Spark a Story

by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  She looks at me with an attempt at a smirk on her face but her eyes give away her empathy.

  We drive over in a cop car and she knocks on the apartment door. Dad opens the door, disgruntled and unshaven.

  “What do you want?”

  “Is this the home of Christine and Gavin Jensen?”

  “It is now.” The way he says this reminds me he still thinks the fire was my fault, that I killed Mom on purpose.

  Gavin comes running up to the door and the smile is wiped off his face as he realizes who’s there. I start to cry. I wish I could stop it for his sake, but it’s all too much. The woman removes my handcuffs and coaxes a sleepy Gavin toward her. She begins to state his rights but he doesn’t even understand.

  He looks at me with tears streaking his face. “Christine, you said you would fix this, I didn’t mean to do it, I don’t understand.” He chokes the last part out through waves of tears as he is taken away.

  Somewhere a clock chimes midnight. It’s not warm out, no birds are chirping, there is not a ray of sunlight or a cup of coffee to be seen, but nevertheless, it’s Sunday once again.

  AMELIA VAN DONSEL

  The Flood

  THE STOVE WHERE they cooked meat that looked like a cockscomb was submerged in a turbid pond. The cutting board where they ritualistically sliced ingredients when there was no more canned food to be reheated was lost to the subaquatic world. The carpet had become nothing less than a mushed, unnatural bottom to the river that snaked into closets and restricted rooms. The earrings and pendants Nathan’s mom had received for her birthday were rusting beneath the waves in their unopened cases, and Nathan’s wildlife adventure books were all but waterlogged in the anomalous aquarium. The pristine water that filled the apartment shimmered in a hot, glinting dawn, like the surface of a planet.

  Nathan’s mom worked fervently, bandana strapped so her forehead was crested with a folded star, and arms weighted with buckets of water that warped whenever she tried to wade through the pool. There was barking from Stacy, Mr. Reed’s schnauzer, and she swished over to shut the window. She wished some of the mothers would help her or maybe find her collapsed in the vast puddle, dead from exhaustion, leaving the water to soak into the bedsheets, the drapes.

  God, not the drapes.

  She would need bigger buckets.

  The damp July had saturated the town’s skin with water. Rain had eroded the world’s color, leaving it in various stages of gray, and the sun, a vague, dim haze behind the wall of cloud, now sputtered like a dying lightbulb. Sidewalks were slick with tears, clean leaves pebbled with rain were glued to the streets, and there were basements that needed pumping, like a toxic stomach, that week.

  But there were puddles to skid through on three wheels, brown murk whose inhabitants were to be sketched colorfully with dulled crayons, soddened grasses to wade through, and soaked playground slides to run up, ones that squealed when rainbow boots, sloshing with water, met plastic. Everything was slowly draining, no longer pouring from roofs in clean sheets and lines, but sliding off of umbrellas in fat beads.

  This had caused a minor inconvenience in Apartment Complex 312. Water had flooded the narrow throats of hallways in the basement and the ground floor, gushing over stairwells until you could slide into it like a pool.

  Evidence of children floated everywhere. Bath toys, cardboard books, stuffed animals whose polyfill was buoyant enough to keep them aloft, all bobbing down corridors, in dining rooms like the spilled contents of a shipping container. But the six-year-olds loved the clatter the synthetic aggregation made when you waded through it, their noses high, elbows cocked above the water. The eight-year-olds loved slinging their slender legs onto tables, beating their hairless chests with declarations of the Water Kings. The four-year-olds loved being paddled by makeshift canoe through the lobby, rescuing the sunken Slinkies, the floating stuffed dogs and books like tsunami survivors, from the drizzly apartment alleyways.

  Nothing worked. The power was shot, the air visibly sizzling above lines of dormant, dysfunctional air conditioners, their polyphonic static hum no longer chugging and sucking away at the collective dust and fuzz and hair of the complex. Everyone longed for that fake cold. Humidity was seeping into the walls, and adults opened windows trying to compensate, instead letting in thick blocks of air. Blinds warped and sagged like jowls, toothbrushes nodded by, plants wilted like the upper-level tenants on the couch.

