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[ozocho]

20/20 Jane is on her way to Brewster Creek

It felt like schoolwork and all the time inbetween. Little moments. The popping radiator next to her desk and the salt-stained aisles that led up to the front of the class and out the door, into the carpeted hall. Winter break was still weeks away and they had to work. By that point in the year everything was familiar. She could pull out the tray of her desk and it would smell like pencil shavings and old glue sticks, and what might've been new for the first few months was now something that was just so desperate to change. If the teacher wasn't paying attention she could inch it open and transport herself inside, imagining it as a dungeon with only a crack of light to sustain the eraser people populating the corner of it. The dark space in the back, behind the textbooks, was wild territory to them, so it was wild territory for her too.

If the weather was bad enough Pap would take off work early to pick her up at school, but Jane wouldn't know how bad the weather was until she had come out the front doors and squeezed through the crowd of other kids and checked up and down the curbside with all its chugging exhausts for the familiar rust pattern on the truck's passenger side door. If she didn't see it, she would start walking home. Each year the landmarks were closer to one another and she had less time to think about things.

She scared the cat on the sofa by tossing her boots across the foyer and stomping up the stairs.  For a few seconds even her bedroom smelled original. She aimed for the corner of the bed but the bookbag landed half on half off and did a tumble down the sheets, and she left it slouched over with its back against the bedpost. Back down the stairs, just as loud, because who was going to tell her that she couldn't? The cat had come out of hiding and waited in front of his food bowl next to the fridge. Jane ignored him and opened the white door in his face. She assembled everything needed for a bowl of cereal, ran to the wide parlor window and looked both ways down the road to see if Pap's truck was anywhere in sight, then loaded up her bowl with a third more of everything and carried the swishing load up the stairs. It was supposed to be: come home, eat, homework, so she idled in front of the radio on her desk for a better part of an hour with three soggy oats drifting around what was left of the milk. She started her homework, but stopped before she had finished half of it. She would tell him that she did it all.

The routine said that after she had finished her homework (and as far as the world knew, she had, but she still had to put on airs for her bedroom, the house, etc) she could do whatever she pleased, but staying indoors risked being asked about her day, and she just couldn't have that. The clock said she had fifteen minutes to avoid it. She pulled on everything she had and left through the back door, with the only goal of getting out of earshot.

Walking to or from home, with her hands in her pockets and her eyes only a couple feet in front of her, the same train of thought. There was nothing to get out of the pasture or anything beyond it, no undertow to ride out on if she looked hard enough, not like before anyway. It was just too dry. She worried that one day she would go blind from seeing the same things so many times. Lately she could get from the back steps to the first trees without remembering it at all, and she wondered if that was how the pasture felt, being out here all day, no change, with only the weather to look forward to. At least when she had gone far enough, when she was finally behind the trees, she could feel what she was thinking about stand out better, like there was a solid color behind it now, and though the paths were starting to feel more worn than they ever had before at least it was always easy to find a new angle to think from.

She took a right at the split. Only the desire for a longer walk prevented her from squeezing through what was left of the bushes at either side and cutting a straighter path than the path itself. She thought about how much garbage she could see during the winter and how all of it couldn't possibly be hers, and if it was, how it was a whole new perspective on quantity. It only got worse as she went along. There was that plastic bag that had been stuck in the lower branches of a pine tree for years, still intact when other things had disintegrated. There were tires in at least three different spots, all different sizes, and a broken wheelbarrow tipped over in the path that she never had the courage to pick up and move for fear of what lived underneath it by now. There was a rusty barbed wire fence along the top of the ridge that hid the drop off into the creek, held up by posts that leaned and leaned instead of falling over, sagging so far that the wire between them was covered with dirt and in some spots it was perfectly safe to just step over. It was scary when she was younger, but now she just felt sorry for how inept it was. Beyond it was the creek and the opposite bank, and more trees, and somewhere way beyond that was somebody else's pasture.

It was too cold to look for crayfish or dam up anything, and either way, she didn't feel much like playing in the water. She cut down to the creek bed by way of a set of small boulders that had been used so many times that they were slowly turning into a lumpy case of stairs, and once down into the jumble of sticks and wet leaves she stood along the edge of the water and tapped out holes in the ice the tip of her boot, with her hands still in her pockets.

Out of all the trash around her she only noticed the hatbox because it was dry and sitting level on the opposite bank. The lavender was faded and the accordion pattern along the lid had a few tears, and the bone colored cardboard showed through in spots, but no one had thrown it there. She crossed the creek on a pair of rocks, using a log that ran from bank to bank overhead to steady herself, and came up underneath it. The ground around it was cleared of everything but the hardest packed clay. No footprints. The woods past it had no trail that she could see, and in a way she felt stranded. She checked behind her, and didn't know why.

The lid had a pleasant friction when she took it off. Immediately, despite the cold keeping everything but the leaves out of her nose, an old, comforting smell drifted out of the box. It was packed with a cabinet's worth of children's things many times older than she was, maybe even her father. Books about spiders and magpies, plastic dolls with hardly any paint left on them, marbles and stuffed rabbits. And sitting on top of it all was her grandfather's silver pocket watch. Wound up.

[ozocho]

19/20 Bucket has a good reason to Lie

If his treadmarks hadn't been so easy to follow he would have run out of power long ago and they never would have found him in time. He went further and further into the woods every evening. They had learned to go after him before dark, to save on batteries, and when they found him they would each take a handle and drag him home. It became so regular a thing that Bob could no longer pinpoint what about it aggravated him so much. It was a faint, hard to remove stain on the end of the day. Eventually it dropped into his routine, right between taking out the trash and washing the dishes. After two weeks they forgot why they were doing it at all.

Jane asked Bob why they just don't tie Bucket up, and Bob's first thought was why it had never crossed his mind to do that, and the second was deciding against it, because he didn't want Jane knowing that the thought had never occurred to him. The behavior had started after Bob had cracked down on Bucket's other, stranger behaviors, namely the talking to inanimate objects. According to what Jane and Wagonwheel had told him, Bucket's going out of the way to not be seen was little more than doing what he shouldn't be doing, and while it irritated Bob to have Bucket finally disobey him, when he had been the only one in the house who listened to Bob consistently, the more it put the trashcan in danger the more he didn't care so much about being obeyed or disobeyed. Fine, talk to the car or the garage or the fencepost (only nothing in the house, please, if we can bargain about it), as long as you stop trying to disappear. But Bob either misjudged the root of the problem or had done something about it far too late, because shortly after lunch, Bucket would be gone.

One evening was the coldest so far, and they found the snow a blessing. The pasture was covered in what looked like delicate plastic foam pellets that when coming into contact with anything would collapse and powder around it. Even when they followed his tracks underneath the cover of the skinny branches it was all plenty clear enough, and they quickly found him in the firs again.

They were dragging him back like usual, when, whether from the particularly low temperature or the extra cup of coffee he had had, Bob tried getting through to Bucket. Previously, Bucket had either avoided answering the questions or never heard them to begin with, Bob could never figure out which, so Bob avoided trying anymore because it was hard for him to feel like the effort was worth it. Topics rarely went beyond a response and a counter response. That day Bob started by saying the things he always said, more to air himself out than any attempt to really reach Bucket.

"We might not find you next time." He was watching his own breath roll out of his mouth. "You have to stop doing this."

Jane would add her own commentary, which was becoming more toxic each time Bob would force her and not Wagonwheel to help with Bucket. "We should just leave him next time. If he wants to be out here so much."

Bob used to tell her to keep it to herself, but he was tired of pretending he didn't agree.

Then Jane said in a mock frustrated tone "Would you like to stay out here?" half imitating Bob, probably unintentionally.

And Bucket responded.

"No."

Neither Bob nor Jane slowed down or turned their heads to show that this was surprising, instead they went quiet and thought about what to say next. It was like somebody they had been talking about had suddenly shown up. Slowly it occurred to Bob that he might have an opening, and he became anxious about wasting it. He would have to plug something in, quickly.

"Why not?"

They waited. It was hard to hear much over the high-pitched whine of them forcing the treads along. Then he heard the click, and tensed.

"I don't know."

There was a chance Bob had lost him. More probing, just in case. "Aren't you scared of running out of power anymore?"

Click. "Yes."

Jane was staring dead ahead of them, between the trees and out into the pasture, listening, like looking back might upset the whole thing.

Bob kept his voice mellow. "Why do you keep doing this then?"

Click. "I don't know."

"Do you want me to help you figure it out?"

"No."

And Bob was sure that was the end of it. Then unprompted, Bucket said:

"I'll have to do that myself, Bob."

*

It had been two days since Bob had asked Wagonwheel to do anything, and what a good stroke of luck. He stared at the fireplace and the parlor lamp and pulled the couch quilt up over his neck. It was suffocating underneath it, but if he let it loose too much Wagonwheel was afraid he would get away from himself. Already once when he had tried to walk across the room, a morning ago, it felt like the hardwood was all dipping and bending like one wing of a teeter totter and he had to crawl all the way back to the couch. His chest was five feet in front of him. He had lapses of memory, and the last time he came to from one of them he had been backed into the corner of the couch, between one of the armrests and a back cushion, and so scared that he had tried to dig into it even further. There was something familiar about it, and maybe that scared him the most. To think that it might be a long-term, repeating thing.

Two nights ago he had been the one to go out and help Bob retrieve Bucket. It wasn't at all dark, so there was no chance of using the flashlight, and no chance that Wagonwheel was looking forward to it. They followed his tracks as far as a split in the deer path where there were so many new and old tracks that Bob and him were forced to take each trace and find out where Bucket could have gone to. So sick of having to to this at least every other night, but not really, truly wishing that they would never find Bucket again, Wagonwheel couldn't have gone more than a dozen steps in the direction he was supposed to, just far enough to put enough of the bare underbrush and stubborn leaves that were still hanging on between Bob and him.

The other path led to the pond, Wagonwheel's to the creek. He had stopped at a sudden curve in it, still within sight of the split in the path. It didn't take long for him to realize that standing there felt more like a punishment than doing what he ought to be doing, and besides, the sun already had a hard time getting through the clouds and an even harder time squeezing between the trees, and the light was fading at ground level. Crows rattled through the upper branches under the cover of the wind and didn't scream until they were right above him. He started walking, just for the noise of it. Bob's plan was for one of them to shout if they found either Bucket or a concrete sign of him. They'd done it before. The shout wasn't supposed to be the panicked, emergency kind, more like a bellow, but that's what he kept hearing. That and whispering, scratching, which in most cases turned out to be groaning wood or a simple bird call that turned into whatever he least wanted to hear at the right distance, but his mind went wild in that margin of what he couldn't explain. His stride would meander more, tacking the path, weighing the urge to go back, then he would press ahead, extra fast and loud, and for a while he would calm down. He would find that the noise started to have something of the opposite effect, where things hid in the places he couldn't hear. So he would slow down, take it in, and it would all start again.

The path straightened out. The ground built up and came to a rise where the woods thinned out on either side. At what might have been the highest point there was a streak of debris ran crossways with the path, half covered with leaves and grown through with weedy poplars and oaks until they were most of the way back to being just shadows like the natural things around them. Closer, he saw old couches or car seats that were nothing but springs anymore, rotten fenders, hoods, bumpers, a door with the glass smashed out. The sensation started crawling up his neck. He felt he was looking into something that was looking back.

"If the person inside you dies, whose fault is it?" From the end of the streak, between the trees was a wedge on one molting tire and two pegs. "Even if they're at the controls?"

Wagonwheel felt the spit rise in his throat and his feet sink into the mud.

"Where's the truck? I know you. I know you know where the truck is. He tells me all his problems, the same ones I remember better than he does. He would probably blame it on the man, if he could remember them." It might have moved on its own. "The man in him lived, she didn't. They were coming in opposite ways and all we saw around the bend was the truck's lights and then it hit us. I came to a stop, but she didn't. They say that they don't make them like me anymore."

He was being electrocuted.

