but cool moons. He stepped into the living room toward his dad, his sneakers seeming to float on the carpet, he walked so softly. Dad rarely yelled at him, but he was afraid he'd be in trouble if his dad caught him in a lie.

"Looks like a beautiful day outside." Dad said it as a query, a gambit. Did he know?

"Yeah, but it's almost too hot."

"Makes a guy want to find a cool place and hide from the sun."

Billy nodded. He could make out the edge of his dad's body now, a darker silhouette among the shadows.

"How are you feeling? Any fever?" Dad's voice was smoky and deep.

"I feel good. I think I'm getting better now."

"It's okay if you're not. You can't rush things. Just take it easy."

"Sure, Dad." Billy really did feel better. His secret was still safe.

Dad stood up, and it was as if the shadows fluttered around him, falling from his shoulders in black rags. He walked over to Billy and put his warm hand on his son's head. Billy was struck by a vivid image of the burning cities of his dreams, then they, too, flickered away, like woodsmoke carried away by the wind.

"I'm going back to bed now. Just knock on the door if you need anything," his dad said. Billy watched the way Dad avoided the sunlight while walking across the living room, staying in the black island cast by the shadow of the couch, then lingering under the lampshade before entering the kitchen. Billy heard a soft squeaking on the stairs and a door closing.

"We'll survive. We always have," Billy muttered to himself. What had his dad meant? He remembered back in the third grade when the class had to give speeches about what their parents did. Most of the children were the offspring of doctors, lawyers, accountants, and professors, the smattering of professionals that could afford to live in this upper-class district. One shame-faced girl admitted that her father was a fireman and her mother was a cocktail waitress. One boy's father was a pro baseball player, but he admitted that his father wasn't good enough yet to be on his own baseball card. It was as if he had confessed that his dad was a drug dealer, the way he shuffled back to his desk with his head hanging down.

When it was Billy's turn, he stood in front of the class and looked out at the sea of sniffling faces. He glanced out the window at the sun-splashed playground, where kids were jumping rope and kicking soccer balls. The light didn't seem to bother them, because they were laughing and running and no one seemed worried about the big hot enemy in the sky. Billy cleared his throat and spoke.

"My mom works at a bank, counting people's money," he said, then his voice fell away. "And my dad—"

He looked at the crazy patterns in the ceiling tiles, then back down at the gray floor. He didn't quite know how to put it into words. He had stayed awake nights, thinking about it. Nights when he knew the fire would come in dreams, red and vengeful.

"My dad puts out the sun."

The class was silent, dull as cows.

"He pushes it down in the sky and grabs the corners of night and pulls the darkness up over the world like a blanket."

Then the laughter started. It began as a birdish twitter somewhere in the back. Then a snicker burst out two aisles over. Next a guffaw, follow by a hoot. Then the whole class erupted, a choir of hilarity that disturbed classes up and down the hall. Even Miss McAllister had her hand over her mouth, trying to hide her smile.

Billy felt his face burn in embarrassment. His cheeks and ears were tingling. He wanted to run, but his feet were as heavy as dictionaries. He closed his eyes tight, squeezing tears from their corners.

Miss McAllister tried to settle the class down. She stood in front of her desk with her hands on her hips. Then she turned and tapped a ruler on the back of a chair. Slowly the laughter faded, like boiling water reduced to a simmer, an occasional bubble rippling but the surface calm.

"That's some imagination you have, Billy," she said. She was still smiling, her pink lipstick glistening in the light. Billy looked at her and felt his eyes darken. He didn't know how he could feel such a thing, but he did. And he knew that if he looked in a mirror, there would be little specks of fire in his pupils, just like Dad's. He returned to his seat.

He put his head and his desk and imagined his classmates with their skin dripping from their bones like hot wax running down a candle. He pictured Miss McAllister sinking into the sun, screaming as the thermonuclear furnace reduced her to vapor. He daydreamed a rain of molten orange ingots falling from the sky, piercing holes in the roof of the schoolhouse and sizzling the children out on the playground. In his mind, the fire swept across the schoolyard like a yellow tide, turning laughter to screams. And behind the tide came the clouds, a dark blank nothingness that would suffocate the ashes. He rode the bus home in a sweat.

Even now, three years later, he still carried the memory of that day inside him, like a small ember kept alive in his chest. He had gained the reputation of being an oddball. The bullies had culled him from the herd like wolves culling a weak lamb from the flock. They called him the "Sundance Kid," and pushed him around while the girls stood by and laughed and dared each other to kiss him.

No one seemed surprised when he got sick. The fevers had plagued him off and on, and his attendance record was spotty. His mom rushed him to the doctor every few weeks until the condition landed him in the hospital. His dad was sympathetic to his suffering, but Billy thought he saw secrets lurking in his dad's eyes, as if they were hiding something that all the doctors in the world couldn't diagnose.

Billy went to the shadowed corner of the living room where his dad had been sitting. He felt better here, where the light didn't stab and the cool air swirled from the air conditioning vent. He clicked on the television with the remote, but the flickering screen hurt his eyes so he turned it off. Mom's car backed into the garage and she walked into the kitchen.

"Hi, guy. Feeling okay?"

"Sure, Mom. I stayed in like you told me to. Dad kept me company for a while."

"He was up today?"

"Just for a little bit." Billy wondered if his dad would tell her he'd been outside.

"Well, he needs his rest. He works hard."

"Mom, what does Dad do?"

She frowned. "You'll have to ask him. I can't really explain it."

That night, when his dad came to see Billy to bed, Billy said, "Remember when I was little and I asked what your job was, and you told me you tucked in the sun? And you said you'd explain when I was ready?"

His dad put a warm hand on his shoulder and smiled. "Of course. I remember everything I ever told you."

"Well, am I ready yet?"

His dad laughed, and Billy thought he saw smoke come out of his open mouth. "Well, I guess you're getting to be a big boy now. Nearly a man."