  Adults were on their separate floors, drawing up paint cans of the mysterious liquid and hurling it out the window. The landlord, stuck in traffic somewhere on the I-95, said that he had the industrial pump somewhere in his truck, and that the tenants would have to make do in the meantime. But they didn’t mind initially, not caring to admit how cool the muddy water felt against their arms plunging down deep into it. Those old enough to help did, those young enough to drown in the nearly waist-deep water were sent outside to the communal spongy rectangle of grass.

  Bathtubs and blow-up pools were mundane if there were a pond in your house with free canoe rides. Happy plastic sandals smacked the sidewalk in protest, windows were pounded on with furious fists; there was profuse wailing. Children each found something to hurl across the yard—rocks, firetrucks, grass, Velcro shoes—with their tiny, sticky hands, each screaming, pleading to someone else inside, Don’t fix it, Don’t fix it.

  Eventually the children stood like inmates, bending and straightening their legs, exhausted by the heat and futile clamor, some convicts chubby, some spindly, some old enough to realize that all their things were ruined. Most were sprawled on the soggy ground in the exaggerated despair of childhood, enclosed by a diamond wire fencing their fingers curled through desperately.

  Nathan could remember balancing on his toes at the counter of a 1-Stop store (he was still small enough to fit in the best places during hide-and-seek), the woman there finding different reasons to open her mouth.

  “Those sunglasses are half-off, dear,” she said, rapt, dropping her magazine at the sight of him. Nathan only cared about the revolving stand. There were cards and eye-level candies and pens and flashlight keychains and sodas to play with. The woman put a few more rubber bath toys into his hand before she jumped, remembering something. “I have just the thing for you,” she squealed. She leaned across the counter again, this time reaching up onto a shelf.

  In her arms was an enormous stuffed dog, its floppy ears dragging, its ridiculously shimmery coat outfitted with a bright-blue fake leather strap. Nathan’s mom had finished reading the ingredients on the cough syrup bottle and glanced over.

  “Isn’t he just fabulous?” The woman’s voice raised in pitch. “And he has a collar and everything. I keep him around for kids like you.”

  Nathan remembered his mom shouting and the dog staring at him and the little tinkling of the bell over the main door.

  Nathan shoved his sneaker farther into the mud, releasing water that bubbled up from the earth with a revolting spurting sound. The color reminded him of the dog’s fur.

  Around the yard, a few toys still lay intact from the harassment earlier, including a few purple hairbands that were twisted in agony yet remained unbroken from window slingshotting. There was a depressive game of pirates he could get in on or maybe the knee-high rock tower, its moat a desperate little sludge ring dug out by the youngest of the bunch. There was all of that, Nathan realized, but there wasn’t a limited issue of I-Rex, the comic of the cybernetically engineered supercanine, to tear through in the early hours of the morning while cocooned in I-Rex sheets or to flip through over his PB&J lunch as he frantically brushed away sticky crumbs. He imagined his collection rippling at the bottom of his room’s new pool. The ink would bleed and run like mascara as he lifts a copy up by one corner, the story line indiscernible, I-Rex’s cybersnout fading white into the background. The pages would dampen into fibery mush in his palms or lose their sheen and freeze stiff and wavy, crinkling as he turns them.

  A shadow fell over Nathan, grumbling. �
��I guess we could take hostages or something.”

  Nathan pulled up his shoe and quickly wiped at his nose. “What?”

  “We could take hostages. Like they do in those movies.” A short Hispanic boy in an unflattering yellow shirt stood above him, his hands wrapped around a stick he had sharpened via the sidewalk.

  “What do you mean?” Nathan asked.

  He looked down at it. “So, okay, it’s not a gun. But maybe we could point it at someone’s neck and give a list of demands. They’d listen to us.”

  Nathan looked around. There were no immediate volunteers. The boy sat back down.

  They could hear the adults arguing in the basement—what would they do about these dryers and why wasn’t Brian getting more towels and was this covered by the insurance and where was the landlord at a time like this. You could see their figures, their curving backs, probably aching from hours of dunking, underarms darkened and damp hair clinging to their faces. They had tried to explain to the children that the apartment was like a capsized boat: if they didn’t get the water out in time, it would sink, and they needed complete cooperation. Then they set them in the yard and said they’d check on them later. One girl recalled an inducement of ice cream before having the door slammed behind her.