"I can reach you. She had something to do with it, and until now I had been pretty jealous to just sit there and listen. Even she doesn't remember exactly what happened. I'll give you the details."

[ozocho]

18/20 Soda Can stops Showing Up

"You talking to the car again? Because Pap made me run out here to ask you."

"I think there's something wrong with it."

"Yeah, it's broke down."

Bucket just sat there with the motor inside him humming, and the stretch of yard between them was getting dark. The wind cut at her exposed ears, and she squeezed up her shoulders to push the collar of her coat over them.

"So should I tell him you're talking to it?"

When Jane stepped back inside the bright kitchen and looked behind her, out the door, the yard looked even darker. Pap had been watching at the window over the sink. "Wear your hat next time."

"He's talking to it." She said.

"Is he going to be out there all night?"

Jane threw up her hands and shrugged.

She kicked off her boots and went into the parlor to warm up, still wearing her coat. Wagonwheel was laying on the couch next to the fireplace with a quilt thrown over everything but his head. She sat down on the rug in front of the cushions and thawed each numb ear by turning one towards the fire, then the other, and the dark side of her face would radiate heat into the cold parlor air until it cooled off itself. While she had her right ear towards the fireplace and her nose pointed at the couch she noticed that Wagonwheel's eyes were open, watching her. She waited for him to say something. He didn't.

"Did you see her yet?" She asked.

His face was still. "No, and stop asking me."

They heard Pap slam something in the kitchen and his eyes bent slightly towards the noise.

"What's Bucket doing outside?" He asked.

"Talking to the car."

Pap stomped in on the hardwood floor of the parlor, pulling the hood on his coat up. Jane turned the other side of her face to the fire and looked away from him.

"Get your shoes back on, and put on your hat. Wagonwheel, get up. We gotta bring him in."

Jane still had her face turned. "He doesn't wanna come in."

"Doesn't matter."

She couldn't hear Wagonwheel move. Pap walked over and knocked on the wooden shoulder of the couch. "Come on."

"What happens if we leave them out there?" She asked.

"His battery will die and the snow will cover him up."

She laughed. "His battery won't die. He'll start crying about it when it gets low."

There was a soft snap and Wagonwheel roughed up the couch all of a sudden. "Ow."

The left side of her face was singing, but she wouldn't look at Pap. "He just let it get real low that one time."

"Jane, come on."

When she turned her head back around Wagonwheel wasn't there and Pap was leaning over the back of the couch, and while Wagonwheel was still throwing on what he had to upstairs, there was no point in hurrying. She sat on the carpet mat by the door and put on her boots as slowly as possible. Pap talked.

"I think he's breaking down. All he does now is sit out there and stare at things." He kept rocking from one foot to the other with his hands in his coat pockets. "We're going to forget about him one night."

Wagonwheel came back down the stairs with a nasty wool cap jammed down on his head and wearing one of Jane's old coats, still too big on him. Jane had only got one boot on by that point but she quickly pulled on the other.

When Pap opened the back door any heat not trapped by her sleeves and hat was sucked right out into the dusk and at the bottom of the back steps he turned on a flashlight and pointed it at their feet. The wind jumped at them once they were out in the open. Jane was staring at the ground to keep the cold away from her face, and so she nearly ran into Pap when they were only halfway out to the car and he suddenly stopped.

She looked up and at first thought somebody else was out in the dark shining a flashlight at back them, then she heard the faint mechanical grinding and realized it was Bucket coming towards them with his lamp on. He was almost within touching distance by the time Pap said anything.

"Are you coming in?"

Bucket stopped and rattled. It took him a few seconds to say "I think so."

Jane flapped the sleeves of her coat. "See?"

"Okay, okay. Let's all go in then."

Looking back the house was a black streak with three yellow spots where the light was holed up in the kitchen and parlor. Jane and Wagonwheel marched close enough behind Bucket to feel like they were pushing him along a little faster. Pap walked off to his side with the flashlight scanning the ground ahead. The pace was agony to all of them. The motor deep inside the trashcan had turned into more a throaty rumble and the headlamp was starting to brown. Pap was creeping along and still outpacing him.

He leaned in towards Bucket. "You feel like you're going to make it?"

There was a wheeze and Bucket stopped, rattling.

Pap waved his hand towards the house. "No, keep going, tell me while we're walking."

But Bucket didn't move. The answer came out like syrup. "Do you think I will, Bob?"

"Come on, let's keep going." Pap seemed hesitant to force him along, so he reached out and gestured at one of Bucket's handles, not touching it, but making a delicate tugging motion like he was pulling on a string. There was a shudder in the treads, then they started rolling again. By the way they corrected their course every dozen seconds or so they could see that Bucket was aiming for the kitchen steps. Inch by inch. The grass crunched underneath.

After another minute or two of staring straight ahead and letting the flashlight ride low a couple paces in front of them, Pap turned towards her. "Jane, here take this and walk him to the steps. I'm going to run in and grab an extension cord." And he passed her the flashlight and jogged towards the light of the porch lamp.

Once Pap was out of range, Wagonwheel finally spoke.

"Let me hold it."

"He didn't give it to you."

"You don't know how to do it right."

"Oh shut up."

Bucket slowly rose and fell over furrows in the yard and tilted around like a glass about to spill over. His lamp no longer showed up on the side of the house, even though they were twice as close now, and when it hit the blades of grass in front of him it only washed them in the dusty color of old dry paper. Jane tried to make up for it by scanning the ground in front of him with the flashlight, completely for his sake, as the ground around them was so well known to her that she could have closed her eyes and walked it without moving at all, and because progress was slowing to the point of each shoe shuffling one on top of the other to keep from pulling ahead, it was hard to take the job seriously for too long, and she started to swing the beam off to the sides and investigate things that just plain looked more interesting under a flashlight than they did during the day.

She ran it along fences. Shadows ballooned and shrank. She made it ghost the treeline behind the garage. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the reflected light making red halo of fuzz along the side of Wagonwheel's face and she caught on that his head was following the light. She wiggled it all over, just to see if he would keep tracking it, and he spit from inside the coat and greasy wool cap. "You're so bad at that."

She heard the hinges on the kitchen door squeak and looked back to see Pap coming down the steps, feeding out a length of extension cord that was bundled around his arm. Sometime during her investigation with the flashlight she had stopped moving at all, and so had Bucket. His lamp was off, his treads were still, but something in him was still buzzing.

"You all right?" She asked quietly. Wagonwheel still seemed preoccupied with the flashlight.

Pap reached them with most of the bundle still in his arms. He had already gone to work hooking Bucket up before he asked "When did he stop?"

"Just now." She watched the dead lamp and inhaled through her front two teeth. "Is he dead?"

Pap laughed, and she was relieved to hear that. When he turned to her his eyes looked tired. "No, he's fine. Both of you get inside, it's your turn to get warm."

He didn't ask for the flashlight back.

They were hardly back inside the kitchen when she waved it in front Wagonwheel's face.

"You want to hold it?"

"I'm not that stupid."

"I'm not joking, I think I heard something outside, and I don't think I'm good enough to find it with this."

She knew her face was unconvincing, but he either didn't notice or didn't care, and took the flashlight, snatching it at the last second so she couldn't yank it back right before he did so. He pushed it against his stomach and kept both hands on it, the lamp off. "What'd you hear?"

"Loud noise."

"I don't hear anything."

"Because it's too windy."

So Pap wouldn't see them, they went around through the parlor and unbolted the heavy front door with the rubber floor seal and the tall coin slot windows. The front yard was as cold as the back and the wind came out of the black somewhere where the edge of the driveway disappeared. Wagonwheel finally pulled the flashlight away and flicked it on. Jane instructed him to look around the edge of the house for footprints and he ran it in straight lines along the flowerbeds and in between bushes. They found nothing out of the ordinary. Snowflakes started to blow in and give shape to the cone of light.

They edged around the side of the house, keeping low, and while Wagonwheel ran a search pattern further back, Jane stuck her head out and saw that both Pap and Bucket had gone in. She listened, just in case she was being called for back inside, but all she heard were the flakes pecking at her coat. Wagonwheel pulled up beside her.

"Nothing?" She asked.

"No. Where did you hear it?"

She didn't answer. She hopped a wooden fence and started walking out into the pasture. She knew Wagonwheel was following her when the light aimed at her feet started to bounce.

"Where?"

She wasn't going to respond to him, but he kept the light on her and the shadow she cast out in front of her was all she had to look at and she couldn't make any movement without it getting reinterpreted by her shadow into some gross motion.

"Get that light off me. We got to look up by the hill."

The light stayed on her longer, and when he finally pulled it away all she could see was a negative image of herself imprinted on the dark, sliding away at an angle. And then the light stopped bouncing.

"I'm not stupid." He yelled. "You're looking for her. I told you I didn't see her."

"Shut up, or Pap will hear you." But she had a hard time just getting her voice to reach him.

"I'm going back in."

She started marching back towards him. "Okay. Gimme the flashlight then if you want to cry about it."

"I'm giving it back to Bob."

"Give it to me!"

But he ignored her, and by the time she could have caught up to him he was already within the safety of the porch lamp. She stood on the edge, at a distance where a leaf caught in the grass could cast a shadow a hundred feet long, but eventually, long after Wagonwheel had gone inside, she fell back in towards the porch light.

[ozocho]

17/20 Bob as an amateur Photographer

He no longer needed an alarm clock. He would wake up at six and once awake he would be awake for good.

Unless it was raining. The steady, window tapping kind; buildup rolling off the gutter and knocking like a grandfather clock, massaging the plaster on the ceiling through the boards and shingles. Under the drum around him the paralysis would allow his neck just enough range to check the clock and look out the window.

He woke up at eight twenty three, and the room was so bright that he had to  remember where he was. He felt like an intruder in his own bed. Somewhere past the cracks in the window frame the rain and the cold air stirred together and landed on everything, and without being at least half awake he was already on his feet and at the dresser, pulling on a fat sweatshirt.

When he opened his bedroom door the smell of cooking grease was in the hallway. He swung down the stairs, and when he reached the landing he saw that Jane had boosted herself up with a kitchen chair and had a black pan on the gas range sizzling with eggs. It was loud enough for her to not hear Bob, and he saw that Wagonwheel was just off to her right with his nose over the cast-iron edge, lusting after either the blue flame or the eggs, Bob couldn't guess which.

Jane knew how to cook without setting the house or herself on fire, but Bob had made a point that if she wanted to he absolutely must know ahead of time. Waking up at six, he would have enforced this small but important point by taking over and wagging the spatula at her, maybe telling Wagonwheel to never have a part in it again whether or not he did now. Waking up at eight twenty three, he saw himself as having no business interrupting something that was going relatively well, and he turned around and went back up the steps.

In the bathroom he fumbled around, relieved himself, cut up his neck with a safety razor and got blood on the collar of sweatshirt. On the way back to his room he heard Jane doing an impression of himself downstairs. He pulled out  a new sweatshirt. There was a broad orange stripe around the chest of it and when he looked into the mirror on the back of the door he thought it made him look swollen and feminine. He put on another one, but paid no attention to his ragged pajama bottoms or the bare feet with the uncut toenails.

When Bob went back downstairs both Jane and Wagonwheel were sitting at the kitchen table eating off of painted porcelain plates Bob had never seen before. Jane spotted him first. She already had a mouthful of egg and rose up in her seat, getting all the air ready for what she had to say by taking it through her nose and trying to choke down the bite as fast as possible. She spun in the chair and pointed towards the counter.

"We made you eggs." Swallow. "We didn't want to wake you up."

"It's alright, just ask next time."

There might have been a combined total of two eggs swimming in a pool of lukewarm grease. Their shape, and material, was almost unrecognizable. But it wasn't burnt, and after beaching the more solid chunks on the edge of the plate with a fork, it actually looked appetizing.

They sat around the breakfast table eating, quietly, until Bob commented on how nice the eggs tasted and Jane and Wagonwheel realized that they weren't going to get trouble, then Jane started prodding Bob for more critical insight towards the meal and its comparison to other meals. Bob mostly nodded and chewed. Wagonwheel slipped into the devil's advocate role, gradually. Yeah they're pretty nice eggs, but they're a little wet aren't they? Eventually Jane stopped looking at or talking to Wagonwheel at all.