Billy puffed out his chest under the blankets.

"Well, like I told you when you were little, I tuck in the sun, just like I tuck you in. Didn't you ever wonder why we always put you to bed just before sunset?"

"But, Dad, they taught us all about gravity in science class, and how the earth spins and revolves around the sun, and that it's night when our side of the earth is turned away from the light."

"That's because they don't know about us."

"Us?"

"People have always looked for explanations for things they couldn't understand. A long time ago, people believed that the sun and the moon were gods, one ruling the day and one ruling the night. Then they thought the earth was the center of the universe, with the sun and the planets circling around it. Now they have the theories that they teach in school. Because it's better if people believe these things than to know the real truth."

"What is the truth?"

"Remember how you told what I did and the class laughed at you?"

Billy nodded, his belly inflamed at the memory.

"It's not good for them to know. It would make our work that much harder."

"What work? There's more to it than just the sun. I can tell by the way you're talking."

His dad sighed and looked out the window, then removed his sunglasses. The sun was setting like a bloody egg yolk, appearing to hover just over the horizon as if reluctant to yield control of the sky. He turned back to Billy with his lips tight. Billy saw yellow and orange flecks glittering in Dad's irises, and his face looked pained.

"I put the sun inside here." His dad pointed to his temple. Sweat was collecting on his brow and his teeth were clenched. He closed his eyes and grimaced as if he were swallowing a stone. Outside, the world was growing blue-gray as the last fingers of twilight clutched at the fabric of the day. Then the night rose like a black fog, cold and dead and soothing.

His dad's face paled, then the rosy color slowly returned. His irises were golden orange and his pupils were fiery crimson, the color of the heart of the sun. He smiled, like someone who had taken bitter medicine and knew the worst was over.

"Sunset is the hardest part," his dad said. "The sun doesn't like to be put to bed. If it had its way, it would shine non-stop."

Billy shuddered at the horror of the thought. He felt his dad trembling so hard that the mattress quivered.

"But I'm strong enough to keep it inside, so that the world can rest for a while. Then it gets too hot inside my head and I must let it out again. It's easier in the winter, when the wind is cold. But during summer, the sun is really hot and strong and angry, and I can't store it as long."

Billy tried to understand. Did this have anything to do with his dreams and night sweats?

"I give night to the world, just as my ancestors did before me. It has been our job since time began. We are the keepers of the flame. Long ago, when there were many of us, ice covered most of the earth. But over the ages, as the sun grew older and stronger, our numbers dwindled. Now there's only us."

"Us?"

"You and me. And we must never surrender. Only we can douse the wrath of the sun, if only temporarily. Only we can give respite to a world that would otherwise be a cinder."

"But why you, Dad?"

"We are born to it, Billy. And someday, when I weaken and become parched and can no longer suppress the flames of the sun, then I will pass the torch to you, just as it was passed to me."

"You mean, Grandpa—?"

"You only saw him at night. Remember there at the end, just before he died? Everybody thought it was sickness. They were right, only not in the way they thought. He was burnt out, mentally baked away from decades of swallowing the fire."

Billy envisioned his grandpa, sweating beneath the sheets, the fever racing through his wasted body as the last days of his life ticked away in that nursing home. Even in his near-comatose state, Grandpa always knew when some nurse had opened the curtains and let the daylight stream through the window. How could the nurses know they were letting the conqueror in to revel over the bones of its vanquished foe? They had been taught that the sun was a healthy, life-giving thing, not a vile enemy.

"I've been fighting the sun a long time, Billy. Long enough to know its secrets and its tricks. And I will teach them to you when you're ready. Someday you will divide night from day. Someday you'll be all that stands between heaven and hot hell. Someday you will rule the sun, at least for a few hours at a time."

"Is that why the sunshine hurts so much?"

"It knows its enemies."

"And my dreams—"

"Of the world on fire, in a blaze of yellow and orange glory? That's what happens when the solar power rages out of control. That's what we must prevent."

The world outside the window was black, a sheet of oblivion stretched tight across the sky and pegged in place by his dad's thoughts. Starlight was sprinkled across the tarry night.

"Why are there stars, Dad?" Billy asked. He rubbed his eyes. He was getting sleepy.

"There are no stars, only the sun breaking through in spots. We are imperfect."

"The moon?"

"The sun's idiot twin. It's harmless. Just the sun's way of reminding us that it's waiting for us to get tired."

Billy let his head drop back into the pillows. There was so much to figure out. "Does Mom know?"

"She suspects something, but she's only human. I've tried to spare her the worst of it. I only wish I could tell her why you have the fevers, so she wouldn't worry so much."

"When will the fevers stop?" Billy asked, looking at his dad's sickly complexion. The skin had a bloodless pall, and a sheen of bright sweat glittered on his forehead. He shook his head slowly from side to side.

"It never ends. We burn until we burn up."

"But why?"

His dad shrugged. "Why is the earth flat? It is our nature to live just as it is the sun's nature to burn."

"What if we don't stop the sun?"

"Then the world burns instead of us."

Billy was quiet. He thought of the nice shady place in the woods, where he could press his cheek in the cool mud. So escape would be only temporary, and long sweltering years lay ahead of him.

An idea came to him. He wondered if there was somebody who shepherded the wind, just as his dad controlled the sun. Someone whose cheeks were constantly sore from puffing and blowing.

And someone who made the rains fall and water flow, perhaps by crying, when the water only wanted to pool quietly.

And someone who held up the sky, who at this moment was telling his or her child about the evils that hovered above the clouds, waiting for a sliver of opening in which to descend. Might there not be all kinds of powers at work, each carefully and precariously balanced to make the world livable?

His dad must have sensed that he'd told Billy enough for one night. There was much for Billy to learn, but there was time. Dad was still strong, and even though he was probably sick of holding the stellar furnace in his head, he wasn't ready to surrender. He kissed Billy on the forehead, his scalding lips touching the equally warm skin of his son.