  Finally, in the dusk that dropped behind the soggy town, the children admitted defeat. They watched water settle in road craters, thick drops slip down the sides of houses. In puddles, gasoline rainbows swirled with a peacock’s iridescence. Everything stuck to everything else, and the dark was becoming difficult to breathe. What they wanted at that moment, perhaps more than something to do, was cold, dry air; the kind with a bit of pine in it that reminded you of fall. It occurred to Nathan that people could die from this boredom stuff. It happened, surely. Parents, wanting to be alone, naively believing that imagination would grab hold of young minds and paint over the muddy landscape before them with nothing more than fictitious castles and beasts and spaceships, released their children only to find them strewn about the yard hours later, dead from acute ennui.

  Nathan pushed up his glasses (they were the same blue as I-Rex’s collar, from the rack at CVS) and glanced at the devastated tenants around him, slouched in corners from the searing heat. He looked longingly across the street to where Mr. Reed was letting out Stacy. A jogger passed, oblivious to the temperature, and then a wondrous reprieve from the tedium came into view. Tentatively, as if she might break a heel, a small myopic woman with a collie the color of dryer lint was wobbling down the sidewalk. Nathan had seen them in the winter, just two furry figures fighting the inundation of snow like mammoths, like what collected on their backs and shoulders might bury them as they trudged steadily forward, chapped faces down. While they were still incredibly slow, it was remarkable how much fur they both had shed.

  Their shuffling drew the children from their haziness and to the chainlink fence. Fifteen pairs of eyes watched in desperation, and as they neared, small arms outstretched in the metal gaps, shoving viciously, each hand more eager than the last.

  Just as Nathan reached across, straining as far as he could to scratch and to pet a creature that was not the goldfish his mom was always trying to get him to like, the endless guinea pigs, turtles, gerbils that had all inhabited his apartment, had died uncared for in a cardboard box or toilet. Just as he struggled forward, he felt around his wrist all the times his mother’s fingers had dug firmly and pulled him away, and it startled him. Jolted him, even, not to have pain in his hand. He had barely grazed the coat, but it was the most wondrous texture—strands of wavy fuzz against his skin, warmer than any stuffed animal.

  As the pack of children chased it down the fence, Nathan rolled a clump of fur between his fingers. A quiet girl who was carrying a stuffed cow that had been depressively soddened into an unidentifiable brown mass was suddenly beside him.

  “Can I . . . feel it?” she murmured. Tentatively, he handed it to her, and she stroked it, running its sleekness across her palm, studying the thinness of the filaments like it was a feather. Their palms wrapped greedily around each strand, hungry,

  Then there was yowling from Stacy. Maybe she was lonely? Maybe the collar Mr. Reed bought for her was too tight? Maybe she needed water for the heat?

  Nathan wasn’t allowed anywhere near Stacy. Still, they did like her wiry gray coat, her patches of scratchy, sallow skin. They adored the few, always-slightly-damp hairs of her muzzle fuzzed with white. Her sleepy, fourteen-year-old waddle (hip dysplasia, actually, but Mr. Reed’s eyesight was going) and her countenance that caused her to yawn, then clamp down with an overbite. Her sour, pale gums and dry, ribbony tongue. Her tufts of withering fur hanging over her drooping, beady eyes that reflected quite freakishly in the dark. Her lumpy, flopped ears, perpetually itchy, that only the strokes of neighborhood children could soothe. Her warped claws that they imagined clicked frenetically on hardwood floors. They fed her like they were feeding a zoo animal, only with Pop-Tarts and rawhide (all too dense for her nine yellow teeth), which required an exclusive trip to Pet-World. They loved pooling their money to buy her an orange bird that sang when you squeezed it or a rubber cube with a rope attached to it, and whenever they came Mr. Reed would open the screen door with an appreciative smile and say, You come back anytime, now.

  The horde of them looked to Mr. Reed’s yard, Stacy’s coinlike eyes flat and floating and beckoning in the dark.