Finished, Bob stared down through the shallow lake of oil and at the wreath of bluebirds staring back up at him.

"Where did you find these at?"

"The others were dirty."

Six o'clock Bob would have laughed and played the forgiving parent. Eight twenty three Bob just wanted to know.

"I really want to know where you got these from."

It took almost a minute for her suspicion to fade, replaced by the excitement of showing an adult something they didn't already know. She slid off her chair one foot at the time and led him into the parlor.

The drawers were still open, and all around its corner of the room were piled smoke colored packets and photo albums with old flaking leather covers. What was left of the set of dishes was another spare plate and a matching set of teacups, with saucers, still half wrapped in tissue paper. Bob could make out a roughly Jane shaped clear spot in the middle of it all, and once Jane was certain that Bob wasn't angry with their, she fit herself back into it again. She unwrapped and held up the delicate porcelain items for him to see, but when she noticed that he was more interested in the photographs and scattered baubles she shifted focus and started unwinding the string bindings on the packets and pulling out fistfuls of glossy cards. She did her best to get him involved.

"Who is this?"

A fat baby in a nautical outfit sat in front of a painted shoreline backdrop, it's body tilted like a bad drawing.

"It's you."

Jane smiled at the picture and then looked up and back at him. "Boy I looked stupid."

"Yeah."

She rotated it to the back and then held up another. A young man with two much hair and a chin that was little more than a smooth bump, reclining in a wicker chair. He was drowning in a sweatshirt and trying to contain a tabby kitten in his arms.

"Is that me?"

Wagonwheel was watching them from over the arm of the couch.

"I think so." Bob took it and passed it over to him. "I found you, but Jane wouldn't let me name you."

Wagonwheel held it so close to his face that Bob could no longer read his expression. He handed it back, stonefaced.

"Not anymore." And he disappeared into the kitchen.

It was late morning by this point and Bob was starting to feel his agency creep back in. Every minute he felt another year older than Jane. He started to shift things from the floor to his far hand and back into the drawer, without making it obvious to Jane, until there were hardly any more packets left lying around and they had settled into a less hyperactive process of holding and reminiscing. They had tucked away a glass mallard when Bob reached for a bright cardboard box a little bigger than his hand. He wedged a fingernail under the lid and pulled out the cardboard braces, flipping open the top. Inside were two old disposable cameras, side-by-side. He removed one from the box and held it up for Jane to see.

"It looks like a toy." She said.

"It sort of is."

Through the spyhole he saw Jane's dark, vague face, fisheyed.

He took it away from his eye and checked the counter on the top of it. It was past zero. He tried winding it and it wouldn't budge.

"It's out of pictures." He put it back in the box and lifted the other out. The counter on that one was between six and five. "Here we go." He wound it until it stopped, then held the camera up. Jane's face snapped into a predatory, broad smile. There was a plastic click. She reached over and spun the camera around in his hands.

"Do we get to see the picture now? Does it come out?"

"It doesn't work like that. We'd have to take it into town and get it developed." He put it back in the box.

"Oh."

"Maybe I'll get them both developed the next time I'm out there."

He set the box aside.

They had the rest of the stuff put away by lunch, and the two of them went back into the kitchen to make sandwiches, still running in a conversation about time and how the colors of plastic change. Jane made comments towards odd things around the kitchen that she had never thought to ask about but found the moment more opportune than any before. With only crust left on the plates, there was a pleasantly exhausted silence.

Jane got up and walked up the stairs after a while. Bob put the rest of their plates away and washed about half of them. He warmed up a pot of coffee that was sitting on the stove and sat down at the kitchen table to enjoy a small cup of it, listening to the rain on the kitchen shutters and the trickling spout outside the back door. The cup steamed. The caffeine made him a little elated, but anxious, and he rose up from the chair and started pacing the kitchen slowly, musically, one hand knuckling the handle of the cup and the other slightly curled in his pajama pants pocket. When the kitchen ran out of floorspace, he swayed into the parlor.

He had loosely planned on starting a fire, but he slid over to grab a log and spotted the small box lying on the coffee table. He sat down at the couch and pulled the lid open again, removing the camera with the spare shots.

He didn't bother looking through the viewfinder, he tipped it around in his hands and examined the cardboard shell and the texture of the winding mechanism. Then he started raising it to eye level. Almost everything in the unlit parlor was too dark to see through the foggy lens. The only clear target was the rainsoaked light coming in through the window over the armchair, and through the lens it looks like stained glass.

He set the cup down and took the camera into one fist. In the kitchen he stepped into his boots without tying them, threw on a long overcoat and opened the door to the treble of the drizzle outside and plunked out onto the back steps. The first picture he took was from the second step. It was a shot of the backyard, wet and misty as it was, with the crooked tree on one side of the frame and the edge of the shed on the other. Jane's bike was in the foreground and the stone pasture wall beyond it.

He wound it and stepped down into the rain.

The second shot was of the garage door and a large slice of the driveway, puddles included. It wasn't until afterwards that he noticed how much paint was flaking off the front of it, but in a romantic spin on it he said that no true image of it would have left something like that out. He had to keep the camera palmed up to prevent it getting too wet. The third picture was taken off to the side of the shed, of the sad face of his old truck, crying rust. The fourth was a his late wife's car, just as smothered with weeds. He thought he was out, but he wound it down again and saw through the moisture bubbled counter that he still had one shot left. There was the determination to make it count, and despite the rain picking up, he wandered all over the yard and the pasture behind it. He was out there so long that his fingers chilled and the constant patter of the rain on his hood turned into a kind of auditory blindness that disconnected him from himself. When the elements were finally getting to him he was halfway up hill and closer to the treeline that he was to the house anymore. He couldn't feel the camera in his hands. The last shot was lazy, but he had to get it over with. It was aimed uphill, at the combined smear of the shiny yellow grass and the shiny orange leaves beyond them, and the white sky above it all. The camera went into one of his pockets and he turned around for home.

And there were the footprints. They were slightly smaller than his own and they hugged the track of his own on its way up the hill and through the mud. At a grassy patch a little before him they had circled around twice and merged into his.

[ozocho]

16/20 Wagonwheel gets Run Over

Jane sat crosslegged in the yard with her windbreaker puffed up around her while Wagonwheel paced around, reaching for the dead leaves being blown out of the treeline. He caught one, pressed it into a hundred pieces and sprinkled it over Jane's head. She knocked the grit out of her hair and pulled her hood up. She would have liked to jump up and shove him until he fell down, but she was busy smashing gravel with a hammer. Wagonwheel caught another and started crushing it up. Jane had her back turned to him. "You can't just give people names." He said.

"Course you can. Or nobody would have them." Jane set one pebble in the center of a big flat rock sticking out of the dirt and swung. There was a crack that hurt her ears and all that was left was a chalky powder.

"When do you name them then?"

"First chance you get."

"And it can't be changed?"

"Nope."

He stopped crushing up the leaf. "What if it's a bad name?"

Jane placed another pebble. "That's why you don't get people bad names. You think about it a lot first."

"People like all sorts of bad stuff they think about a lot."

Crack. Jane tilted forward and blew away the dust.

Wagonwheel moved a little closer. "Who named you?"

"Don't remember. I was too little."

"It had to be Bob."

"Maybe."

Wagonwheel timed it just right, to approach Jane right after she had brought the hammer down. He aimed and most of the pieces landed in a scallop the bunched up nylon made on top of her hood. Jane didn't notice. Wagonwheel smiled.

Jane had cleared all of the smashable gravel out of her immediate area and stilted herself up on her hands to shuffle backwards. Wagonwheel leapt away silently as he could. Most of the compost on her head remained. He had to say something to keep from laughing. "You think you have a good name?"

Jane heard it in his voice and spun herself around in the crabgrass. She was looking hard at him underneath a flap of the hood, and she started chopping at the dirt with the back of the hammer. None of the leaf spilled. Now he spun around to hide his face and acted like he was interested in a bottlecap he found pressed into the dirt.

"I like my name." Jane said.

"I don't."

And he could hear the chopping stop. "Better than your name."

"No, I mean I don't like my name."

"Who does?"

He turned and flung the bottlecap at her, inaccurately, but it caught the air and spun like a flying saucer and cut back in towards her face, snapping her on the cheek.

He was already in the process of escaping her when he heard the zip of the jacket fabric, and at full speed before he could look behind him. She came at him with the hammer cocked back so far that it was almost touching her shoulder blade and trailing crumbled leaf from the top of her head like a burning fuse. The fabric under her arms sounded like angry radio interference. Swishswishswishswish.

Once he was past the edge of the garage and saw that she was still chasing him, he knew that she wouldn't stop until she had either put the claw end into his leg or she went and told Bob and he'd scare Wagonwheel to within an inch of his life. He cut through the weeds and hooked around the tail of the old truck and aimed downhill, towards the ditches. He was gaining ground, and she knew it, and she started to do ridiculous lung-evacuating roars that made sure Bob knew that something was going on, no matter where Bob was. He jumped the first ditch and was approaching the second when the hammer came tumbling in and kicked off the ground to his right, bouncing away and into the bushes. She jumped the first ditch as he jumped the second.

On the other side of the second ditch was a slope of mud that was too steep to do anything but crawl up. Wagonwheel got the top of it right before Jane was squaring up her jump across, still yelling. Wagonwheel hissed down at her.

She could have ran a short way down the ditch and crossed over where the ground wasn't as steep, but she went for the jump and cleared the ditch and dug into the hillside. Wagonwheel knew if she got level with him she would grab him by the arm and windmill him down the slope, or just plain shove him down, on top of whatever else Bob did to him. So he kicked her under the chin. Her face went cross like she had been stung on the nose and she acted like whatever had stung her was chasing her back down the hillside. She stumbled right into the ditch standing up and the mud went up to her knees, and she screamed. Wagonwheel ran even further into the woods.

It took two days for him to get hungry enough to come out of hiding. He found out that Jane had been stuck in the mud for only a few minutes, but had lost Bob's only good hammer and both of her shoes, and was still under a kind of house arrest. As he came back across the yard, she spotted him first from her bedroom window and yelled for Bob. Wagonwheel considered turning right around, but his stomach refused to. He was walking up to the back door and looked up one more time and saw just her eyes shooting down at him over the edge of the window sill.

Bob always threatened to hit him, but Bob said that the only reason he didn't was that he would probably kill Wagonwheel or break something of his badly enough  that he could never live with himself. Instead he hit doorframes and chairbacks and the edge of the table six inches from Wagonwheel's face. Never Wagonwheel. Sometimes he would get close enough that Wagonwheel would swear that this would be the time when Bob would be just a little bit too tired or stressed out to control himself- but no, the threats always funneled down into the same punishment: being locked up in the garage, for however long it took for him to convince Bob that Wagonwheel would be sure to remember the punishment the next time he had the slimmest desire to do (wha t, he had usually forgot by that point), and he wouldn't do it again.

Of course, the big not-so-secret secret was that Wagonwheel had actually enjoyed being locked up in the garage. Bob would never stick him out there when it was too cold and even though five or six hours out of the day might be pretty miserable, what with still having to go out and do his chores and suffer the company of Bob while Bob worked in the garage that day, it was no more than what he would have been dealing with in the house, only now he had privacy at all other times. He would listen to the radio, search through cabinets he wasn't supposed to, sneak out the window at night just to blow raspberries underneath Jane's window. Gradually, Bob or Jane or both of them caught on to what he was doing. Dead batteries in the radio probably gave that one away, and now Bob removed it at the beginning of a sentence. Cabinets were locked, windows nailed shut. Wagonwheel would still find bits and pieces to occupy himself but when he was making games out of washers and sandpaper scraps it started to feel like a stretch to call it fun. It was hard to shake the idea that he was trying to convince himself he wasn't having a worse time in the garage then he would have had outside of it.

*

"He's having fun in there."

