beginning all the time.
There was fire in me, and in Father, and heat all around us. We were traveling as fast as those stars, though we were sitting quite still. I was holding something enormous and my body was too small for it. I kept my eyes open so fiercely, they burned. I kept so still, my chest got too tight to breathe.
I sat still all the time those stars were flying, and we watched them cross the heavens and eventually they were gone, and after a while I could swallow again, and then I could blink, and then I could breathe.
Father and I sat on the steps a while longer and then we went inside. And that day was the best day of my life.
Dark
I HAVE NEVER liked the dark. I think if Mother were alive she would have sat with me or left a night-light on or something, but Father doesn’t believe in things like that; he believes in Common Sense and Saving Electricity.
People say they are scared of the dark, but they’re not actually scared of the dark itself; they’re scared of the things in the dark, like monsters and ghosts. But I am afraid of the darkness itself, because in the dark there is Nothing.
The night of Neil’s accident, after Father left, darkness pressed around me. It filled up my nose and my ears and my mouth. I struggled to breathe. I turned this way and that. I said to myself, I wouldn’t talk to God. I was afraid of what I would say. But the dark kept pressing, and in the end I sat up and threw back the covers and said: “I undid it!”
There was silence. I started to cry. Then God said: “You can’t undo things. I’ve told you before.”
“
“Don’t,” God said. “He’ll hate you even more. Trust Me.”
I thought for a bit. “Don’t You ever get tired of it?” I said at last.
“What?”
“Being right.”
“One thing I never get tired of,” God said, “is being right.”
The End of Judith McPherson
JUST BEFORE DAWN I dreamed I was in the Land of Decoration: It was dark and I was running for my life, and I could hear footsteps and every so often a shout: “Over here!”
I didn’t understand how people knew where I was, because I wasn’t leaving any footprints and I wasn’t making a noise. Then I saw there was a trail of bright dust shining in the dark, and it was coming from my pocket, the one I had put the stone in that the old man had given me, but when I put my hand in the pocket there was only a hole and, trickling from the hole, glittering dust.
I tore off my jacket and threw it away and ran faster, but still the trail continued. I stumbled and fell and got up again, and then I was running at different speeds, fast one minute—and the hills and fields around me jumping this way and that, the way they do when you are thrown around on the back of a horse or in a very old film of cowboys and Indians—and slow the next, as if everything was flowing like treacle or honey, and that was worse because I couldn’t make my legs go fast enough.
However I ran, the dust kept trickling, and I thought this stone must be enormous, bigger than the universe, and I hadn’t known it. I ran and ran, trying to remember where the land gave way to the floorboards, but where the sand dunes should have ended there were more dunes and where the hills should have stopped there were more hills. The Land of Decoration went on and on, as I used to imagine it did, only now I wanted it to end and just come to the door or the radiator or the edge of the ring.
I had to stop to get my breath back and as I bent down I saw that the reason the dust wasn’t stopping was that I was full of it, I was made of it, and there were holes in me everywhere. And as I began to run again, I knew that soon there would be nothing left of me except pipe cleaners, cotton, and a little bit of felt.
At Dead of Night
“NEIL LEWIS HAS had an accident and won’t be at school for a while.” Mrs. Pierce was standing in front of her desk.
“What happened, Miss? What happened?”
“He was involved in a car accident. Mr. Williams has told me they’re taking good care of him in the hospital.”
“When did it happen?” said Gemma.
“Last night,” said Mrs. Pierce.
“When will he be back?” said Luke.
“We’re not sure,” said Mrs. Pierce. “It’s just as well it’s nearly Christmas; it will give him a chance to get better before school starts again.”
For the rest of the day I tried to see if Mrs. Pierce was looking at me. I don’t think she was, but I couldn’t be sure.
There were Christmas lights on every one of the trees in the front-room windows as I turned in to our street that evening. The rooms looked warm. I was aching and pulled my scarf higher. I wasn’t sure if it was because I had cried so much last night or because I was coming down with something.
“How was school?” Father asked when he got home.
“Fine.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Mrs. Pierce said Neil had had a car accident. That he would be off till after Christmas.”
“Right,” he said.
“Was work all right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Absolutely” is a word Father never uses.
We were reading the Bible later when a dustbin rattled in the back lane. Father jumped. Then he went to the window, looking first to the right and then to the left. When he came back to the table, he smiled and said: “Cat.” He turned a page over, then turned back. “Where were we?”
I looked at him. “Here,” I said.
“Oh yes.”
He began to read. But before we had got ten verses further, he stopped mid-sentence, took off his glasses, and laid them on the table. He said: “I think we’ll leave it there for tonight.”
“We’re halfway through the chapter.”
“What better place to finish?” he said. “We can ponder what’s going to happen next,” and he got up from the table and didn’t come back.
LATER THAT NIGHT I woke to voices. To begin with, I thought they were coming from the street, but then I realized they were coming from downstairs, and I crept onto the landing.
Halfway down the stairs I saw light coming from under the middle-room door. Inside the room I could hear Uncle Stan. He was saying: “Taking things into your own hands like this.”
“What would you have had me do?” Father said. “If I hadn’t heard that window smash, I don’t know what
