The red Folger’s can pinged again. “Eight,” Emmett said. He took the BB gun down from his shoulder and put the stock between his feet so he could crank the handle up to get the next BB ready. With the patience of a born hunter, Emmett lined up the front sight between the two halves of the rear sight, then aligned all this with the coffee can. Let himself breathe a minute. Gently squeezed the trigger. The coffee can pinged again. “Nine!” he said excitedly. Gun down, handle up to cock it, back to the shoulder. Aim. Slow and easy. Breathe. Ping. “Ten out of ten, Grandpa! Ten out of ten!”

“Nice work, Gridley,” chuckled Grandpa. He finished thumbing tobacco from the foil pouch into his pipe. “Hope no coffee cans get the idea to invade our yard.”

As Emmett reloaded, Grandpa struck a kitchen match and puffed his pipe to life. Hearing the scrape of the match against the arm of the porch rocker, Emmett ran up. Once Grandpa had his pipe lit, he held up the match and Emmett blew it out. “Thank ya,” Grandpa said graciously, and tossed the match out onto the gravel driveway. He watched Emmett for a minute, puffing at his pipe, then looked up at the grey clouds that had begun filling the sky. “Emmett, I got a job for you.”

Emmett was dubious. “What sorta job?”

“Pretty tough job. Messy, too. Needs a man to do it, o’course.”

“O’course,” Emmett said.

 “It’s a pretty gross job, though. You know, on second thought—”

“Nah, Grandpa, what is it? I don’t mind gross.”

Grandpa pulled himself upright with a grunt and led Emmett around to the front of the house. “It’s these goddam tomato worms, you see em? Gol durn, I’m sorry.” Grandpa pointed to the two big tomato plants with the stem of his pipe. “You see em?”

Emmett winced at the bulbous green caterpillars slowly gnawing the leaves. “Yeah.”

“You kill em, I’ll pay you a nickel apiece for em.”

Emmett considered this. “A nickel’s five cents?” Grandpa nodded. Emmett thought about the offer. Maybe he could talk Grandpa up to ten cents apiece. But then again, maybe not. Sometimes Grandpa would get grumpy about stuff like that. And the job might be fun. Easy enough, anyway, just to kill some worms. “Okay.”

“Well, don’t rush into anything.”

“How you want em killed?”

Grandpa grinned. “Thorough.” Then he chuckled and started walking over to the shed. Halfway there, he paused and turned. “You goin out to the pond today?”

“Probably.”

“But you ain’t a-goin down to old Drayman’s place, correct?”

Emmett gave an exasperated sigh. “No, sir.”

“And why not?”

“Cause old man Drayman’s a bad fella and has all sorta dangerous business layin around his property.”

“Uh-huh. And why else?”

“Cause I don’t have no business bein out there anyway.”

“Uh-huh. And why else?”

Emmett thought hard. “Cause you’ll tan my hide if I do.”

Grandpa laughed. “Smart and a good shot. You got no future in the army, boy.” Grandpa went on to the shed where he was torturing his lawnmower back to life. Emmett wondered how Grandpa could know what kind of bad stuff was out at old man Drayman’s place if he had never gone there himself.

Thinking about his new job, Emmett figured that the obvious thing to do was to use the BB gun. But the worms were so small he had to get right up next to them to hit them. On his third try, a BB tore a tunnel through one of the worms. It writhed, stretching and contracting in pain, then detached its head from its leaf to search right and left for someplace that didn’t hurt. Emmett couldn’t help thinking about the one and only time he had fired his BB gun at a bird. The bird, a purple marten that had been minding its business in the front yard, had twitched once at the BB’s impact but then hadn’t moved. Hadn’t run away, hadn’t taken wing. Just stood there. Emmett realized that maybe it couldn’t take wing anymore. That maybe Emmet had taken away its ability to fly forever.

