Little, Big

Smoky laughed. “That’s hard,” he said.

She laughed too, dipping her head and raising the back of her hand to her mouth in a way that already seemed heartstirringly familiar to him. “It sure is,” she said. “It seemed to take forever.”

“You mean you—”

“Every time you thought you were coming close, it would be just as far off, in a different place; and if you came to that place, it would be in the place you came from; and my throat was sore with running, and not getting any closer. But you know what you do then—”

“Walk away from it,” he said, surprised at his own voice but Somehow sure this was the answer.

“Sure. That isn’t as easy as it sounds, but—”

“No, I don’t suppose.” He had stopped laughing.

“—but if you do it right—”

“No, wait,” he said.

“—just right, then…”

“They don’t really come down, now,” Smoky said. “They don’t, not really.”

“They don’t here,” she said. “Now listen. I followed Spark; I let him choose, because he didn’t care, and I did. It took just one step, and turn around, and guess what.”

“I can’t guess. You were covered in colors.”

“No. It’s not like that. Outside, you see colors inside it; so, inside it—”

“You see colors outside it.”

“Yes. The whole world colored, as though it were made of candy—no, like it was made of a rainbow. A whole colored world as soft as light all around as far as you can see. You want to run and explore it. But you don’t dare take a step, because it might be the wrong step—so you only look, and look. And you think: Here I am at last.” She had fallen into thought. “At last,” she said again softly.

“How,” he said, and swallowed, and began again. “How did I come into it? You said someone told you…”

“Spark,” she said. “Or someone like him.”

She looked closely at him, and he tried to compose his features into a semblance of pleasant attention. “Spark is the dog,” he said.

“Yes.” She had become reluctant, it seemed, to go on. She picked up her spoon and studied herself, tiny and upside down, in its concavity, and put it down. “Or someone like him. Well. It’s not important.”

“Wait,” he said.

“It only lasted a minute. While we stood there, I thought—” guardedly, and not looking at him “—I thought Spark said…” She looked up at him. “Is this hard to believe?”

“Well, yes. It is. Hard to believe.”

“I didn’t think it would be. Not for you.”

“Why not for me?”

“Because,” she said, and cradled her cheek in her hand, her face sad, disappointed even, which silenced him utterly, “because you were the one Spark talked about.”

Make-Believe

It was probably only because he had nothing at all left to say, that in that moment—or rather in the moment after that moment—a difficult question or delicate proposition which Smoky had been mulling over all day tumbled out of his mouth in a far from finished ftrm.

“Yes,” she said, not raising her cheek from her hand but with a new smile lighting her face like a morning rainbow in the west. And so when the false dawn of the City’s lights showed them the snow piled deep and crisp and even on their window-ledge, they lay with the deep crisp bedclothes up around their necks (the hotel’s heat had failed in the sudden cold) and talked. They hadn’t yet slept.

“What,” he said, “are you talking about?”

She laughed and curled her toes against him. He felt strange, giddy, in a certain way he hadn’t felt since before puberty, which was odd, but there it was: that feeling of being filled up so full that the tips of his fingers and the top of his head tingled: shone, maybe, if he were to look at them. Anything was possible. “It’s make-believe, isn’t it,” he said, and she turned over smiling and fitted their bodies together like a double s.

Make-believe. When he was a kid, when he and others found some buried thing—neck of a brown bottle, tarnished spoon, a stone even that bore half an ancient spike-hole—they could convince themselves it was of great age. It had been there when George Washington was alive. Earlier. It was venerable, and immensely valuable. They convinced themselves of this by a collective act of will, which at the same time they concealed from each other: like make-believe, but different.

“But see?” she said. “It was all meant to be. And I knew it.”

“But why?” he said, delighted, in torment; “why are you so sure?”

“Because it’s a Tale. And Tales work out.”

“But I don’t know it’s a tale.”

“People in tales don’t know, always. But there they are.”

One winter night when he was a boy, boarding then with a half-brother who was half-heartedly religious, he first saw a ring around the moon. He stared up at it, immense, icy, half as wide as the night sky, and grew certain that it could only mean the End of the World. He waited thrilled in that suburban yard for the still night to break apart in apocalypse, all the while knowing in his heart that it would not: that there is nothing in this world not proper to it and that it contains no such surprises. That night he dreamt of Heaven: Heaven was a dark amusement park, small and joyless, just an iron Ferris wheel turning in eternity and a glum arcade to amuse the faithful. He awoke relieved, and never after believed his prayers, though he had said them for his brother without rancor. He would say hers, if she asked him to, and gladly; but she said none, that he knew of; she asked instead assent to something, something so odd, so unencompassable by the common world he had always lived in, so—he laughed, amazed. “A fairy tale,” he said.

“I guess,” she said sleepily. She reached behind her for his hand, and drew it around her. “I guess, if you want.”

He knew he would have to believe in order to go where she had been; knew that, if he believed, he could go there even if it didn’t exist, if it was make-believe. He moved the hand she had drawn around her down her long flesh, and with a little sound she pressed herself against him. He searched himself for that old will, long in disuse. If she went there, ever, he didn’t want to be left behind; wanted never to be farther from her than this.

Life is Short or Long

In May at Edgewood Daily Alice in the dark of the woods sat on a shining rock that jutted out over a deep pool, a pool made by the fall of water down a cleft in high rock walls. The stream that hurtled ceaselessly through the cleft to plunge into the pool made a speech as it did so, a speech repetitive yet always full of interest; Daily Alice listened, though she had heard it all before. She looked a lot like the girl on the soda bottle, though not so delicate and lacking wings.

“Grandfather Trout,” she said to the pool, and again: “Grandfather Trout.” She waited then, and when nothing came of this, took up two small stones and plunged them into the water (cold and silky as only falling water held in stone pools seems to be) and knocked them together, which within the water made a sound like distant guns and hung longer than sounds hang in air. Then there swam out from somewhere in the weed-bearded hidey- holes along the bank a great white trout, an albino without speckle or belt, his pink eye solemn and large. The repeated ripples caused by the waterfall made him seem to shudder, his great eye to wink or maybe tremble with