"Good night, Billy. I hope you dream of ice," he whispered. He turned out the light as he left.

Billy lay in the dark, contemplating the illusion of night. One day he would fight the sun. One day he would swallow fire. One day he would keep the world from becoming a funeral pyre, as he had seen it burning in his mind. But tonight, it was enough to know the sun could be beaten.

He pressed his eyes closed, and his mind spun in bright circles until his thoughts disappeared into a perfect red and stormy sleep.

###

IN THE HEART OF NOVEMBER

Margaret sat on the tombstone, swinging her legs. Ellen could read Margaret's name carved in the gray granite, though the letters were blurred.

"How long have we been friends?" Margaret asked, her voice like a lost wind.

"You mean...before or after?" Ellen pulled her sweater more tightly across her chest. The graveyard was in the heart of November, all shadow and chill and flapping brown leaves.

"Both, silly."

"Seven years."

"And have I ever broken a promise or blabbed a secret?"

Ellen looked away. Even though Margaret was almost invisible, her eyes glowed bright and strange. Ellen had stopped by the graveyard every day after school since her best friend had been buried, and they often spent hours out here in the summer, talking about boys and Ellen's mom and Mrs. Deerfield's geometry tests. Margaret knew more of Ellen's secrets than anybody.

"I don't know," Ellen said. "You never blab on this side, but you could be telling my secrets to every dead person in the world, for all I know."

Margaret's wispy features darkened. "Dead people don't care about your problems. They've got their own."

"Their problems can't be as bad as mine."

Margaret drifted down from the tombstone and put a cold hand on Ellen's shoulder. "I wish you never had to find out."

"If I were dead, then it wouldn't matter if boys treated me like dirt."

"Don't be so sure."

"Do boys like you...over there?" Ellen tried to picture Doug as a ghost, but couldn't. He was too tall and healthy and strong. He was meant to be running up and down a soccer field, as swift as sunshine, his dark curly hair flying about his face.

"Dead boys just aren't very interesting," Margaret said. "They don't want to do anything but sleep."

Margaret put her hands together, and the pale fingers merged. "It's hard to hold hands when you don't have much to hang on to. And kissing—" Margaret puckered her lips and made an exaggerated smacking sound. "Nobody likes cold lips."

"Gross," said Ellen.

Margaret's giggle spilled out over the grass and echoed off the stone wall that surrounded the cemetery. The sun was sinking into the gnarled tops of trees. Cars passed by the highway beyond the wall, the wheels making whispers on the asphalt.

"I'd better get home," Ellen said. "Mom will be mad."

"I wish you could stay here all the time."

"But you don't want me to be dead."

"I just get lonely sometimes. Lonely for living people. I miss being alive."

Ellen looked into Margaret's unearthly eyes. "You miss Doug."

"Wouldn't you?"

Ellen didn't say anything. How could she tell her best friend that they were in love with the same guy? She'd hoped Margaret would get over him. Margaret and Doug didn't have anything in common, especially now.

But they had been close once. Back in the seventh grade, they'd been as steady as anybody. And all Ellen could do was watch with envy as they held onto each other at school dances or talked quietly during lunch or passed notes in class. After Margaret was hit by a car and killed, Ellen thought Doug was going to die as well, only from a broken heart instead of a broken body.

"I've got to go," Ellen said. Her mom would yell at her for being late again. If only Mom knew that the more she yelled, the more Ellen wanted to be late. Ellen waved and started through the rows of tombstones.

"I might come out tomorrow," Margaret called after her.

Ellen turned, chilled by more than the long shade of a dead oak. "I thought they didn't like it when you come out."

"Who cares what they think?" Margaret shook her see-through hair. "I get tired of them telling me what to do and where to go. They don't want anybody to have any fun."

Ellen didn't know who "they" were, but Margaret's eyes always narrowed with anger when she spoke of them. "You aren't supposed to leave."

"Gosh, Ellen, you're starting to sound like your mom." Margaret's hollow voice rose in pitch as she mimicked Ellen's mom. "'You were supposed to be home an hour ago. You were supposed to make an A on that math test.'"

Ellen laughed, even though Margaret's shrill imitation was too perfect, and it reminded Ellen of what was awaiting at home. "What will they do to you if you leave?"

Margaret shrugged. "Whatever."

Margaret had left the cemetery once, had floated outside Ellen's window in the mobile home park. This had been about two weeks after her burial. Margaret had seemed so much more lost, lonely, and creepy outside of the graveyard. Whatever invisible chains kept her bound to the dirt under her tombstone must have been painful to break, because when Ellen visited the next day, Margaret had faded to nearly nothing. A month passed before Margaret returned to her usual thin form.

Ellen moved to her best friend and gave her a hug. At least, she tried. Her arms passed through Margaret, raising goose bumps. "Don't do anything to make them mad. They might take you forever next time."

"I want to see Doug," Margaret said.

"Doug's not worth it."

"How do you know? What do you know about losing somebody you love?"

Ellen's eyes grew hot with held tears. Margaret was beautiful. She could have had any boy she wanted. Ellen was afraid that Margaret still could, even dead. "I've really got to go."

"I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to be mean."

Ellen sniffled. "It's not your fault. I'm just feeling sorry for myself."

"See you tomorrow?"

Ellen nodded and hurried from the graveyard, making sure no one was looking before she climbed over the cemetery wall. She slipped into the woods and onto the well-worn path that led home.

"What's wrong?" Mom asked. "You've hardly eaten a bite. You're not going to starve yourself so you can look like the girls in Seventeen, are you? I told you to quit wasting money on those stupid magazines."

"No, Mom, I'm not on a diet." Ellen was tired of eating macaroni and cheese and greasy hamburger. Mom's cooking even made the school cafeteria lunches look good.

"You look pale." Mom leaned over the small table and pressed her hand to Ellen's forehead. Her hand was nearly as cold as Margaret's. "You're not taking sick, are you?"