Emmett grimaced at the bulbous, writhing worm, then raised his BB gun again. After two more shots, the worm fell from the leaf onto the sidewalk, spasmed a moment, and lay still. Emmett felt sick. Gross bugs or not, he didn’t like to see things suffer. Dead was bad enough, but not-alive-and-not-dead was worse. Luckily, Grandpa had left a few bricks lying around from some project or other. Emmett pulled one of the pudgy caterpillars off its leaf, wincing at its softness, and dropped it next to its dead companion. He stood over the two worms holding one of the bricks at chest height, took a moment to verify his aim, then let it drop. With a wet sklutch the brick crushed both worms. One of them sprayed a stream of green fluid almost a foot. “Holy cow,” Emmet shouted, then lifted the brick to examine the corpses. Flat as pancakes. Then Emmett saw that one of his victims had also blasted a jet of green fluid all over his sock. “Jeez,” he whispered, revolted.

While Emmett lined up his next round of worms on an adjacent bit of sidewalk, Herschel came galloping up to visit, ears flapping. He was an elderly black stray with long, unkempt fur. “You better stand back, there, Herschel,” Emmett warned. “You don’t want to get tomato worm goop on you.” Emmett dropped the brick again, wincing at the squelching it made. But then Herschel and Emmett heard a deep, metallic voice booming from the sky that made their blood run cold. VERTEBRATE SCUM, it bellowed. YOU DARE HARM YOUR RIGHTFUL MASTERS? TASTE NOW THE WRATH OF. . . SPIDEROID MURDER FORCE ALPHA!!!

Emmett gaped at the Spideroid dreadnought falling out of the sky, rotary cannons and gamma-ray lasers blasting. Only a timely speed-roll saved him from being torn in half by a blast of machine-gun fire. He was pinned down behind the tomato plants, separated from his rifle. “Herschel, help me!”

But Herschel was already standing on his hind legs and summoning the Disk of Anubis from underspace. He slapped the disk onto his chest and it created a glowing ion field all around him. “Spideroids,” he growled, “you fire upon us in defiance of the Treaty of Cylotria! Disperse at once or die! This is your first, last, and only warning. So swears. . . Dogwing!”

As Emmett watched Herschel’s Dogwing form rise into the sky to attack the Spideroid dreadnought, he realized that he desperately needed to poop. “Time out!” he called. He ran to the front door, through the mud room, through the dining room, through the kitchen, and through the living room where Gran was watching Price is Right. “Hi, Gran!” He ran to the bathroom and closed and locked the door. Luckily, his poop came out like a bunch of small, hard grapes so he didn’t have to waste a bunch of time wiping. He washed his hands and ran back out past Gran (“Bye, Gran!”) to the kitchen, where he poured himself a glass of cold water from the fridge. He drank two thirds of it without stopping, then remembered that he also needed to breathe. After four gasping breaths, he finished his water and put the pitcher back in the fridge. Gran’s voice came from the living room.

“Emmett, honey?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you goin out to the pond today?”

Emmett stifled an irritated sigh. “Yeah.”

There was a dark pause. “‘Yeah?’”

“I mean, yes, ma’am.”

“You know not to go out by Mr. Drayman’s place, now, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And did you put on your jacket like I told you? Because that wind—”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right, then. If it thunders, you come on inside.”

Emmett ran back outside, but Dogwing—Herschel—was nowhere to be found. It looked as though the Spideroid dreadnought had flown away, too—perhaps scared away by the brave dog. Emmett smelled rain, and saw that the clouds had almost entirely covered the sky and were getting darker. He grabbed his BB gun and stowed it in the mud room, then went out to the end of the gravel driveway to where the woods began. If he were going to get out to the pond before it rained—or before Gran yelled at him to come inside—he’d need to get a move on.

The trail through the woods out back was narrow, winding, hilly, and punctuated by thorny green vines and goatheads. He found a couple of patches of soft, green moss that he paused to pet as well as a few good skipping rocks. Unfortunately, there were no interesting bugs anywhere. Not even under the big rocks. Emmett wished that cousin Ronnie were coming over today and not tomorrow. Sometimes Ronnie would bring Batman comics with him, or Rom the Spaceknight. Once in a while he’d even bring some issues of Heavy Metal, which had more grown-up stories. Some of those comics even had pictures of boobies in them.