  It was a night the color of blackberries, a white-hot moon standing above, watching the wide, pale faces of children. The fence was locked, but Nathan, after one more glance to the window, scaled it. Star Wars boxers snagging, he made it with a thud on the other side. He fixed his glasses and studied the street before him, his sweaty hand, for the first time, empty of an adult’s.

  As the adults loosened their clothes, the world seemed to do the same, their figures wavering like mirages in the night’s heat. The air had a resilient sizzle, and every surface touched was viscid and warm, nearly malleable. Dirt, woodchips, and grass had been somehow suspended in the undulating pool like bodies swirling in a grubby galaxy.

  Nathan’s mom pulled up a dripping pair of her son’s shorts, which he had experimentally left on his bed covered in butter for three days. She was afraid it would begin to attract wildlife if left unattended. There was enough sweat to cloud her vision, and her body was so shaky and soaked she could barely discern the cold-coffee water from perspiration anymore. It was getting late, and even after hauling for a full day the water had barely begun to lower. She knew the dangers of slowing—the rigorous pumping followed by dampness followed by mold followed by contractors like a pricey fucking remodeling parade.

  She felt something shift its weight inside her. Maybe it was the underlying fear that at any moment someone could come into your house and kill you and your child with a chainsaw. Maybe it was how Nathan never looked both ways before he crossed the street or how he always tried to take home a menacing plastic dinosaur or miniature space gun during trips to the dentist. When friends were over, there was no sword fighting, no tribal wars. It’s the principle of it, that’s all, she’d explain to them as she collected plastic sheaths and knives during Nathan’s birthdays, although she never really knew what that meant herself. During story hour at the community center, where the carpet was riddled with gum and trails of crackers, Nathan used to cry when she informed him it was time to go, the story was getting too violent. There was never any Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, to be heard. Nathan’s mom recalled the vacant eyes that followed her as she exited each toy store, each movie theater, puppet show. She remembered yanking him away from an employee at the science museum (“Radical Ranger Ruth”) who was showing off a lemur. It was something close to safety, but it wasn’t safety.

  Throughout the day she had heard pitiful sighs and one How sad as the young, upper-level tenants observed her from the hallways. Isn’t there someone to help her? they’d asked each other before turning back upstairs. And then there were those—the older c
ouples, mostly—who’d peered into her apartment to watch her heaving with exhaustion and had derided her with a quiet, She had it coming, never lets her boy do anything nice.

  She kept pouring and dunking and dousing.

  She thought about moving, maybe to someplace cooler, with fewer nosy neighbors and fewer gnashing dogs. Minnesota? She wished she took walks at night to view the soap operas of the neighborhood through their windows. It was the cosmopolitans who did that, she decided. Instead she stayed inside and watched the soap operas on TV. She wished she’d joined a gym, she wished she bought more produce. She wished she had let Nathan have his fucking dog.

  And at that she looked to the window for him.

  The air was buzzing and bubbling with the night’s chatter. A rush of smoky hot air billowed Nathan’s T-shirt as cars whirred past, their headlights grazing bushes with ghostly projections of light. It smelled like the town was adapting to the water, the damp air of warping wood and soaked fabric and industrial-strength cleansers. Pine needles washed downtown by rain were spread like orange centipedes beneath Nathan’s muddy sneakers. Meanwhile, children were being unloaded from the top of the fence, dropping beside him as he moved to the edge of the pavement. Stacy was alone. Mr. Reed had gone to bed early that night; he’d been feeling ill.

  Nathan shifted his feet, his teeth clamping. He missed the warmth, the feeling of heavy fur intertwined with his fingers. He wanted a scratchy tongue against his palm, a chin to knead, a pair of eyes to look back at him and say, Yes. Yes. Thank you.

  The short crowd stood against the fence, sweating in silence. Nathan saw it like he was I-Rex: deft, elusive, fearless. There was no crosswalk. There was just a moment of emptiness in the street. And in the split gap between passing cars, slashing metal, Stacy’s head lifted as Nathan sprinted off the sidewalk, slipped on the leaves, and skittered onto the asphalt, his glasses flying across the road, so many miles away. Nathan’s hands scampered wildly, clawing and groping at the grit for a glasses-like shape as his vision was reduced to slow-motion blurs, like a soddened comic book.