"Worry about yourself."

Bob was folding shirts at the foot of his bed. Jane was wrapped around the edge of the door frame, holding on with her hands while her tip toes were planted in her own room. She could just barely get her nose to clear if she stretched out all the way.

"He likes it when you put him in there. I bet he can still get out, no problem."

"Get back in your room."

"I am."

"Stop playing around."

"My feet are still-"

Bob threw down the empty wicker laundry basket and it crinkled when it bounced across the floorboards. He spun around. Jane shot back from the doorway.

"It's like he has his own house." She whined from the other room.

"Okay, switch with him."

"No!"

When he came out of his room, he leaned into hers. "Then sit there and think about why you have to get so angry all the time." He shut the door.

She thought about it, a lot, and the more that anger spun around the room without an outlet, the more it doubled back on itself and smoothed out into a silent, hunterlike calm of revenge. She canned up days worth of it before she was finally set free.

Wagonwheel will still locked up. In the late morning, while it was still cold, Bob went out to the garage and unlocked the door to let him out for chores. Today it was raking, and from the back of the house Jane watched as Bob handed Wagonwheel his tiny half-rake and tiny half-trashcan and gestured along the treeline. Bob didn't see her, but she had gone out ahead of them that morning and removed her bike from the shed.

Starting between the back steps of the house and the gravel edge of the driveway was the top end of a long, shallow wash that cut down the slope of the yard and squeezed between the shed and the pasture wall where it's grade dropped off suddenly. When it rained hard the wash turned into a rapid that carried all the water from the backyard into the ditches behind the garage, and sometimes when it came down hard enough Jane would go out afterwards and see a scale canyon carved down the center of it, as deep as her finger was long, and they would all have to help Bob fill it in. When it wasn't raining, it was a a shortcut from the backyard to the trees for people who didn't want to hop the pasture wall, mainly Bob, but also one of them if they happened to be lugging something, like a rake or trash cans.

After Bob had gone inside, Jane circled back with the bike and set the front tire as close to dead center at the top of the wash as she could reckon. Jane knew that the only time Wagonwheel was ever efficient about anything he was told to do was when he was serving out a sentence. He couldn't wait to get back inside the garage and do nothing, so instead of wasting time by riding the rake like a hobbyhorse or spearing old tires with it, his first can full of leaves would be coming back up the wash to throw on the fire pit in record time.

She watched the top of the shed. The first sign would be two bobbing ears, and she would have to time her launch based on that. For days she had worked out the dimensions. Nothing about the morning seemed to change any of that.

She actually heard the clattering of the trashcan first, and had waited long enough to consider it a false alarm before she saw the top of his head come into range. Her fingers went numb on the handlebars and she broke out into a sweat underneath her windbreaker. She pushed off and slammed down onto the raised right pedal. She picked up speed too fast, but fought against her urge to wheel back on the brakes, and instead stopped pedaling altogether while gravity took over. The shock of the wheel on the uneven bed of the wash clattered her teeth. She almost flipped herself when the wheel went in and out of one of those miniature canyons.

Jane could tell that Wagonwheel heard the bike coming because he suddenly stopped. There were second thoughts about her stopping too, but too late. She came around the side of the shed and hit the steep portion of the wash and impacted him trashcan first. The image of it made her sick. He was standing and then he wasn't, flipping back onto the ground as fast as something on spring might shoot up.

[ozocho]

15/20 Soda Can appears before the Royal Magpie Society

The Grand Vizier leaned back on the Yakking Branch and nodded slowly to the circle of nearly-peers. Cut out of woodblock. Ink feathers, ink beaks. A stenographer with a felt cap and corncob pipe scribbled out the conversation onto a scroll so long that it dangled beneath the branch and snapped in the wind.

"How could you be so criminally negligent?"

Soda Can scrunched up her face and tried to force tears. She acted out a swoon. The member of the Society chosen to defend her did so with relish. "Criminally lonesome, maybe!"

The nearly-peers fluffed and squawked.

The Grand Vizier swelled. "You'll hold your tongue until it's your turn up here!" He turned towards the nearly-peers. "Or it will be held for you."

"Threats!"

"Yes!"

The nearly-peers erupted once more. Soda Can swooned once more.

And she would turn the page and the smell of old paper would hit her face. A coffee stain color was creeping through the margins. Her fingers would smell like the book the next day.

Round lines. The Yakking Branch started to wobble. From behind the vizier shuffled an old, fat magpie in a mildewy overcoat pinned with medals. The vizier spun around.

"Commodore! You know the rules!"

The Commodore took the pipe from his mouth and stabbed the end at the vizier and the rest of the Society Branch. "I told you, and you, and all of you." The medals were distracting most of the audience. "But no one ever listens."

"Great point, Commodore. Now return to-."

The Commodore got closer. He leaned around the vizier and shot one final lightning bolt of a stab towards Soda Can. "This- is what you get!"

"Commodore, please!"

The defending Society member leapt off of Soda Can's branch and landed on the Yakking Branch, outward of the Grand Vizier. "Nobody asked the Commodore to speak!"

"Nobody asked you to either!" The vizier was being smothered. The Yakking Branch was so overloaded that the Society could only follow the argument by nodding their heads.

She would recognize the familiar beats and slip into the person she was a month ago, two months ago, reading the same pages. She would twirl her hair and bite her nails. Time compacted. She was sitting beneath the window in the attic and underneath the yellow lampshade in the parlor all at the same time.

The Commodore had ejected the other two from the Yakking Branch with his bulk. Everyone, defendants included, leaned in as the crimes were described.

Jane was born in the fall and came down sick in the winter. The nearest hospital was a three-hour drive along country roads with ditches on either side that could swallow up the truck whole. If Bob didn't work the pedal like he did and he didn't keep the speed low, the bed would fishtail and she would go from jogging the bundle in her lap to pulling it in towards her throat until the truck was straight again. The vents above the dashboard struggled to keep the windshield clear and the headlights of air sucking, bovine tractor-trailers would blind them in the moment right before they passed each other, inches from the edge of the ditch. Jane screamed the whole time.

Bob dropped them off underneath the ER overhang. The sky was brightening, but the clouds trapped them in a cold, purple hole. The receptionist had a cigarette in two fingers. No insurance. Bob came in knocking the snow off of his boots and sat down next to her. The blanket was peeled back and they watched her swollen face for the better part of an hour. The receptionist called them over, and only Bob went. Yes, no insurance. Bob sat down next to her with the clipboard and tried to fill out as much as he could on his own.

Once they were called up, the doctor was in and out insultingly fast. The diagnosis was a run-of-the-mill fever that could be cured with a prescription formula, only the cost was a life or death situation in itself. A day of making bank calls and living out of gas station restrooms. When they drove back it was nearly as dark and cold as it had been on the way there.

The Society Branch went wild. Soda Can's defense was hopping with irritation. He made a move to occupy the Yakking Branch but the Commodore blocked him off.

She thought the book belonged to her father because nobody else had ever been a kid. There was an inscription just behind the cover in beautiful cursive. "For Teddy Jr" She worried most about passing things to her kids when she was a kid herself. There was this book and one about a spider attending a tea party, a rocking horse her father had made for her that was black and white and the mane was attached with steel tacks, a silver pocket watch.

She had heard the news and ran out into the woods in her only school uniform. Her father always reminded her how paying for it had shortened his life by at least three months. "It's so you won't have to do the same thing, can you appreciate that?" In the process of trying to get angry and upset enough to make time give him back up again, she tore her stockings, scored her shoes, left stains on the whitest parts of her uniform that were sure to never come out. She hid in a tree and dug her nails into her legs so hard that it looked like two dogs had bitten her.

"Why again? You had your chance." The Commodore snapped his beak. "And in what an unnatural way."

The formula was bought with money they borrowed so many times over that it wasn't clear who they owed what anymore. The swelling in Jane's eyes and nose went away and a healthy pink returned to her skin. She slept, but Bob couldn't. He would get up at four, shower and shave, drink a little coffee, drive two counties over to unload trucks at a supply yard for farmers. He would come home after lunch smelling like every kind of fertilizer; earthy cow, sharp chicken, a nostril-burning pure nitrogen. He would finally eat for the day, shower again, have another cup of coffee, then drive the opposite way to a seasonal job putting up telephone poles. He would get back after dark, shower again, eat again, and then try to sleep. But he would just roll around, and right after midnight, every night, he would leap out of bed and run to the bathroom and throw up. And he would be up by four.

Jane's fever returned a year later, and the year after that. It was never any better or any worse. They would just be breaking even again when she would come down with it and suddenly there was the medication to pay for, gas to drive into town every week, new alternators. Sleep that Bob was now just starting to get again would be gone for two and a half months.

Nobody came into the woods looking for her. She climbed down in the late evening, and there was a snake below her.

A stubby cabinet in the parlor corner had all the books in it that her father used to read. She would pull on the brass handle in the door would swing open longways like a stable gate. There was a musty smell trapped in it, and the books were piled in it with their bottoms facing out, all of them at an angle because nobody ever bothered to stack them properly. If she opened most of them their spines would still crack.

"That's enough, Commodore." The Grand Vizier landed behind him.

"You haven't let me get to the point yet."

The defense landed opposite, shouting "Off!" The branch was bouncing again.

"Off! Off!" The Society Branch cheered, raining feathers.

The Commodore sucked his head back and motioned to the Grand Vizier that he wished to get by. The Society twirled their necks and heckled him back down the branch until he rejoined them.

The defense tried to reach the Grand Vizier's height. "How about you let us have a say now?"

The vizier turned away from him and addressed the Society Branch, giving Soda Can a downwards, scornful look. "The distortion of natural laws. That's what it is. Not once, but twice."

"I say! Let us speak! "

"No doubt the Society has seen the evidence? We're not disagreeing about what was or wasn't done, are we?"

The Society's eyes popped when they yelled it. "No!"

"What are we disagreeing about then?"

The defense tried to face the vizier. "Your big mouth!"

"Guaranteed to haunt."

While the Society was busy cheering and crawling over one another, the Grand Vizier de-branched the defense, who fell some distance, before recovering and landing next to Soda Can.

The fever didn't return when Jane was four, or when she was five. When Jane was six, Bob started throwing up around the clock. Within a week his knees were unreliable and he had to lay down for most of the day. She had to see Jane off for school, work part time, come home and take care of Bob, then take care of Jane when school let out. They had no money, and the weather got worse.

"One-for-one."

The defense was horrified. A cool, predatory silence washed over the nearly-peers. They leaned forward, talons digging into the bark of the Society Branch. Soda Can could see herself reflected in their eyes.

"I propose to the Fine Society that we remove the defense from his branch. All in favor?"

"Here here!"

"Then removed he be."

And they launched themselves in squadrons of four until the entire branch was clear. Soda Can leapt back. The lead group hit the defense in the chest and tossed him off the branch, and he would've fallen, but they caught him by the shoulders and held him up for the others. They aimed for his face. Tearing fabric. Someone caught the end of a thread in their beak and yanked back on it, and his glass eyes fell out of his head and he unraveled in a cloud of sawdust.

The nearly-peers circled overhead. Only the Grand Vizier wasn't airborne. "And you." Soda Can felt the branch shake. "You have nothing to stand on anymore."

The branch and the tree moldered underneath her. Worms jumped out of the wood and submerged again. Moss appeared in the shadows. The tree collapsed and she fell with it.

The snake looked like yellow wax. It lay in the one spot in the path where the orange evening sun could still reach the ground. It wasn't coiled up or spread out but shaped like a sloppy question mark, watching her. On any other day she would have climbed back up the tree and yelled for help or even fought her way through the thorns on either side rather than get its attention. Now it was just all the torment of the day, continued, only in a solid form. She took a step forward and it recoiled along its length into a tighter S-shape. She continued to step forward. When it was in range, she brought her heel down on its neck.

[ozocho]

14/20 Bucket talks to the Parlor Lamp

"The last time I said I was feeling bad, but this is worse.