After another quarter mile, Emmett finally reached the pond, just as Herschel came bursting out of the undergrowth. He must have made short work of that Spideroid dreadnought, because he was now just disguised as an ordinary dog again. Herschel jumped into the water immediately, overjoyed that someone had finally thought to take him out to the pond. The water was opaque, exactly the same rusty-orange shade as the Oklahoma dirt all around. It was about ten yards across and twenty-five wide—more an overgrown mud puddle than a pond—but it soothed Emmett to watch the splashes made by tiny creatures in the water and skip the occasional rock.

As Herschel waded around in the rusty water, Emmett watched the first raindrops make circles in the pond’s surface. In spite of himself, Emmett was glad Gran had made him wear his stupid jacket. Herschel came up out of the water covered in orange-red muck and began to shake himself off. “No no no no no no no!” Emmett shouted, running away. Confused, Herschel chased him and began to shake himself off again. “Dammit, Herschel!” They played this game for several minutes, and it was clearly the most fun of Herschel’s life. Finally, Herschel got all the shaking out of his system while Emmett hid partly behind a tree—a tree that revealed an interesting treasure.

The bones were pretty big—definitely not from any squirrel or bird. A lot of the skeleton was missing, probably because of predators, but there was still a pelvis and a thigh bone and a few ribs. Emmett found a stick and began digging around to see if any other bones were hidden nearby. He found a bit of skull half-buried in the dirt, and was slightly disappointed to find that it was just deer bones.

One of the people in the audience cleared his throat and Emmett looked up. The guy had a rumply hat and a trenchcoat and was holding a notebook and a pencil. From the little card in his hatband that said PRESS, Emmett guessed that he’d been sent by the local paper to cover the fascinating discovery. “Mister Emmett?” The rumpled man had an irritating, nasally voice. “Could you tell us what you’ve decided to name this startling prehistoric creature?”

Emmett thought fast. He’d gotten so caught up in the excitement of discovering a hitherto unknown species of dinosaur that it had never occurred to him what he should name it. “That is an excellent question,” Emmett said slowly. “A very, very good question. See, at first I had a hard time figuring out what to call the thing, since it has so many unusual features. It has four arms and two legs, of course, which is unusual for a dinosaur. And it seems to have hunted by burrowing underground, almost as though it could swim through the dirt. And so after I had thought for a long time about what to call this dinosaur, I finally decided to call it, um. . . . the vitruvisaurus. It’s from Greek words meaning ‘many-armed underground lizard.’” The journalist nodded, satisfied, and Emmett stifled a sigh of relief.

“Doctor Emmett?” asked another audience member. This one had silver hair and a silver moustache and a cane and an expensive black suit. He also had a British accent, and Emmett wondered if he’d come from the British Dinosaur Museum. “I wonder if you would mind terribly describing for us how this terrifying beast would go about catching its prey.” The guy put weird emphasis on the word prey, but then again, he was old and British.

“I’d love to,” said Emmett, picking up what he hoped was part of the thing’s shoulder blade. “As you can see, the pelvis and shoulder gave this animal remarkable mobility in the arms and legs, so that it could swirl all six of its limbs around in circles, like this.” Emmett spun his arms around at his sides. “This limb mobility, coupled with its unusual pointed snout, allowed it to swim underground at extraordinary speed—”

The rest of Emmett’s answer died on his tongue as an explosion of thunder shook the ground beneath him. Herschel sprinted away instantly, and Emmett found himself alone. Between running away from Herschel’s shaking and exploring the new skeleton he was now completely turned around. And with the clouds and the rain, it was harder to see landmarks. He wasn’t sure which direction Gran’s house was; he wasn’t even sure which way the pond was.