"I feel fine." Except her belly was like a nest of snakes. She was worried that Margaret would come out tomorrow.

"Well, you don't look fine."

"I think I just want to go lie down a while."

"Got your homework done?"

Ellen nodded. She always did her homework while the teachers were explaining it to the rest of the class. Margaret had gotten beauty, but Ellen was lucky with books. Too bad Doug was smart, too, and never asked Ellen to help him with homework.

"Well, good. That's one less thing I got to worry about." Mom's face was pinched and tired, her cheeks flushed. She might have been drinking. Ellen couldn't smell anything over the cloying aroma of cheese powder.

Ellen pushed her plate away, knowing she'd see the leftovers again tomorrow. And tomorrow might bring other horrors. She went down the narrow paneled hall to her bedroom. The bed took up most of the floor, and she crawled onto it and lay on her back, looking at the pictures of musicians and unicorns on her walls. The unicorns would have to go. She was getting too old for unicorns.

She reached over, slid her desk drawer open, and took out the photograph. Its edges were worn from handling, but the face was just as wonderful as always. Doug smiled out from between the white borders, straight teeth and dark eyes and curly hair. Something swished against the window, and Ellen's breath froze in her lungs. What if Margaret was at her window, looking in? What if Margaret had seen her gazing longingly at Doug's picture?

She got on her knees and looked out the window. The lights blazed in the windows of the mobile homes, which were arranged as awkwardly as tombstones. Different sizes, moved in at different times, all slowly fading under the wear of time. This was her graveyard, and she was as trapped here as Margaret was in hers of grass and granite and artificial flowers.

Nobody stirred outside, neither the dead nor the living. Leaves scurried across the bare yards like frantic mice. A pole at the end of the park glowed with a sick blue light, but it was too cold and weak to attract bugs. Ellen drew her curtains tight and rested back on her pillow.

Doug. He'd said hello to her in the hall the other day. She summoned the memory in all its glory, the flash of his eyes, the warm tone of his voice, his head above the crowd of students changing class. She'd been too nervous to say anything in response, all she could do was give a lame wave and what she hoped was a smile.

Probably looked like a grimace. She brought a small hand mirror from her drawer and practiced her smile. Dimples that were dumpy instead of cute. Her cheeks were fat. She had a pimple on her chin. God, she was hideous. No wonder Doug didn't want her.

She and Doug had been close briefly, right after Margaret's death. They had sat together at lunch, Doug wearing sunglasses so that no one could tell that Mr. Cool had been crying. They'd even hugged at the funeral, and now Ellen embraced that fleeting memory of his muscles.

If only Margaret could die every day, then maybe Doug and I—

As soon as she had the thought, she was sickened. She'd rather have Margaret back alive than to have any guy in the world. Anyway, if Margaret were alive, Doug would still be going out with her. Margaret had been beautiful. Still was. And Ellen was a frumpy, dumpy piece of nobody. She cried herself to a restless sleep.

"You didn't go out," Ellen said the next afternoon.

Margaret lowered her voice, looking around at the other graves. "I was scared."

"I don't blame you." Ellen felt a small spark of joy, a lightness in her chest. If Margaret didn't go out, everything would be okay.

"I want to see him."

"You'd better be careful, Margaret. They want to keep you a secret."

"I don't have to talk to him or anything. I just want to see him. To remember what he's like."

"What about Doug? What if you freak him out?"

"I didn't freak you out."

"Well, you did a little, at first. I mean, it's not like I believed in ghosts or anything, or did one of those corny seances to try and bring you back."

"I wonder if Doug misses me as much as I miss him."

Ellen didn't know whether to lie or not. She had never kept secrets from Margaret before. She looked at the ground, at the seam of stubborn dirt where the grass hadn't taken root.

"Are you ashamed of having me for a friend?"

"Of course not." Ellen knelt in the moist grass by the tombstone. "You'll always be my best friend. Forever."

"Better than Doug?"

Does she know? Ellen's throat was tight. What would a ghost do to you if you tried to steal her boyfriend?

"Doug still thinks about you a lot," Ellen managed to say, which wasn't a lie. "I talked to him a few weeks ago. He said that you guys listened to Crash Test Dummies together. He said that 'Swimming In Your Ocean' was your favorite song."

"Crash Test Dummies. Now that's what I call irony, seeing the way I got killed."

Ellen tried to change the subject away from Doug and death. "Do they have music...over there?"

Margaret looked beyond the graveyard, beyond trees and stone and all things solid, as if she hadn't heard Ellen. "It doesn't hurt to get killed. It hurts more, afterward. Being dead, I mean. And knowing it. That's the worst thing."

"I wish I could trade places with you." So Doug would be in love with her. Even if she couldn't do anything about it, couldn't hold his hand or kiss him. She'd be happy enough just to know he carried her in his heart. Just to be able to make him happy or sad when he thought of her.

"Don't say that." Margaret drifted down from the stone. Part of her misty flesh seeped across Ellen's face. Ellen shivered.

"It hurts to be dead, Ellen. It hurts to remember everything you lost."

"You haven't lost me," Ellen said, wondering if Margaret was splashing the chill of death on her face just to warn her. But Ellen would never commit suicide. She was too scared. And if she died, she'd never have Doug. But would Doug have her?

"I don't ever want to lose you." Margaret smiled, a white sliver of movement among the smoky threads of her face. The front gate of the cemetery creaked open.

"Somebody's coming," Ellen said, but Margaret had already disappeared, back to her cold and dreamless sleep. Ellen pretended to mumble a prayer in case the visitors happened to see her. Then she went out the front gate and headed toward the soccer field.

Ellen's mom would be mad, but Ellen didn't care. Nothing else mattered anymore. Let everybody else hate her. She had to find out once, for all, and forever.

"This is really weird, Ellen," Doug said.