"I think I'm seeing things that I shouldn't be seeing. I know now that thinking about something is the same as seeing it and that if you can't find somebody who sees the same things you think about then you're probably crazy. I'm sorry. How are you?

"Yesterday I asked Jane what it meant to be crazy and she said that it was seeing stuff that wasn't there. I asked her what kind of stuff and she said she didn't know, 'whatever isn't there, I guess.' I think she was getting mad but I had to know. I asked her how you would know if something wasn't there, even if you saw it, would it look any different from other things? She said no, that part of being loony was the crazy things looking even more real than real stuff.

"Wagonwheel got even more mad at me the day before that. I was in the kitchen when I thought he dropped a saucer. I even heard the sound of it breaking. I didn't like the sound I thought I heard so I tried leaving the kitchen, but Wagonwheel stopped me. He asked me where I was going, and I said "Outside", and he asked why, and I told him the breaking dish was frightening. He asked me 'What broken plate?' I told him the one he just dropped. 'I didn't drop anything.' is what he said. 'And you better not tell Bob that I did.' I might have told Bob if he didn't stop me. Then I realized how dangerous this could be. What if I had told Bob that Wagonwheel broke the dish, and instead it was only me being crazy? I asked Wagonwheel what I was supposed to do, and he said 'Stop being so nuts all the time.' Is it that easy for other people?

"I can't stop thinking wrong. I forgot to take the garbage out to firepit yesterday and I didn't remember until it was already night. I never forgot it before. It might be another sign. I don't like going out at night because my lamp isn't bright enough and I get scared thinking about the things I'm not shining it on. Are they really there? And what a long way it is to the firepit. I thought I saw Mother out there, and at first it was nice because it's great having somebody out there with you when it's so dark, but then she disappeared. Not because the light wasn't on her, I think, but just because I thought I saw her and she wasn't really there. I say "Are you there, Mother?" and I think I hear her say 'I can't hear you.' I didn't say anything back. I should've said something back. It was so confusing. If she didn't hear me she wouldn't have said anything, and if she did hear me she wouldn't have said that. Right? It was too much to think about for me and I forgot to say anything extra, just to make sure. Today I asked her if she was out by the pit last night and she said that she couldn't remember. I asked her if she had said 'I can't hear you' and she said she couldn't remember. I went to the firepit and I tried to find the garbage I threw into it, but there were just ashes.

"Do you talk to the coffee table or armrest when I'm not here? I've talked to the car next to the greenhouse and I've talked to the radio when it wasn't on. I tried talking to Bob's old truck. When Mother told me that she wasn't out there last night and that I was crazy, I was so upset that I had to tell somebody. The closest person I could tell was the old car but I had already talked to it so much that I didn't want it getting mad at me like Wagonwheel did. Then I saw Bob's old truck behind the garage and I know I've never talked to it before. There's a lot of weeds around it now, so I almost didn't. Snakes scare me. Bees scare me. Once there was a nest full of bees in a bush by the shed and I rolled over the nest and they chased me back into the house, then they were all over the house and Bob got angry at me. I'm so afraid of bees. A snake never chased me anywhere, but it could. I had to make sure there were no snakes or bees by the truck first.

"I think the best way to talk to a car or truck is from the front, that way you can see them and they can see you. I have to get close, though, because if I'm too far away I'm sticking out from the side of the garage and Bob can see me from the house. One time when I was trying to talk to the car he saw me and thought I had broken down. He came out and heard me, and told me that it was a bad habit to do what I was doing. This was before Jane got mad at me and Wagonwheel got mad at me and Mother said I was crazy. I don't argue with Bob. I wasn't trying to argue with him when I told him that I think the car was listening to what I had to say, and what was the harm in it if I was doing most of the talking. This is when it started. Bob usually gets upset with me, but this time he said he was scared of me. I didn't understand what that meant. I asked him why, and he told me that talking to things that couldn't talk back was a sure sign of being crazy. I asked him what crazy was, and he said it was what I was doing. 'But Bob' I said, 'I think the car is listening.' Then he said 'You just think it's listening, it's all in your head.' Then he shook his head. 'You scare me sometimes.' And I got scared, and I asked him 'What's going to happen if I'm thinking things that aren't there?' Then he said 'You won't be able to know what you're seeing anymore.' Can you imagine that? I can't. And I promised him that I wouldn't do it anymore, but then I started doing it without realizing it. Just thinking to myself, or to the telephone or to the chair next to me. And since I was doing it anyway I would keep forgetting what Bob told me. I thought that maybe I couldn't stop doing it. That I was crazy and if it made me feel better I might as well be crazy. I didn't know any better. I wasn't trying to scare Bob or say that he was wrong. Bob is always right. So when I was really upset and wanted to tell somebody and I went up to the truck, I started talking like I normally do.

"But it wasn't listening. Bob had told me that all the stuff I had been talking to wasn't really listening, but when I tried to talk to the truck, I knew it. I didn't feel comfortable. The longer I talked the more I knew I was talking to nothing. It was so bad that I forgot what I was talking about. The car had listened. The radio had listened, while it was off. You listen. The truck didn't listen.

"I thought it might be that I had turned so crazy that I thought even crazy stuff was crazy now, but when I ran away from the truck to tell the light post by the garage, the light post was really considerate and patient. I knew I could hear it even though it wasn't saying anything. It's younger than you but more tired, and really appreciates company. The car can get scary. The radio can’t remember. The truck was just me, talking to myself."

[ozocho]

13/20 Wagonwheel tries to Impress

Bob had a fishing rod with a proper reel on it, green and black stripes down the side with a knotty cork handle. The only person who was allowed to use this was, obviously, Bob, and if anyone was accompanying Jane to the pond they would all have to share the same catfish rod. This infuriated Wagonwheel and only Wagonwheel. Who else was going to go fishing with her? Soda Can had no interest in anything but being there and Bucket physically couldn't. The green and black rod gathered dust while Wagonwheel sat next to greedy Jane, who fished and fished and came up with great excuses why he couldn't be the one doing the fishing. Maybe if Bob used it more, maybe if it even came up in conversations once in a while. There was just no sense in the matter.

"How long does it take for a reel to go bad?"

"The line might get old, but that's about it."

"How much does line cost?"

"Not much."

"But it sure is a pain to respool, right?"

Bob's mind would never let any of these points sink in and Wagonwheel would push through the conversation with less and less tact until the both of them were shouting at each other and Bob made Wagonwheel leave the house. Bob would have the gall to tell him that if he hated sharing the pole with Jane so much why did he have to go fishing only when Jane wanted to, and Wagonwheel would say that he wasn't allowed to use Jane's pole by himself, and Bob would say that he never said that, and then Wagonwheel would ask him what the use of fishing was if you didn't go with somebody. Then Bob would roll his eyes, and Wagonwheel hated when he did that, and Bob would say Well why don't you make your own rod? Just a stick and some string, like we used to do. Wagonwheel thought this was such a stupid suggestion, and would tell Bob this, and that's when he'd be thrown out.

When Jane was well enough to get around like she had before picking up the flu, the first thing that she wanted to do was go fishing. Wagonwheel was likely to tear his face off, because of course he too wanted to go fishing, but to top off all of the other aggravation, Soda Can wanted to come along.

Just Jane and him were high-stepping through the tall pasture grass, fat crickets springing out of their way. Jane had a jar with a bright yellow lid and when someone's foot would go crashing through the weeds and stir up potential bait, she would pounce on it and snag up the bug in a jaw of fingers. Most of them ended up in the jar intact enough to leap around and pop against the glass and Jane was too busy laughing at the sensation to give what Wagonwheel was saying much thought.

"We could tell her she doesn't need to come. She doesn't fish anyway. Right?" Since Jane was in charge of bait, Wagonwheel was left holding the catfish pole, the pole he wasn't allowed to use. The injustice wasn't lost on him. He had the pole over his shoulder, holding it like he was about to bring it down on someone's head. "Why go fishing with her if she doesn't fish? Right?" He felt uneasy saying Soda Can's name out loud, as even the thought of it had the power to make him lightheaded and angry all at the same time. "Right?"

"Oh shut up."

"Don't tell me to shut up."

"Then go fish with your own pole."

Wagonwheel's nostrils flared and he gritted his teeth. He did a half shotput roll and flung the pole out into the field. He started marching back towards the yard, making sure that he didn't turn around to see what Jane's reaction was, ashamed that his first thought after throwing it was how he hoped it landed just fine and how he hoped that Jane wouldn't get upset and tell Bob. An image in his head of Jane getting red-faced and puffy made it hard for him to maintain himself, so he used the excuse of watching his footing to take a look back and see what damage his action had done: Jane was carrying both the jar and the pole, laughing, taking the time to watch him walk away. He cussed and made like he had somewhere important to be, until he was just out of sight, then he dropped against the side of the garage and pitched gravel between the shed slats.

He took time to bottle up the scene so he could analyze it and squeeze anything out in his favor, and if he couldn't do that he would mark the odds against him, until events were too trampled to recognize anymore and he decided that whatever he did, he couldn't keep doing this. A lack of change right now would make him sick. There had to be no mistaking it.

He swung open the shed door. There it sat, high up, spread across three beams under the peak of the roof. The only thing that had kept him from defying Bob and going after it earlier was the simple fact that it was out of reach, and he would look up and see it higher than any plywood shelf or coffee can full of screws and the two by fours would feel like church rafters. Now that he was determined the situation seemed trivial, and he was embarrassed by how watery he had always been about it. Next to the broom and rake pair that Bob had cut down to Wagonwheel's size were the full-sized things. Wagonwheel felt that irony was such that when it rained it poured and the fact that he was using Bob's own broom, one that Bob probably thought Wagonwheel couldn't even lift, to knock down his own fishing pole was funny enough that he almost bungled the whole thing trying not to laugh. He gave the broom a carefully aimed swing and hit the pole endways like a hammer hits a nail, and at first he thought he had just made it more lodged in place, but one end slipped and the whole thing tipped up, then back, like a sinking ship. It landed on top of chicken wire and a bag of charcoal briquettes.

He had pictured an event with a little more ceremony, rather than the green and black pole, smaller than it looked when it was above him, laying in its own dust. He picked it up. He leaned it into the doorlight and studied it. The body of it was actually transparent, and wherever he had made contact and pushed away the dirt the dull green was electrified and lit up like sea glass. He admired the levers and hammers and the line that ran off the spool and through the eyelets to the end of it where the hook was still attached. It was longer than he was tall but he playacted a fishing stance as best he could between the lawnmower and Jane's bicycle. It was lighter than it looked. It felt weaponized.

When he closed the shed door he left it unlatched, to maintain the illusion of having never been there. There was the question of how he was going to get something too large to throw up under his arm or hide at his side across the pasture without Bob plainly seeing it from the house. He considered a flanking route by keeping the garage between him and the house and cutting through the swampy thicket that followed the ditch, then he thought about the sharp odor of the culvert mud he'd have to trek through and imagined dealing with that smell for the rest of the day. He pushed away from the garage with the rod held low, and ran for it. Twice the rod was floating so close to the ground that a hump of grass caught the end and bent it like a rapier, by some miracle not breaking either the rod or his arm, but they were small instances and he would spin out of it to keep his momentum going and in a quick minute he was behind the far side of the hill. There he put on airs by swinging the rod around and propping the bare side against his shoulder and trying to walk like he thought someone who was in no hurry should walk, playing down how out of breath he was by channeling it through his nose.

He dipped into the trees and had to watch the hook to keep it from catching on leaves. Of course it was easier to just take the path, but if there was a chance he could beat the other two to the pond he would have to take it. What would he say? The initial impact of him having the rod and them not having the rod was a scenario he ran over and over again, tweaking variables and outcomes enough to be prepared for anything. Her jealousy would make Jane accuse him of stealing it, and while that would be completely true, he knew that if he radiated enough authority Jane would be forced to accept it. Yeah, Bob said I could use it if I wanted to. Yeah, he said I could use it if I was careful. He had to get the tone just right, make it consistent with her idea of Bob. He held up the rod and looked along the length of it, pointed it at a squirrel's nest in a nearby tree, certain that the eyelets doubled as aiming sights. His memory of Bob using it was a very gray one. It was before Wagonwheel was enlightened, when he walked on all fours and rubbed up against legs and only had food in mind, but the memory was sharper than most things from that time. Bob aiming the rod at the water and the hook, with grub, shooting out from the pole and into the water where it caught the fish from the inside and Bob pulling it back to the bank with the reel. It was spiny and smelled like the pond. When Bob held it down so Wagonwheel could examine it the fish jerked and Wagonwheel leapt back, and Bob laughed. Wagonwheel laughed at it now.