He stood under a bedraggled old post oak. Nothing looked familiar. He walked around the deer bones he had found to stand under another tree and look around again. He felt himself beginning to cry, but then imagined cousin Ronnie at his elbow. “I’ve been lost hundreds of times. Do you think I cry about it every time like some kind of titty baby? Dry up.” Emmett made himself breathe. He walked to another tree to keep the drizzle off—though now it was more rain than drizzle—and thought he saw a lopsided maple that looked familiar. As another boom of thunder sounded off in the distance, Emmett made for the maple, his confidence returning.

Ten minutes later it was as dark as dusk and the rain was slapping down in fat, cold drops. Emmett’s confidence was gone and he stood crying with his back to an old birch tree. He had no idea where to go. Everything was dark and alien and when a flash of lighting lit everything it startled him without making anything familiar. He stood for a moment looking in every direction and sobbing quietly to himself. He wished Ronnie were with him, or Grandpa. When he got his breathing under control, he had an idea: he had gone the wrong way when he had walked toward the familiar-looking maple tree. It hadn’t been the right maple tree at all. So maybe he should retrace his steps, go back the way he came. Then he could get back to the maple tree and go the opposite way. It had to take him somewhere more familiar-looking than here. He took an imaginary compass out of his pocket to look at, peered up through the rain with what he hoped was a rugged look of grim determination, and waved his hand over his head at the other men.

“Fall IN!”

It was about 50 clicks to the maple tree at Da Nang, and maybe another hundred to the DMZ. And behind every tree was a land mine, or a poisonous snake, or a Viet Cong sniper. Emmett could hear Stir Crazy panting behind him, even emitting the occasional sob. Stir Crazy was a nincompoop and a coward, but he was the best damned radio man in the company.

“Sarge, I don’t like this! I don’t like NONE of this!”

“Good thing likin it ain’t part of your job. I said fall IN, maggot!”

Stir Crazy went whimpering back to the line as they continued marching through soft mud and hard thorns. Emmett took out his compass again and glared at it. Shook it. Tossed it into the brush. “8-Ball, this compass is spinning. Let me see yours.”

8-Ball ran up and handed Emmett his compass. “Some kind of magnetic anomaly, looks like.” Emmett glared at him. “Sir.”

“No shit,” Emmett replied. He tossed the second imaginary compass into the woods—and stopped. Peered between the trees. Lightning flashbulbed everything, then thunder shook the earth. And in the lightning Emmett had seem one of the gables of Gran’s house. He didn’t know how the hell he’d ended up so close—maybe that maple tree had been the right one after all—but he was flooded with relief.

Emmett motioned his men to follow him single file as they padded toward the house beyond the trees, then held up a fist to stop them. He took the imaginary binoculars hanging around his neck and carefully surveyed the yard. No dangerous animals, no obvious booby-traps, no VC. Even better, the clouds were letting up a little bit. It wasn’t sunny, not even a little, and the rain was still pounding, but at least it didn’t feel like night had fallen at three in the afternoon. Emmett’s platoon must have come at the yard from a weird angle, though, because Emmett didn’t see the hilly backyard of the driveway anywhere. Puzzled, he peered up at the house. It looked strange, perhaps because no lights were on. Then Emmett realized that he wasn’t looking at Gran’s house at all. This had to be Mr. Drayman’s place.

Emmett scrunched down as small as he could and watched, silently, for several minutes. Nothing crossed the yard. Nothing lit up or moved in the windows. Emmett waited with his eyes closed until a flash of lightning lit up the sky, then flicked his eyes open and ran toward the back of the house, figuring anyone watching would be too dazzled by the bright light to see him properly. The yard was all yellow knee-high grass and weeds that felt like they were slapping at his pant legs as he ran. When he reached the back wall he scrunched down again, gasping. Which way was it to Gran’s house from here? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t remember ever being at this house before, and he wasn’t supposed to be here now. He kept scanning left, in front of him, right, listening and watching for movement, ignoring the rain and lightning and thunder. Nobody came, nobody went, and nothing moved.