What did Doug know about weirdness? His world was soccer games, shooting for college scholarships, getting tons of pictures in the yearbook. He'd been in the graveyard before, but not since Margaret's funeral, and certainly never when the sky was purple with sundown. A pale slice of moon hung in bare branches like an ornament.

"How come you've never been back?" Ellen asked.

"Because I—" Doug paused, gasped. "I don't know. It makes me think about her, and I don't like to think about her. It makes my chest hurt."

They stood before Margaret's grave, Doug shivering in his soccer shorts and T-shirt. She'd dragged him here right after practice, had called him to the sidelines and told him she had something really important to show him. So important it couldn't wait for him to get dressed.

She'd taken his hand, and he hadn't pulled away. She led him across the street and over the hill, feeling the eyes of Doug's friends on her back. They probably thought good old Doug was going to score, put another one in the net. Ellen trembled as they walked, brushing aside his questions until they came to the graveyard.

"Margaret is my best friend," Ellen said. Doug looked at her as if she were crazy, but she didn't feel crazy at all. In fact, for the first time in years, she felt that her life was under her own control.

"Yeah, Margaret was great," Doug said, looking around at the tombstones gray in the weak light. "She was really special."

"I have to know, Doug. Did you really love her?"

Doug let go of her hand. "You're scaring me."

"The truth is nothing to be afraid of." Ellen squinted at Margaret's grave, but could see none of the strange milkiness of her ghost. She hoped they hadn't called Margaret away, that they hadn't confined her to some dismal, dark hibernation. "Did you love her?"

Doug looked around. He seemed uncomfortable without an audience. Ellen wondered if this was how he acted when he was alone with Margaret. "Uh, yeah. Sure. Of course I did."

"How many girls have you gone out with since then?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"It's got everything to do with everything."

"Are you feeling okay?"

"I'm fine." Ellen grinned, not caring if her dimples were dumpy. "Never been better. How many girls?"

"Heck, I don't know. Five, six."

"Maybe ten?"

"Maybe."

"And you loved Margaret the best?"

"You're weird. I've got to go."

"Just answer me, and you can leave."

He scratched his head. His eyes reflected the moonlight. "Well, I loved her. But you got to move on. You got to keep living. I know you were her best friend, but I didn't know you were so hung up on her."

"Even dead people have feelings." She almost wished Margaret would rise like fog, to tell Doug how much she missed him. Ellen wondered how Mr. Cool would handle that.

"I'm getting out of here." Doug headed for the gate, hunched, his arms huddled across his chest. November was always cold, especially in the graveyard. But Ellen knew some things were colder than November. Like a guy's heart.

"She loved you, you know," Ellen called.

Doug stopped near the gate, his shadow mingling with the wrought-iron bars. "I thought you were taking me out here so we could be alone. I was going to kiss you. I was going to be gentle. Hell, I was even going to walk you home after."

"I bet you say that to all the girls," Margaret said, her voice everywhere and nowhere.

Doug glanced at the sky, shook his head as if to clear away cobwebs or memories or imagined voices, then hurried through the gate.

"He's not so hot after all," Margaret said from her tombstone perch. "Not like I remember him."

"Some people grow on you, and some don't."

"You could have fallen in love with him," Margaret said. "I wouldn't have minded too much."

"I know. But every time I kissed him, I would have thought of you. And he wouldn't have."

"Yeah." The moon shone into Margaret, making her hair radiant. She was beautiful, both inside and outside. "Well, when you're dead, warm lips are gross anyway."

They shared a laugh, and even though the wind howled around them, Ellen was warm. She might not know what losing love was like, but she knew what having it was like.

"You'd better get home," Margaret said. "Your mom's going to kill you."

"Naw. She's not going to kill me. I'm going to live a long time."

The cemetery was silent except for the brittle rattling of bone-dry leaves. After a moment, Margaret said, "Live for both of us, okay?"

Ellen reached out, held the wispy hand of her best friend. "I promise," she whispered.

Ellen left Margaret to her dark sleep and headed for the gate, street, and home. Tomorrow Doug would be telling half the school that she was nuts, but she didn't care. Doug could go stuff himself, as far as she was concerned. She could hardly wait to get home and tear his picture into shreds.

There was one more thing. She paused at the gate. "See you tomorrow, Margaret," she called across the empty graveyard.

A peaceful hush was her only answer.

THE END

###

About the author:

I have written 12 novels, including The Red Church, Speed Dating with the Dead, Disintegration, and The Skull Ring.

Other electronic works include Burial to Follow and the story collections Ashes, The First, Murdermouth, and Gateway Drug. I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where I write for a newspaper, play guitar, raise an organic garden, and work as a freelance fiction editor.

Come to the Haunted Computer, become a Spooky Microchip, and help me build my next book. You’ll also find writing tips, free fiction, and survival tips.

Talk to me at hauntedcomputer@yahoo.com, "hauntedcomputer" on Twitter, or hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com. If you enjoyed this book, please tell your friends and give another Nicholson title a try. If you hated it, why not try another one anyway? What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, and what does kill you is probably lurking in my next book. Read on for more.

Try these other thrillers because they are good:

OCTOBER GIRLS

By Scott Nicholson (writing as L.C. Glazebrook)

Five days until Halloween and all hell is about to break loose.

And it’s all Crystal’s fault.

Momma warned her not to consort with the dead and tried to teach her the magic spells that would close the portal to the afterlife. But Crystal doesn’t want to be a trailer-trash witch like Momma. She has dreams of going to community college and escaping the Appalachian town of Parson’s Ford.

Her best friend Bone is only too happy to escape the afterlife and help Crystal break the rules. Bone died too young, and she’ll do whatever it takes to remain among the living.

Then a teen movie maker comes to Parson’s Ford, and he has a very special project in mind: a horror movie starring a real ghost. The kids who watch his movies turn into brainwashed zombies. And to totally complicate matters, Crystal thinks he’s kind of a hunk, and she’s afraid her boyfriend Pettigrew only loves her because of Momma’s magic spells.