Jane's voice snuck through the trees and reoriented him. They were already at the pond. The foliage grew in such a way that it would have been impossible to approach them without being heard first, so he made no attempt to, and it was obvious when they finally heard him crashing through the branches, because Jane went silent.

He stepped out into the clearing, shaking a vine from his foot. Jane was sitting crosslegged on the bank with the catfish pole propped up in her lap, trailing a line out into the water and the red bobber. Soda Can was quarter of the way around the pond and holding an armful of stones. Both had their necks twisted around to see him come out of the woods. He saw Jane's eyes squint and then jump open when she spotted the rod. She crawled to her feet and brushed the dirt off her pants.

"Bob said-"

"I'm telling!"

[ozocho]

12/20 Jane waits on a Thunderstorm

The clouds curled to the north like steam coming off a boiling pot. Jane would set her nose to the windowsill to steady her eyes and would pick out a point of reference between her and the clouds, like the cowlick of leaves that stood higher than anything else on the far treeline, and by watching what cloud lined up with her eyes and the leaves and by the way it drifted past she could piece out the wind's direction. More often than not it didn't work, and some illusion of movement would cause clouds moving towards her to look like they were moving away, or the same situation, only backwards, or sometimes they would change shape so slowly that she couldn't be sure what cloud she was supposed to be keeping track of in the first place. If she was upright for too long a fist of nausea would start to grow in her stomach and she would turn on the radio and lay down on the bed, staring at familiar constellations in the ceiling. She would try to decide what feature was directly above her.

It was so hot that her hair itched, and her ceiling game would spin her eyes and give her vertigo. She had her right arm laying over the bridge of her nose. The radio leaked out a song that came and went with the reception. Sometime after breakfast there had been talk of thunderstorms.

Her stomach settled a little and she sat up and turned off the radio and listened for wind. The clouds on the horizon still steamed, but were no closer. Even the reflected light off the lawn was enough to make her face sweat. She sat back in her desk chair and took a few deep breaths, trying to compress that pain in her stomach.

Thunderstorms were the holidays of weather. It wasn't just relief from the heat. A warm day or a cold day was such a functional thing that nobody cared about it outside of breakfast and newspaper conversation. You might as well choose the color of a chair. Storms made you notice them, they came in like a parade and their act passed through different phases. They had stage presence.

The fan was still on the shelf above the desk from the night before. Pap had told her that if she wanted it down she had better ask him to, but she knew how testy he was from nursing her day and night and saw no harm in handling it herself. Still, she reached for it and it felt heavier than she remembered, and even though there were no problems in the end, she remembered his warnings about cuts and electrocution and it made her unsure of herself, after the fact. She wondered if she would ever be able to handle a fan without being scared of it in some way. Was that a good thing? She had all her fingers, she had all her sense. She pictured these fears stuck in her brain like old nails driven too far into a tree, and it was a question of whether you left them in and hoped they dissolved or if you flip the hammer around and scratched them out. She got her analogy caught on itself and like a string of lights, couldn't untangle it. The switch for the fan had never not been broken and the only way to switch it on and off was to reach in and grab a nub with some pliers, so they usually just plugged or unplugged it. This she could do as much as she pleased, because Pap considered her well aware of the dangers of outlets and knowledgeable on common sense practices concerning them, like not sticking butterknives into the sockets and other baby nonsense.

She sat in front of the fan until her skin wasn't so much cool as numb, and when she stepped away she could feel the heat glow around her. She would talk into the blades and make her voice sound like Bucket's. Outside the window she saw a breeze swirl the tree at the far end of the yard and she pushed her ear away from the fan and tried to catch it at the window, but it never got that far. Her stomach hurt. She switched the radio back on and moved to the bed. The quilt underneath her superheated every point of contact. She tried to lift herself off of it while laying on it at the same time. She always felt she was within a few inches of floating. A man on the radio was telling the studio audience bad jokes, and every time there was a certain beat the audience would laugh and hoot at him. She kicked the quilt off the bed.

A gust of wind jumped up over the windowsill and blew across her forehead. In spite of her stomach she slid off onto her feet and looked out the window to see a little black cloud racing by overhead. Surely not the storm itself; evidence of it. She was smiling, but her stomach hadn't been given enough time to flatten out, so she lay back down, rattling with excitement even when she was trying to keep still. She was irritated by that man on the radio. Your stories are boring, go get the weatherman, so he can tell us where the storm is and when it will be here.

[ozocho]

Doodle for Myrmecological World.

[ozocho]

11/20 Soda Can and Bucket imagine a Rhinoceros

There was a section of the pasture fence blown open as wide as a garage door. The bottom two ties had been snapped and sagged down into the grass, only held together by the white fibers at the center anymore, and the remaining three were torn off at the sides where they once sat in the posts. Under a blue sky and a friendly sun Soda Can could work out time as well as anybody else, and knew that the fence had not been like that this morning.

Without Jane around the trees on the other side were dangerous. She might be able to navigate the forest path by herself but elsewhere details were as good as nothing and any one spot between trees was the same as another. Once, Jane had kicked a ball from the top of the hill and it ramped right over the top of a stone and skipped, they thought, only just past the edge of the woods, and Jane had told her that she shouldn't have to get it, what with Soda Can being so much closer, so Soda Can went for the ball. When she was only up to her waist in leaves she already had known it was a bad idea but out of her devotion to Jane she persisted and dunked her head under anyway. Her last clear memory had been of a spot of light pulling away from her face and the heavy shade around her rolling in and flooding her nose. Jane had later told her that when she called for Soda Can a few minutes later there was no response, and going into the brush she found the ball exactly as close to the edge as she thought it had been, but no Soda Can.

Soda Can insisted that there were sharks in the woods. She thought the broken fence confirmed that, but Jane always corrected her, that there was no way there were sharks in the woods: did you see fish in the woods? Sharks were just fish, and fish can't swim out of water. When she said this it made Soda Can feel inadequate and stupid and it was one of the few times she regretted something she had said. Then Jane would go on: Maybe a bigger animal, that didn't need water to move, like a bear or a rhinoceros, maybe. Soda Can would ask Jane what a rhinoceros was. "Like a bear, but with a horn."

Normally not the most stealthy type, she didn't notice Bucket was there until he was already speaking.

"What happened, Mother?" Soda Can jumped.

"A rhinoceros, I think." Bucket had stopped well behind her and now she could hear him idling quietly.

"What's a rhinoceros?"

"It's like a bear, but with a horn."

"I'm not sure what a bear is."

"Like a rhinoceros, but without a horn."

"Oh."

Now Soda Can felt pressured to piece together a better picture of this rhinoceros and approached the shattered fence cautiously. Bucket, no doubt even more afraid of the scene than she was, didn't move. She hoped that he would be brave enough to stay put a little while, because without his company she doubted that her own courage, that close to the trees, would hold out.

"Are you sure it's safe, Mother?"

"Probably long gone by now." She leaned over the wreckage, but not too close, scratching her chin. "Maybe there's some tracks."

There were tracks all right, at least half of which she knew had nothing to do with what the tracks of a rhinoceros might look like, mostly robins and raccoons, and a tight cluster that tap danced around a pile of rocks; probably  Wagonwheel. Not that he or the birds or some opossum was responsible, as old and cracked as the tracks were. She saw more interesting candidates closer to the shade, but they convinced her they weren't anything important. "Not sure."

"Jane had that book."

Soda Can moved out from underneath the pressure of the trees, shivering to get whatever they had off of her. "What book?"

Click. "The one with the pages colored on the edges," She heard him raise the volume, because he had difficulty recalling something and being scared at the same time. "when it was just the page you couldn't see the color, but when the book was closed you could. It was to mark out sections, whether you had the book open or not."

She wasn't following him. She smiled. "That's nice."

"But the sections were about animals." The volume ran down once more. "Is why I said so."

She looked up at him. "What was it called?"

"The red one." He paused. "I can't read. And Jane wouldn't read it to me."

"Were there pictures?"

Volume up. "Oh yes."

*

Mother had told Bucket that if he wanted to know what a rhinoceros or a bear looked like he would have to go into the house and get Jane, if she wasn't too sick, to latch the book to him and bring it back out so she could show him. He asked her if it was really worth it all, and she insisted that it was, that it was important he know about these things.

"Okay, but I'm sure Jane could show me what a rhinoceros is, without having to take it outside." He had said.

"She might get sick all over again if you put her through it."

The last thing Bucket wanted was for Jane to get sick all over again.

Bob had told him that the only good reason he had going into the house was to recharge in the kitchen, and that this was to be done with as little noise as possible. He had just recharged when he came across Mother and the broken fence, so if Bob saw him in the kitchen again so soon he would have nothing to defend himself with. He stood before the back steps for at least an hour, paralyzed with indecision. After a fifth dialogue with himself over the matter, he reasoned that enough time must have passed to make his appearance feel far more natural. He hoped he wouldn't have to lie, though, because he knew he couldn't. He bumped open the kitchen door and rolled in, the thump of his treads on the door a lot louder than he had meant it to sound, or maybe not. He had such difficulty determining noise. He hovered around his outlet for a few moments. He couldn't hear Bob coughing in the parlor or a paper snapping in his hands, and when he inched past the kitchen chairs and into the archway between the two rooms, he saw no Bob.

Bucket could climb stairs, only he had some trouble with it, and he rarely did so more than once every few weeks, mostly from a lack of any good reason to. Bob described the noise as "aggravating" the one time he had been mad enough to be honest about it, like "someone trying to drive him crazy, on purpose". This was never Bucket's intention, in fact, Bucket didn't like it himself. It took so much power that he was always afraid of being unable to get back down, and something in him felt like he was about to go tumbling backwards whenever the treads were about to crest the next step. There were eight steps between the landing and the upstairs hall.

Bucket had made so much of a racket climbing the stairs that by the fourth step even he knew he was being much too loud about it, and on top of that, the fear that this arbitrary, destructive rhinoceros had already put into him was combined with the panic of the climb. If he tried to go back down, backwards, he knew he would fall, and if he tried to push on in his current frame of mind he was sure there would be just a bit too much acceleration and he would tumble down all the same, only further. He was locked on the fourth step, constantly expending power to keep in place, repeating a gentle nodding motion.

"Stuck again?"

Jane was standing at the top of the stairs in her pajamas.

"Please go back to bed, I'm okay."

But she ignored him, slipping by him on the stairs, and then grabbing him by the handles she gently rolled him back down to the landing. The guilt was catastrophic. She turned him around and faced him, and if he had been able to he would have looked away.

Click. "Please go back to bed, there might still be time. I'll tell Bob it was all my fault."

"Are you going crazy?"

"I might be, I'm so sorry."

"Let's get you recharged." She said it in her imitation Bob voice, pushing him towards the kitchen until he started moving on his own. Bucket was too devastated to argue about it and he relived his crime over and over while he recharged. Jane slid one of the low backed kitchen chairs across the linoleum and climbed onto it, resting her hands across her stomach and letting out a deep breath. She was already feeling it, he could tell, and he imagined the storm that was building inside of her.

[ozocho]

10/20 Bob just can't find it In Him

It might have broken, it might have not, the point was that she was sleeping well for the first time in days and he could leave the house and get the stink of fever out of his lungs. His shirt was veined with creases too permanent to rub out and his denim pants were one quarter their original weight and could probably stand on their own by now. His hair looked vacuum sealed from palming it back. He dragged his boots from one flagstone to the other, eyes bunched up near the back of his throat and his mind buzzing like an arc lamp. He could think about nothing without a dirty screen of white noise getting in the way and he would have dropped in place if his body hadn't already been moving.