Emmett realized that he was cold. His coat and shirt and pants were all soaked through, and they weren’t getting any drier. He wanted to go back to Gran’s house, but he couldn’t yet. He had to see something. He was scared witless but he had to see something. He stood slowly and silently with his back pressed against the wall, then inched leftward, careful not to trip or step on anything that would make noise. After what felt like half an hour, he finally reached a window. He turned and got on tiptoes in the mud and weeds and peered into the window’s lower corner. His view was being blocked by something and he couldn’t tell what it was. He slowly lowered himself and looked around. A few yards to his right were the ruins of an old flowerbed with two rain-filled dog bowls and a cinder block in it. Emmett put the cinder block under the window, then stood on it and raised himself on tiptoe again. The bottom-most part of the window was blocked by the bottom of the Venetian blinds inside. Steadying himself against the wall, he stretched still higher.

The room was dark, even with the Venetian blinds slanted partly open. Between the darkness of the room itself and the dirtiness of the window, Emmett couldn’t even see the edges of the room. Everything more than a few yards away just faded into a sort of indoor dusk. To the left and a mere yard from Emmett’s nose was the back of an old television set. It did not seem to be on. Underneath the small table that the TV rested on was something small that glinted, but it was almost completely blocked from view by the lowest slat of the Venetian blinds. No matter how Emmett shifted left or right, he could not make out what it was. Finally he got down from the cinder block, moved it over slightly, and got back up onto it again. After some shifting, he could finally see the glittering object resting under the TV table. It was a pair of bifocals with plastic frames, one lens marred by a crack from top to bottom. The bifocals were covered in a layer of dust, as though they had been sitting there for months. Emmett couldn’t imagine how someone could drop their glasses and then just forget about them. Further back into the room, several yards beyond the TV, Emmett could make out something else. It was smallish and had an irregular shape and was brown, with something white on top of it. Emmett shifted to one side to look through a less smudgy part of window and saw that it was a pair of brown shoes, their heels touching the bottom of the couch. And emerging above these shoes were two socks, and above those, two baggy, ill-fitting pant legs.

Emmett ducked with an audible gasp, then slapped his hand over his mouth. Had he been seen? He didn’t remember seeing old man Drayman before. Was he tall, fat, short, thin? The person sitting on the couch was definitely thin, from what Emett had seen in the dimness. His pant legs were much too large for him. Why was he sitting in front of a dead television with his lost glasses underneath it on the floor? Was he sitting with a shotgun in his lap waiting for trespassers? Sleeping? Emmett listened with every cell in his body, but all he could hear was the occasional raindrop on a leaf’s back and the rhythmic pumping of blood in his ears. When three full minutes had dragged by without a single other sound, Emmett gingerly put the cinder block back in its flowerbed, then inched further along the wall to the corner of the house. Peering around this corner he saw the old back door, its window covered by a blind. Next to it and below it was the basement window. Déjà vu washed over him. Every nerve and muscle screaming at him to run away, he inched toward this window, flashing glances right and left to make sure nobody was sneaking up on him. He knelt by the basement window and looked down through the cobwebs. The room was almost as dark as the living room had been, but it was small enough that Emmett could still see the room in its entirety. Opposite the window he looked in at Emmett saw some shelving with odds and ends on it—a pocket knife, some smallish cutting or poking tools that Emmett couldn’t identify, several large marbles or ping-pong balls that were a dull red color, some old books bound in ancient leather. Below the shelf and in the middle of the floor were two narrow cots with metal frames, painted white but chipped in places. On the cot nearest him, for just a moment, Emmett thought he saw a child. But it was actually some kind of doll or mannequin laying on the cot. It was about four feet tall and made of reddish clay. It must have been sitting there a long time, because its face and chest were both sunken in, and its arms and legs looked flatter than they should have. The front of the head, where the face should have been, was smooth except for two vague dents where eyes should be. Probably the strange doll was not finished yet. Someone had also tied dark cords around the mannequin’s wrists, ankles, and throat.