Now it’s Halloween, the night when the portal to the afterlife is widest, and somebody’s been messing with Momma’s potions. The fate of the world is in Crystal’s hands, but she hasn’t been paying attention to her lessons. And a mysterious figure in the afterlife is urging Bone to stay loyal to her own kind instead of to Crystal.

The movie is rolling, the creatures are stirring, and the brainwashed teenagers are ready to welcome a new star from the other side of the grave.

Crystal and Bone must overcome drama queens, coffin cuties, and mangled magic if they want to remain best friends forever—but at this rate, forever may not last much longer.

Learn more about the paranormal romance series October Girls or buy it for Kindle at Amazon

CURSED!

By J.R. Rain and Scott Nicholson

Albert Shipway is an ordinary guy, an insurance negotiator who likes booze and women and never having to say he’s sorry.

And he thinks this is just another day, another lunch, another order of kung pao chicken. Little does he know that he’s about to meet a little old lady who knows his greatest fear. A little old lady who knows what’s hiding in his heart. A little old lady who dishes up a big stew of supernatural revenge, with ingredients as follows: First you take one psychotic ex from a family of serial killers. Next add a pinch or two of an irrational childhood fear. Now thoroughly mix in an angry sister, a life-stealing great-granddad, and a notorious mass murderer—who happens to be dead but doesn’t know it. Let it stew and froth and bubble thoroughly....

In just a matter of minutes, Albert’s life turns upside down and he enters a world where magic and evil lurk beneath the fabric of Southern California. And all his choices have brewed a perfect storm of broken hearts, broken promises, shattered families, and a couple of tiny problems. Namely, killer mice and a baby.

Albert Shipway is finally getting a chance to right some wrongs.

That is, if it's not too late.

Learn more about the urban fantasy Cursed! or buy it for Kindle at Amazon

THE RED CHURCH

Book I in the Sheriff Littlefield Series

By Scott Nicholson

Stoker Award finalist and alternate selection of the Mystery Guild

For 13-year-old Ronnie Day, life is full of problems: Mom and Dad have separated, his brother Tim is a constant pest, Melanie Ward either loves him or hates him, and Jesus Christ won't stay in his heart. Plus he has to walk past the red church every day, where the Bell Monster hides with its wings and claws and livers for eyes. But the biggest problem is that Archer McFall is the new preacher at the church, and Mom wants Ronnie to attend midnight services with her.

Sheriff Frank Littlefield hates the red church for a different reason. His little brother died in a freak accident at the church twenty years ago, and now Frank is starting to see his brother's ghost. And the ghost keeps demanding, "Free me." People are dying in Whispering Pines, and the murders coincide with McFall's return.

The Days, the Littlefields, and the McFalls are descendants of the original families that settled the rural Appalachian community. Those old families share a secret of betrayal and guilt, and McFall wants his congregation to prove its faith. Because he believes he is the Second Son of God, and that the cleansing of sin must be done in blood.

"Sacrifice is the currency of God," McFall preaches, and unless Frank and Ronnie stop him, everybody pays.

Learn more about the real haunted church that inspired The Red Church or buy it for Kindle at Amazon

DRUMMER BOY

Book II in the Sheriff Littlefield Series

By Scott Nicholson

On an Appalachian Mountain ridge, three boys hear the rattling of a snare drum deep inside a cave known as "The Jangling Hole," and the wind carries a whispered name.

It's the eve of a Civil War re-enactment, and the town of Titusville is preparing to host a staged battle. The weekend warriors aren’t aware they will soon be fighting an elusive army. A troop of Civil War deserters, trapped in the Hole by a long-ago avalanche, is rising from a long slumber, and the war is far from over.

And one misfit kid is all that stands between the town and the cold mouth of hell…

Learn more about Drummer Boy and the Appalachian legend that inspired the novel and buy it at Amazon

DISINTEGRATION

By Scott Nicholson

Careful what you wish for.

When a mysterious fire destroys his home and kills his young daughter, Jacob Wells is pulled into a downward spiral that draws him ever closer to the past he thought was dead and buried.

Now his twin brother Joshua is back in town, seeking to settle old scores and claim his half of the Wells birthright. Jacob’s wife Renee is struggling with her own guilt, because the couple had lost an infant daughter several years before.

As Jacob and Joshua return to the twisted roles they adopted at the hands of cruel, demanding parents, they wage a war of pride, wealth, and passion. They share the poisonous love of a woman who would gladly ruin them both: Carlita, a provocative and manipulative Hispanic whose immigrant family helped build the Wells fortune.

Joshua wants other things, too, but Jacob’s desires are divided between the forbidden love he can’t possess, the respectability he can never have, and the revenge he is dying to taste. And Renee has dark motives of her own.

If only Jacob can figure out which one to blame. But the lines of identity are blurred, because Joshua and Jacob share much more than blood.

And the childhood games have become deadly serious.

Learn more about the psychological thriller Disintegration or buy it at Amazon

THE SKULL RING

By Scott Nicholson

Julia Stone will remember, even if it kills her.

With the help of a therapist, Julia is piecing together childhood memories of the night her father vanished. When Julia finds a silver ring that bears the name "Judas Stone," the past comes creeping back. Someone is leaving strange messages inside her house, even though the door is locked. The local handyman offers help, but he has his own shadowy past. And the cop who investigated her father's disappearance has followed her to the small mountain town of Elkwood.

Now Julia has a head full of memories, but she doesn't know which are real. Julia's therapist is playing games. The handyman is trying to save her, in more ways than one. And a sinister cult is closing in, claiming ownership of Julia's body and soul . . . .