Even with the greenhouse vents open it would have been a twice-daily thing to get out there and water them during a heat wave, but during the overcast, cool spell of the last two days he knew they would still be damp and perfectly content to have other matters taken care of, not that Bob cared, as he couldn't imagine anything around the yard as comforting right then as mother-henning the hibiscus and mandevilla. The door was made from two by fours and plastic sheeting with tears at the corners and pinned with chicken wire from the waist down, to keep woodchucks out. A cement block acted as a latch. He swung it open and the humid breath blowing out was a shot of lightning. Still too exhausted to be clearheaded, at least he could feel his blood running again.

Bob was nearsighted. He had a single pair of wire glasses that were older than Jane and once had a clean, brass look to them before most of the coating had worn off. Now they looked leprous, and the bridge had been bent so many times that it was as malleable as a pipe cleaner and Bob was certain that more twist would snap it. So he usually went without the glasses. He could read and write without them, after all. He wasn't that old. For the whole week that Jane was sick he had hardly needed to see farther than the bed and her face and he hadn't so much as thought about them for a further week and a half. It was overcast and the dirt on the panes wasn't letting any extra light in. A wilting plant looked a lot like a healthy plant. The first time Bob noticed it was when a taller hibiscus near the end of the right-hand bed was showing the bloodless undersides of its leaves and looked in general like two large hands had rung it out. He kicked the base with the side of his boot and it felt as heavy as the door jam outside. The soil was black. He poked it with his finger and the hole refilled like a well. He moved along the bench with his heart picking up.

Every group he leaned over to inspect was, to different degrees, dying. Bob lifted up a pot of strawberries that now looked like a pot of thinning hair, and when it was about as high as his head a cloud of flies swarmed out from between the leaves and fled to the cover of other nearby plants. He threw the pot back down onto the heads of the others and there was an explosion of what looked like white confetti.

Bob punched the door to the greenhouse open and the two springs croaked. He stomped from one end of the yard to the other and to the top of the hill, shouting Wagonwheel's name louder and louder until his legs were hurting from his ankles to his waist and the back of his throat felt like the cracked ground he was walking on. How could he be any more specific? Do. Not. Water. Unless he said so, but of course Wagonwheel watered anyway. Normally Bob would have to remind him to do something so many damn times it would make his head spin, and then the one thing that would be harmful to do too much of, he did. Bob walked back down to the yard. He told himself that he would not clean up a thing until Wagonwheel came out of hiding, which now that Wagonwheel was sure to know how furious Bob was with him might be until he got hungry enough, maybe a day or two, an afternoon if it started to rain again. Bob imagined himself sitting there for days on end, watching them rot, and he decided he would just do it himself and let Wagonwheel's term earn interest. Still, Bob underestimated how brilliantly aggravating Wagonwheel could be: the trash bags were misplaced, and it took him the better part of an hour to find them laying out in the pasture, in a soggy box.

When his hands were gloved and the first trash bag was shook open and clutched ready in the left hand, he stood in front of the greenhouse door and delayed. He counted to one hundred, confident that if by then Wagonwheel still hadn't come out then he would do everything himself. It passed, and he added another hundred. Still no show.

He went in to check on Jane. He made sure he took off his boots and gloves as slowly as possible. Up the stairs in his socks. The door to her bedroom was further open than it was before and she was laying with her back to him. A new glass of water was sitting on the stand next to her bed. Back down the stairs in socks and sliding on and tying boots, slipping on the gloves. Outside, the wind had picked up, but Wagonwheel was still nowhere to be seen.

Bob started with the bench closest to the door and took it out on the plants, as it was impossible to think about anything but a phantom Wagonwheel right over his shoulder saying all of the most arrogant, condescending things that Bob could think of. He shook them out of the pots. A few of the them saved themselves by having roots strong enough to grip drainage slits in the pot bottom and resist Bob, others would hold on right up until the bulk of the soil had already fallen out and all Bob had to do was poke one of the fingers and they would drop into the bag. An initial pass through the greenhouse and three trash bags later, the isolated, surviving plants were a sorry sight, and when he really got a good look at them this second time he found half of them to be past saving, and that he only ever let them off because they had looked so much better next to the rotten ones. None of his anger was satisfied, if anything it was so much worse now that his knees and shoulders were sore and he was forced to sit back on a stool outside and relieve the pressure. The wind took some of the heat off but couldn't get rid of the smell of vermiculite, plastic and soggy plants. He could see the woodier stems of some of them poking through the bags, or trying to.

It was a waste of trash bags if he was just going to burn them anyway, but since the one intact trashcan was occupied and the other had a bottom so rusted through that it looked like it was on a hinge, Bob wasted four trash bags. He dollied them down the path and tossed them one by one onto a bouncing mattress of yard trash in the firepit. At five points he planted newspaper wicks and touched them off with another in his hand. It didn't catch, and he had to crumble up a whole other paper and stuff it under the smaller branches to get the fire to eat properly. The smaller branches combusted and dried out the larger ones above them, then the fire got up underneath the plastic and shrunk wrapped the edges before they too caught and the black smoke from it took off over the hill. While Bob was still standing there two of the bags popped and the wad of compost inside spilled out over the pit and almost extinguished it again, but the fire had too much of a head start, and was already halfway through the other bags a minute later. He went back to the stool in front of the greenhouse, where he thought the black smoke from the bags couldn't reach him, but it stuck to his shirt and his hair.

[ozocho]

9/20 Soda Can and Wagonwheel can't Get Along

The flu had snuck up on Jane sometime during the night and Wagonwheel was ejected from the house first thing in the morning, so Bob could concentrate on taking care of Jane, according to Bob, and with the sun just coming over the trees at the other end of the pasture it was already hot enough to make Wagonwheel angry. The first day in who knows how long that Bob had nothing for him to do and he was supposed to be able to waste his time however he wanted, like staying inside going to sleep, maybe stealing a candle and a pack of matches and living in the crawlspace all day. How could that interfere with Jane and her flu? The sun crept along the dry grass by the garage and fried Wagonwheel's brain from the outside while the injustice fried it from within.

The kicker was that he was supposed to stay with shouting distance of the house, just in case Bob needed him to help with something. Knowing Bob, that meant that Wagonwheel would be left to sit out in the sun all day, waiting for nothing. Well he wasn't having any of it, and with him deprived of doing what he really wanted to do he planned to compensate himself by going way out of shouting distance and into the woods, to his secret spot, something like a bunker for these kinds of situations.

On any other morning she would have appeared in the yard at about the same time Jane left the house, and Wagonwheel would never see a trace of her beforehand. Now that it was already light and Jane still wasn't around, Soda Can appeared regardless. As he was walking up the hill he could hear her shouting up behind him, exasperated.

"Where's Jane?"

He planned on not responding at all, but she persisted, and he had to shout back down the hill. "She's sick!"

Soda Can covered her mouth. "How sick?"

"It's just the flu." He tried to sound sure of himself. "She'll be fine."

"Did she look okay?"

"She's fine."

"So you didn't see?"

He shrugged. "No."

The sun felt like it was picking up momentum and Wagonwheel could hear the marrow in his bones cook. She moved her hands to her forehead and followed a patch of dirt in tight circles. She spun long enough for him to think that she might never stop, and he reasoned it was safe enough to walk away. As he did: "You better be careful." The phrase took him by surprise, then "Too much of the sun can be bad for you. Find shade."

"I'm trying." He didn't turn or slow down. He could tell she was following him.

"Where?"

"Go away." He was a few steps away from the crest of the hill when he stopped. "Go and wait for Jane."

"Stop being so moody."

Wagonwheel flared his nostrils and felt the heat rise. "Fine." He planted himself and shut up.

Soda Can looked at Wagonwheel, then skyward, then down, blinking the sun out of her eyes. "We're going to roast out here."

He said nothing.

She stared hard at him for what felt like hours. She looked like she was melting into the air. "This is what I'm talking about." She shook her head.

"And what's that?"

"You and your tantrums."

"Don't talk to me like that."

"Sorry." She gave him one of her pained smiles. "You'll cool down when you get out of the sun."

He picked up a rock.

"Have it your way." And with a snap she turned around and was on her way back downhill. Somewhere just out of range of his rock, he lost sight of her. He threw it down in anger. Of course it would be trivial for her to follow him without being spotted, so it made the whole argument and rock stunt pointless, and he only felt more worn out for it.

Along the treeline, halfway between the footpath to the pond and the broken birdbath was the secret entrance to Wagonwheel's secret spot, and he made sure to walk towards it indirectly enough to hide its real location. A glance through the trees and a scan of the pasture turned up nothing, but he knew better. He pushed his way into the hot, claustrophobic hollow cut out of the underbrush and replaced the screen. The floor was old pine needles and dirt and cooler than the air above it, and spread out along most of it was a miniaturized landscape constructed from twigs and scrap firewood, uncommitted supplies of which were piled up off to the side. A little canal, filled with actual water, formed the backbone of the creation and the tiny buildings chased it. There were pinechip lean-to's and multistory castles with special details that Wagonwheel was, without any shame, proud of.

He was nearly suffocating and let the screen crack a little. So much for secrecy. He was only so concerned about it because it played on his fear of someone finding out that he was so serious about something. It was a temporary thing, he even had to reason to himself, I have done other things that wouldn't have seemed so strange to others, and why couldn't somebody have seen all of this when I was doing that? He made an effort to clean it up in spots. It would be better if someone saw it and thought that he was normally this organized when working with- well, this. Maybe it was a new form of art, and it just needed enough attention. If anybody was going to walk in on him now, it had to be at this point, while he was still confident that what he was doing wasn't insane and if someone was to doubt him he could easily find it in him to defend himself. He could feel it topping out. This idea he had about being infallible wouldn't last.

[ozocho]

8/20 Jane definitely hears Something

For as long as Jane could remember there had been a balancing act come bedtime, with the noise around her having to be fine-tuned towards being not too distracting and not too isolating, all at the same time. Having the radio on was a no go, not only because it was much too loud for her to sleep by but also because it was too loud for Pap to stand, period, and sleeping without any noise at all would be as good as sleeping without a bed. A happy medium had to be found.

Pap insisted that the fan was what he called a "finger chopper" and there was no end to his warnings about what would happen if someone were to get too brave around it. Originally the blades were uncaged and when space on her desk was short it seemed bigger than it was, like it could reach out for her if it wanted. Then Pap made something out of spare clothes hangers that could contain it, and he moved to a higher shelf in the corner of the room. It no longer felt like it was loose in her space and she was soon so attached to the noise of it that she started to leave it on, muggy summer night or not.

One spring evening a storm had rumbled its way over them and the wind had knocked everything about like an open hand. Glass in the greenhouse was smashed, stray branches flew around the yard. Towards the tail end of it they were huddled around the stove in the kitchen when the power cut out. Pap tried to keep a handle on everybody, but the second he walked away to find candles was the second that Wagonwheel and Jane disappeared into the dark parlor and started shoving each other over the furniture. Bucket was too afraid of running out of power to move from his dead recharge cord in the kitchen, but he didn't fink on them either. When Pap came back the roughhousing between her and Wagonwheel became a makeshift game of hide-and-seek, Pap the seeker, and they underestimated how angry he really was until the moment they were laughing so hard they couldn't help but be found, and once revealed Wagonwheel was sent out to the garage for the night, Jane receiving a very stern warning to shape up or else. They sat around the kitchen and the candles talking about nothing specific until Pap decided that everybody should turn in for the night.

Jane was escorted up the dark stairs by Pap and the light from the brass candle he was carrying. The flame would peek around corners ahead of them and animate every corner and crease in the wallpaper and her peripheral vision suffered. In the doorway to her own room she faltered. Everything from the floorboards to the dimple in the ceiling looked like an imposture. He put a gentle hand on her shoulder and tried to guide her in. Jane dug her heels in.