Emmett could hear himself wheezing in terror. He found himself stumbling across the backyard toward the woods in slow motion in a dream. He didn’t hear his feet sliding through the leaves or his gasping breath, just the heavy pulsating in his ears, which was not his heartbeat at all, it was something else, something the house made him hear, he clamped his mind shut and raced into the woods without looking back, listening back, or breathing. He stumbled over stones, felt branches scratch his legs, kept running anyway. After several minutes he stopped, gasping, dark blotches undulating in front of his eyes. He sat down in wet grass and began crying, not even sure why. Distantly, he realized that the rain had slowed to a drizzle.

When the rushing in his ears had faded and he could think again, he reprimanded himself. You don’t run like an idiot when you’re already lost. Before, he’d just kept walking and gotten loster and loster and loster until he had ended up at Drayman’s house. Emmet had to keep his head.

He thought that he recognized a smallish elm to his left with a bird’s nest in it, but experience taught him caution. Was it really the same elm tree? He walked halfway around the tree, looking it up and down. Yes, it was the same tree he had marched past on his way to Drayman’s place. He looked around him until he saw a hill of reddish-orange dirt about ten yards distant that he’d crossed over just before seeing the tree. Was it the same hill? He got up close to it, peering carefully, then walked over it with his eyes closed to get the feel of it. Yes, it was the same hill. He picked up a stick and sat on the hill, holding the stick vertically so that it almost covered the elm tree. If he walked in a straight line from the hill to the tree and kept walking in the same direction, his next landmark would be a tree stump. He set off at a brisk walk, glancing over his shoulder occasionally. When he reached the elm tree, he held up his stick again so that it hid the tree stump ten yards in front of him. The next landmark beyond that was a small patch of yellow flowers that he didn’t know the name of. Emmett kept moving from landmark to landmark to landmark, glancing and listening behind him frequently to make sure that the landmarks behind him were in a straight line with the landmarks in front of him. In ten minutes, he saw a timid, stunted sapling that he recognized as a friend; a few minutes later, he reached the pond.

He sat down on a flat rock at the pond’s edge, breathing hard, his mind blank. Thinking back, he knew that no one had seen him at the old house, that it had really just been the corpse of a house. But he still couldn’t stop thinking about the throbbing in his ears, the feeling that the house was holding him somehow, the sense that he wanted to go back and visit the horrible place even though there was no reason to go there and every reason to avoid the place. Everything is all right, he told himself as his breathing calmed down. He was happy to see that the sun was peeping out from behind a cloud. He closed his eyes and enjoyed the show that the light made on his eyelids. After a few moments, Emmett felt calm again, even a little tired. Finally, he turned to go back to Gran’s house.

Without the rain and Herschel confusing things, he knew the way perfectly—could almost walk it with his eyes closed, in fact, except for all the thorns and goatheads. He was tired. So tired. He hoped that his parents would come pick him up soon. Maybe they wouldn’t even pick him up today. Maybe it would be tomorrow that they would pick him up, after he hung out with cousin Ronnie. But maybe tonight? Emmett wasn’t sure. Everybody has parents, right? So he must have parents, too. It was just a matter of being patient. Sooner or later they would come.

Herschel came barreling out of the underbrush, nearly running into his legs. “Hi, boy,” he said, surprised at how tired he sounded. It was still at least another hour before sunset, but Emmett was already sleepy enough to go to bed. Then he stopped dead in his tracks and motioned for Herschel to do the same. There it was again: not thunder this time, but some other kind of rumbling, a rumbling under the ground, quiet and far away. Impossible though it seemed, the rumbling was coming closer and closer under the ground. “Run!” screamed Emmett as the earth churned behind them. “It’s the vitruvisaurus!”

Herschel was delighted that someone had finally thought to run hell-for-leather through the woods with no fixed destination, and he quickly sped ahead of Emmett. Finding a stout white oak, Emmett scrambled up its lower branches like a colobus monkey. Having studied the fearsome teeth and jaws of the vitruvisaurus firsthand, he had no intention of being devoured by them. Emmett watched as the flying dirt from the dinosaur’s burrowing reached the base of the tree, paused, went around the tree, paused again, then slowly returned the way it had come. It could be a predator’s evil trick, of course—the vitruvisaurus had an unusually large brain for a dinosaur—so Emmett waited patiently.