Learn more about The Skull Ring and False Recovered Memory Syndrome or buy it at Amazon

SPEED DATING WITH THE DEAD

By Scott Nicholson

A paranormal conference at the most haunted hotel in the Southern Appalachian mountains…a man’s promise to his late wife that he’d summon her spirit…a daughter whose imagination goes to dark places…and demonic evil lurking in the remote hotel’s basement, just waiting to be awoken.

When Digger Wilson brings his paranormal team to the White Horse Inn, he is skeptical that his dead wife will keep her half of the bargain. He doesn’t believe in ghosts. But when one of the conference guests channels a mysterious presence and an Ouija board spells out a pet phrase known only to Digger and his wife, his convictions are challenged. And when people start to disappear, Digger and his daughter Kendra must face the circle of demons that view the hotel as their personal playground. Because soon the inn will be closing for good, angels, can’t be trusted, and demons don’t like to play alone….

Learn more about Speed Dating with the Dead and the 2008 paranormal conference and inn that inspired the novel or buy it at Amazon

AS I DIE LYING

By Scott Nicholson

Richard Coldiron’s first and last novel follows his metafictional journey through a troubled childhood, where he meets his invisible friend, his other invisible friend...and then some who aren’t so friendly.

There’s Mister Milktoast, the protective punster; Little Hitler, who leers from the shadows; Loverboy, the lusty bastard; and Bookworm, who is thoughtful, introspective, and determined to solve the riddle of Richard’s disintegration into either madness or genius, and of course only makes things worse. They reside in the various rooms of his skull, a place known as the Bone House, and take turns rearranging the furniture. As Richard works on his autobiography, his minor characters struggle with their various redemptive arcs.

Richard keeps his cool despite the voices in his head, but he’s about to get a new tenant: the Insider, a malevolent soul-hopping spirit that may or may not be born from Richard’s nightmares and demands a co-writing credit and a little bit of foot-kissing dark worship.

Now Richard doesn’t know which voice to trust. The book’s been rejected 117 times. The people he loves keep turning up dead. And here comes the woman of his dreams.

Learn more about As I Die Lying and the six people in Richard Coldiron’s head or buy it at Amazon

FOREVER NEVER ENDS

By Scott Nicholson

It falls from the heavens and crashes to earth in the remote southern Appalachian Mountains.

The alien roots creep into the forest, drawn by the intoxicating cellular activity of the humus and loam. The creature feeds on the surrounding organisms, exploring, assimilating, and altering the life forms it encounters. Plants wilt from the contact, trees wither, animals become deformed monstrosities, and people become something both more and less than human.

A telepathic psychology professor, a moonshine-swilling dirt farmer, a wealthy developer, and a bitter recluse team up to take on the otherwordly force that is infecting their town. The author’s preferred edition of the 2003 paperback release The Harvest.

Learn more about the science fiction thriller Forever Never Ends or buy it at Amazon

BURIAL TO FOLLOW

A Novella by Scott Nicholson

When Jacob Ridgehorn dies, it's up to Roby Snow to make sure his soul goes on to the eternal reward. The only way Roby can do that is convince the Ridgehorn family to eat a special pie, but a mysterious figure named Johnny Divine is guarding the crossroads. When peculiar Appalachian Mountain funeral customs get stirred into the mix, Roby has to perform miracles…or else.

Novella originally published in the Cemetery Dance anthology "Brimstone Turnpike."

Learn more about Burial to Follow at the Haunted Computer or buy it at Amazon

ASHES

By Scott Nicholson

A collection of supernatural and paranormal stories by award-winning author Scott Nicholson, including "Homecoming," "The Night is an Ally" and "Last Writes." From the author of THE RED CHURCH, THE SKULL RING, and the story collections FLOWERS and THE FIRST, these stories visit haunted islands, disturbed families, and a lighthouse occupied by Edgar Allan Poe. Exclusive introduction by Jonathan Maberry, author of THE DRAGON FACTORY and GHOST ROAD BLUES, as well as an afterword.

Learn more about the supernatural stories in Ashes or buy it at Amazon

THE FIRST

By Scott Nicholson

A collection of dark fantasy and futuristic stories from award-winning author Scott Nicholson. Dystopia, cyberpunk, and science fiction imbue these stories that visit undiscovered countries and distant times. Includes two bonus essays and Nicholson's first-ever published story, in addition to the four-story Aeropagan cycle.

Learn more about the fantasy and science fiction stories in The First or buy it at Amazon

MURDERMOUTH: ZOMBIE BITS

By Scott Nicholson

A collection of zombie stories, from the zombie point-of-view to the shoot-‘em-up survival brand of apocalyptic horror. Proof that even zombies have a heart…Based on the comic book currently in development by Scott Nicholson and Derlis Santacruz. With a bonus story by Jack Kilborn, a comic script, and Jonathan Maberry’s "Zombie Apocalypse Survival Scorecard."

Learn more about Murdermouth: Zombie Bits and see zombie art or buy it at Amazon

CURTAINS

By Scott Nicholson

A collection of crime and mystery tales from the vaults of Scott Nicholson. Includes "How to Build Your Own Coffin" and Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror selection "Dog Person," as well as the psychological thrillers "Letters and Lies," "Sewing Circle," and more stories that appeared in magazines such as Crimewave, Cemetery Dance, and Blue Murder. Includes and afterword and a bonus story from bestselling authors J.A. Konrath and Simon Wood.

Learn more about Curtains: Mystery Stories or buy it for Kindle at Amazon

TROUBLED (UK)

By Scott Nicholson

When twelve-year-old Freeman Mills arrives at Wendover, a group home for troubled children, it’s a chance for a fresh start. But second chances aren’t easy for Freeman, the victim of painful childhood experiments that gave him the ability to read other people’s minds.

Little does Freeman know that his transfer was made at the request of Dr. Richard Kracowski, whose research into the brain’s electrical properties is revealing new powers of the human mind. Kracowski is working for a secret society called the Trust, but also has his own agenda in exploring the nature of the soul. His experiments have an unexpected side effect, though. The electromagnetic fields used in his experiments are summoning the ghosts of the patients who died at Wendover back when it was a psychiatric ward.