"How old are you?" He added a soft laugh. She shook her head. "You were just having a great time. What's so different?"

"It's darker."

He laughed again. "Well, okay. I'll sit out in the hall until you go to sleep if you want me to, but I also have to make sure Bucket doesn't get too scared." What he was really doing wasn't lost on her. Bucket was always scared, and Pap being around wasn't going to change that. However, her shame was starting to outrun her fear.

"Okay."

*

What woke Jane was most likely that isolating lack of background noise. She had been so wrapped up in the horrors of the dark house and the pressure to not be so afraid of it that she had fallen asleep out of mental exhaustion alone. How much later it was she did not know, only that from the lack of candlelight she knew that Pap had given up his vigil. The one thing she could pick out was the pale gray outline of the window and the night past it. The bedsheets sounded like tearing paper. She looked around her room and watched shapes shift like it had under the candlelight only this time they crawled all at once instead of jumping around the corners of her eyes. It scared her to think that something could still move while she was looking directly at it.

With the joints of the house popping all the time it didn't stand out until she caught the rhythm of it, right off of her left ear: the ticking of a clock, her old grandpap's pocket watch to be exact. It should have been in the top drawer of her dresser, but she must have dropped it between the mattress and the wall when she had it out last time. She pulled apart the blankets, then continued to go deeper down the side of her bed, when she discovered that the sound was definitely beyond it. In the wall.

The problem still had ordinary dimensions: she hears the watch, she can't find the watch. Then it forced her to think about the mathematics of it. She realized that if it wasn't stuck in the mattress then it must not be in her room at all, and it couldn't be on the other side of the wall because that was outside of the house altogether. She realized that the sound must be traveling at odd angles from some other source, possibly from the very watch she thought it was, sitting away in the drawer! Of course she had never heard it any other night because the fan was always on.

The wonder of the concept lasted for about a minute. The longer she listened to it the louder it seemed. There was just no way, miracles of science or not, that the sound could do that. She was close enough to feel it. She put her ear against the wall.

She jumped away from the wall and out of the bed entirely. She danced in place, nervously shuffling her feet and hands. Her eyes were no more accustomed than they were before and nothing but the lighter patterns on the bed sheets seemed solid. She felt vulnerable to the rest of the room, but the bed, being attached to this wall and this thing that just did not make sense in any reasonable, safe way, made the bed just as contaminated with that same wrongness the wall had.

A potential life saver of an idea didn't come to her until she was half out of her skull with fear, but it would do. She tiptoed across the room and managed to avoid crushing her foot on the tiny desk chair, over to the dresser with the loose handles. She slid open the top drawer with way more noise than she would have preferred, brushing aside coins and socks and broken crayons. She impaled her thumb on what was probably a sewing needle, then in the back right corner her nail brushed against the velvet bag. Before she even pulled it out of the drawer she knew there was no watch in it.

Jane had no idea what it meant, and somehow that was far more terrifying than anything else she could think of. The very, very little kid in her took a few fast steps towards the door, the floorboards screaming underneath her feet, which shocked her mind a bit more level; the fear of Pap knowing she was up made a story about a watch in her wall seem just as stupid as it sounded.

Could she go back to bed? Of course not. But she couldn't go to Pap either, or continue to run around her room, waking up the whole house. Instead she utilized her knowledge of which spots on the hallway floor were the loudest, then did the same for the steps.

At the bottom of the stairs she paused to listen, but couldn't hear anybody moving upstairs. She stepped into the dark kitchen and had to strain her eyes to see anything but the window over the sink. A sudden grinding from the right made her leave the floor.

"Why are you up, Jane?"

"Shh, I was checking on you."

Bucket's motor wound down. "Oh, I'm okay." Jane could finally make out his outline. His lamp was off, his voice was quiet. "I'm sorry. I would talk with you, but I'm so afraid of running out of power."

[ozocho]

7/20 Wagonwheel and Bucket see if It Rolls

"I bet it would if we got behind it and gave it a good push."

"I don't think it will."

Wagonwheel squinted the sun out of his eyes and looked down at Bucket. "And how much do you know about cars?"

"The tires are flat-"

"So we push it harder."

"-and I think it's stuck in the ground."

Wagonwheel looked from the front tires to the back. "No it's not." The mud was up to the axle. "If it doesn't move it doesn't move.” He lifted himself onto his tiptoes and pulled down on the frame. Not only did the springs not give, the whole thing felt like it was cased in cement.

Click. "Maybe Bob could help us."

Wagonwheel spun around. "Don't even mention it to him. I swear."

"I won't."

Wagonwheel yanked down on the car again. Not an inch of give, and he backed away panting. "It's all about where you push it." He walked around to the other side of the car, past rust spots you could stick your head through. He stared into one of the cherry flavored brake lights. "If I stood right here-" he fitted one arm into a crook in the chassis and play acted a good push. "-and you did the same thing over there." He gestured. "I think we could." Wagonwheel leaned into the car. "Yeah, I think we could."

He motioned for bucket to take up his position opposite him, and after a good moment's worth of inaction, Bucket acknowledged.

"What should I push with?"

"That's not my problem."

And Bucket leaned his flimsy chassis up against the bumper.

Wagonwheel took the countdown ceremony very seriously, and insisted that when the numbers dropped Bucket was to (and it wasn't just a suggestion) combine his strength with Wagonwheel's and shove the car unstuck. This could be the only outcome. When the countdown hit “push”, Bucket whirled his treads up and practically spun them off the rollers, slinging mud out behind them and right onto the side of Bob's greenhouse. Wagonwheel put every ounce of upper body strength he had, but his braced back legs took the force of it and almost immediately he was horizontal, nose in the mud.

He came up cussing out everything around them, Bucket especially, and when he saw the side of the greenhouse his eyes popped.

"You're telling Bob about that, not me."

"Okay." And he started to roll away.

Wagonwheel grabbed him by the handle. "I got another idea."

He high stepped over a greasy puddle by the driver side door and started tugging at the knife-shaped handle. "You know what I think the problem is?" He wrapped both paws around it and leaned back, trying to jump it open. The metal around the doorframe cried and strained. "I think somebody must've left it in park." One of the bigger tugs finally broke away the crust holding the whole mechanism in place, and even though the door couldn't have opened more than an inch, the change was sudden enough to send Wagonwheel reeling back onto himself. When he got over the immediate shame of the fall and realized what he had accomplished, his face lit up. "See?"

And just as quickly as the light had hit his face, a new, shadier feeling slipped into his head. Visually, it was just a black slice, backlit a little by what little sunlight made it through the cloudy windscreen and smoked the inside of the cabin; too dark to see specifics, but bright enough to see that there was indeed something on the other side of the door. Then the car moved.

Bucket's perspective on this was an unusual one, having not seen what Wagonwheel was seeing, or feeling, the whole scene played out to him like this: Wagonwheel going for the door, then not going for the door, then his friend leaving his own eyes. Wagonwheel's tongue came out and the hair all over him stood up. He dropped on to all fours and hissed at the door.

"Are you alright?"

No, he was not. Some part of him recognized the words, but it was gone faster than he could blink.

*

Bob's calling for him in the angry tone and Wagonwheel sits in the dark, content with not moving at all. Each call's a little closer and in the air between them he can hear Bucket's treads whining. Don't do it, Bucket, he thinks to himself. Don't tell them where I am. He's sick and every thought drips out of his head before he can get a hold of it.

The board and steel mesh in front of him is peeled back and in the gap are Bob's two boots.

"Get out of there!"

He doesn't move though.

"Now!"

The raises himself up and catches his back on a nail in the support above him, cussing. Bob thinks it's directed towards him, and when Wagonwheel is most of the way within arms reach a fist comes in from the light and locks it's fingers around the skin of his neck. He's dragged the rest of the way out.

Bob stands him before the side of the shed and lays out an absolute scorcher about messing up the side of the greenhouse and scaring Bucket. His orders are to wash himself up and then go out and scrub down the glass. For good measure, Bob tells him  to apologize to Bucket.

"He doesn't have to, Bob."

"I know he doesn't, but he will."

[ozocho]

2005?

[ozocho]

6/20 Soda Can experiences Déjà Vu

Soda Can leads Jane through the more uneven patches of the yard by what little she can see better, up to the kitchen steps, and watches Jane go inside for the night. She waits in the pool of porch light and listens to the sleeping house. When the squeak of everybody turning in runs down to nothing, she crosses the yard and leaps onto the mossy old stone wall in the pasture. Making a game of avoiding every other block, she follows it out into the middle of the field.

Stranded by a pasture's worth of night, as dark as water. From a pocket in the crumbling cement post she pulls out a watch. Like every other night she holds the cool reverse up to her ear and hears the tiny heartbeat knocking away. Not too late, then, and she pinches the gear on top and winds it. From the same pocket she grabs a sturdy length of twine and ties it to the watch, dropping the whole thing over her neck.

With her anchor she’s free to wander off the wall and makes direct contact with the fields. The first few steps have splashes of yesterday and a few more shows the week before that. The thoughts of others come from the air like a drizzle. A voice shoots around from the left of her head yelling for somebody to come back inside but she's already days away before anything responds. By a swampy spot stands what is either a large animal or person, burning thoughts either way, and in a slice of time she picks up a simple question, repeated until the voice runs dry.

"Will she get well? Will she get well? Will she-"

Soda Can finds the old run through the trees and trips into a chain of memories involving Jane and her. Jane's voice jumps from the brush nearby and only her upper body charges down the path until it passes under a low hanging branch, then the whole image blows away. It might have been the month ago, they took the path so often. And a stone's throw ahead there's something of a reverse experience with Jane's muddy boots running towards her. It was difficult being teased by such things, but to not take the path and to cut through the woods instead would mean to lose herself in unknown and possibly dangerous thoughts. She remembered a night when she had followed the creek much too far and nearly forgot who she was.

The pond felt like the inside of a washing machine at full spin, and each time she went looking for the memory it was always somewhere else. Like an indistinct, old smell, it would've been impossible to imagine it before hand, but was instantly recognizable in person. She would zero in on this dip in memory until the pull of it became so strong that all she had to do was let go and fall. The vortex of thoughts would quiet down, just a bit, and along the sloping shore grew soft banks of snow, tinted blue by the memory. Before she no longer had the chance to do so, she would feel around her neck and pull up the heavy watch and concentrate on its face, the frame swirling around the steady hour and minute hands.

The memory would split into two distinct hills of emotion, separating until the hazy edges were lopped off and persons formed. Just off the bank was the taller one, mostly warm eyes and a broad eyebrows that flew over his eyes like wings, and out over the water, which was turning lighter than ever and smoothing itself out, the second person would appear, doing dodgy figure eights over the bright center of the pond. The gloves were loose, the wool cap on her head had the choppy zigzag pattern. Every night Soda Can would feel the burn creeping up behind her eyes and wouldn't understand it, and she would sit on the bank and do her best to hold on. The man would lean over and stick his palms on his knees and laugh, shouting to the slipping girl. His voice sounded like it was coming through a pipe and it would make her think of tobacco smoke and firewood.

When the emotions in her started to falter the image in front of her would start to smear with a hundred other, fresher memories. She would panic. She would think that what little was left had to be fully taken and digested and she would jump out onto the ice and get in line behind the skating girl, so familiar with the path of the other that she could mime every turn and stumble. Before long Soda Can could feel herself wrapped in that same jacket and knitted cap, feel the nip at the tip of her nose and the blades cutting beneath her feet.

The frontier of the pond would start to blacken but she would refuse to let go. It would move down the banks and swallow up the trees, swallow up the man, it would eat at the ice and crack it. Finally it would be impossible for her to ignore, crawling up underneath her feet and numbing all but the warmest thoughts until the fear would clamp down and she would lose her footing entirely. No more context, no more feeling at all. She would start grasping for anything, and that's when an arm would smack the heavy weight around her neck and she would hug it like a liferaft. Swirling frame, steady hands.

She was back on the bank, looking over the pond and the other spinning memories, but this time spinning a little less. Then she would turn and walk back.