Looking up, Emmett saw Gran’s house. He had climbed high enough up the tree that he was at the same level as the second floor windows. From his high vantage he could see a very confused Herschel circling around in Gran’s backyard and sniffing the ground looking for him.

Exhausted, Emmett finally decided that the dinosaur was gone. He climbed down his tree, walked through some brush, and emerged into Gran’s backyard. He walked past the small plots of okra and cucumbers, through the grass, and up to the gravel driveway.

When Emmett entered the living room, he thought at first that Gran was dozing on her ancient La-Z-Boy, but she perked up and turned to look at him as he walked in. “Well hello, sweetheart.”
“Hi, Gran.”

“I was just about to get you to come inside. You look peaked. You feel okay?”

“I’m just tired,” he said.

Gran put down the footrest of the recliner. “Well why don’t you lay down and rest a spell? I set up a place there on the davenport for you.”

Gran had put down some waxed paper over the cushions and a rolled-up towel on the arm of the couch. Next to the couch was a folding metal tray table with a mason jar on it half-full of clear liquid. He was very sleepy. “All right,” he said. He crawled around the tray table to lie down on the couch. The rolled-up towel under his head was softer than any pillow and the waxed paper crinkled quietly underneath him. Gran walked over to him, touched his forehead gently with the back of her hand, and nodded. “You just rest here and I’ll start supper, okay?” She opened the Mason jar.

“Okay,” Emmett said, and opened his mouth as wide as it would go. Gran reached her forefinger and thumb deep, deep down into his throat and pulled out a gleaming red ball an inch wide. She dropped the ball into the liquid in the mason jar, then clamped the lid shut. After a few moments, the red gleam faded.

Gradually, Emmet’s skin darkened and reddened. His features became less distinct, less detailed, his eyes blank. Foreign writing appeared on his forehead, as though inscribed in clay with a tiny blade. Gran licked her thumb and rubbed away the rightmost letter of this writing, a letter that looked like a capital X that had been dropped and broken and glued back together again. Where Emmett had lain there was now only a doll made of orange-red, clayey mud. Gran watched its face a few moments longer, kissed its forehead, then walked into the kitchen.

When Grandpa came in from working on his lawnmower, dusk was settling in. Gran sat at the table brooding. Grandpa poured himself some water. “What’s the matter, Momma?”

“It’s just Emmett,” Gran said. “The waters in his jar. They’re real cloudy. Even cloudier than they were last week.”

Grandpa sat down with her at the table. “Well, he’s been through it, you know? It’s like that lady said, it takes time. ‘Two steps forward and one step back.’” Grandpa sipped his water. “Your body remembers things sometimes, even when you don’t.”

“I know that!” she snapped tartly. After a few moments of glaring out the window she stood up and went to the cabinet. “You ever get that lawnmower to workin?”

Grandpa said something vulgar under his breath. “No, I gotta go tomorrow and get me a part for it.”

“Will you pick up some of those orange slice candies?”

“Orange slice candies.”

“You know. With the sugar on em.”

“All right.”

He stared at the wood grain on the opposite wall while Gran put down a sheet of newspaper and began paring potatoes. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I just wonder sometimes. You know? If—"

“Dale, we been over this and over it. When you saw what you saw, what else was you supposed to do? Leave everything be? Pretend you didn’t see it? Let it go right on like it was?” She glared at him. When she felt sure he wouldn’t spout any more nonsense she went back to her potatoes

Grandpa looked down into his water, sloshing it around. “Yeah. I guess so.” After a few moments, he drank the rest of it. Then he walked over to Gran, kissed the top of her head, and went to go put his glass in the sink.

“Don’t be gone long, now. Dinner’s ready soon. And get that dog a treat.”

“Ain’t even our dog,” Grandpa mumbled, but he still got a wiener out of the fridge for Herschel. Then he went back outside to smoke one last pipe before dinner.