Freeman simply wants to survive, take his medicine for manic depression, and deceive his counsellors into believing he is happy. When he meets the anorexic Vicky, who may also be telepathic, he’s afraid some of his darkest secrets will be uncovered. But when the other children develop their own clairvoyant abilities, and insane spirits begin haunting the halls of Wendover, he can’t safely hide inside his own head anymore.

Meanwhile, the Trust is installing sophisticated equipment in the home’s basement, aggressively probing the threshold between life and death. And they’ve brought in another scientist who doesn’t share Dr. Kracowski’s reluctance to push the limits.

This scientist is a pioneer in ESP induction, and he performed most of his work on a very special subject: his son, Freeman Mills. The author’s preferred edition of the 2005 U.S. paperback release The Home, in development as a feature film.

Learn more about the paranormal thriller Troubled or buy it at Amazon UK

CREATIVE SPIRIT (UK)

By Scott Nicholson

After parapsychologist Anna Galloway is diagnosed with metastatic cancer, she has a recurring dream in which she sees her own ghost. The setting of her dream is the historic Korban Manor, which is now an artist’s retreat in the remote Appalachian Mountains. Drawn both by the ghost stories surrounding the manor and her own sense of destiny, Anna signs up for the retreat.

Sculptor Mason Jackson has come to Korban Manor to make a final, all-or-nothing attempt at success before giving up his dreams. When he becomes obsessed with carving Ephram Korban’s form out of wood, he questions his motivation but is swept up in a creative frenzy unlike any he has ever known.

Sylva Hartley is an old mountain witchwoman who is connected to Ephram Korban both before and after his death. Her knowledge of Appalachian folk spells and potions has bound her to the manor in a deeper and darker way. Sylva harbors a family secret that refuses to stay slumbering in its grave.

The manor itself has secrets, with fires that blaze constantly in the hearths, portraits of Korban in every room, and deceptive mirrors on the walls. The house’s brooding atmosphere affects the creative visions of the visiting artists. A mysterious woman in white calls to Anna from the forest, while Mason is driven by the whispers of an unseen critic. With an October blue moon looming, both the living and the dead learn the true power of their dreams.

It’s a power that Korban craves for himself, because he walks a shadowy land where passions burn cold and even the ghosts are haunted. The author’s preferred edition of the 2004 U.S. paperback release The Manor.

Learn more about the paranormal thriller Creative Spirit or buy it at Amazon UK

SOLOM (UK)

By Scott Nicholson

Katy Logan wasn’t quite sure why she left her finance career in the big city to marry religion professor Gordon Smith and move to the tiny Appalachian community of Solom.

Maybe she just wanted to get her 12-year-old daughter Jett away from the drugs and bad influences. Maybe she wanted to escape from the memories of her first husband. Or perhaps she was enchanted by the promise of an idyllic life on the farm that has been in Gordon’s family for 150 years.

But the residents of Solom know all about the man in the black hat. They whisper the legends around the pot-bellied stove at the general store, they pray for protection from him in their little white churches, they think about him as they gather hay, harvest corn, and work their gardens. The brave ones talk about him, believing him dead and buried, but nobody dares to utter his name.

The Reverend Harmon Smith has come back more than century after his last missionary trip, and he has unfinished business. But first Katy and Jett must be brought into the family, and the farm must be prepared to welcome him home. Gordon has been denying his heritage, but now it’s time to choose sides. Does he protect the ones he loves, or surrender to the ancestral urge for revenge?

Learn more about the paranormal thriller Solom or buy it at Amazon UK

THE GORGE (UK)

By Scott Nicholson

An experimental rafting expedition, an FBI manhunt for a delusional killer, and the worst storm in decades collide in the remote mountain wilderness...and then THEY come out.

Bowie Whitlock and a team of celebrity athletes is commissioned to test two experimental rafts in the rugged Unegama Wilderness Gorge in the remote Appalachian Mountains, considered the most dangerous whitewater rapids in the eastern United States. Photographer Dove Krueger, Bowie's occasional lover, is there to document the journey. The expedition is tense from the start as jealousy, romance, and money are riding on the mission's success.

FBI agent Jim Castle and his partner are in the gorge looking for Ace Goodall, a deranged abortion clinic bomber. Ace, accompanied by a fragile young woman, is having visions that guide his murderous behavior. A trip-wire around his camp detonates a rigged explosive, tearing apart part of a cliff wall and exposing a long-hidden species to the world.

The race is on as dark storm clouds gather, the river is swollen, and Ace hijacks the rafting expedition to make his escape. But the bloodthirsty creatures swooping down from the high cliffs have been too long without prey.

Ace has one more bomb.

God is talking to him.

It's raining again, and his young companion is pregnant.

And killing isn't what it used to be, because the dead no longer stay dead.

Learn more about The Gorge or buy it at Amazon UK

Other books include the collection of psychological suspense and paranoid horror Head Cases (buy it at Amazon) and the screenplays for Creative Spirit (buy it at Amazon) and The Skull Ring (buy it at Amazon). You can also save by buying the omnibus Kindle book Ethereal Messenger, which contains the supernatural novels The Red Church, Drummer Boy, and Speed Dating with the Dead.

Contact me at hauntedcomputer@yahoo.com because I’d love to know what you think—and if you are in any way dissatisfied with this product, please give me a chance to make it right.. Let me know about any misspellings and formatting issues, since books in the digital age are living documents.

Thanks to Dellaster Design, Stephen James Price at Generation Next Publications, Neal Hock, Gail Lang, Vicki Tyley, Pamela Haworth, and Andy Weeks.

This is a work of fiction. All people, incidents, and places are solely the products of the author’s imagination. The writer begins the journey, but you complete it. . . .

Scott

hauntedcomputer@yahoo.com

http://www.hauntedcomputer.com

http://hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com

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