Earthly Worlds

by Billy Wright

  He put his ear to the floor, trying to peer under the door, but he lost sight of the beetle quickly, and its glow faded.

  Had it been a dream? He couldn’t be sure. But today felt like that moment somehow, like a familiar scent you couldn’t identify.

  With a sigh, he uncrossed his arms and got in the truck. It was time to keep job hunting. He would stop at the lumber yard and few other places to see if they had any job openings. But it was a fruitless search; all he came home with was a handful of job application forms that they would “keep on file.” On his circuit around town, his stomach rumbled, but he might as well start cutting back on meals right away. He could wait until dinner with Liz and the kids.

  When he pulled up in front of the trailer, he saw the absolute last thing he was expecting.

  Wearing Liz’s wide straw hat to shade her from the blazing sun, Cassie sat on a folding chair at a folding table at the edge of the road. Taped to the table, written in a rainbow of crayons, was a sign that read GEROJ SALE. On the table lay an assortment of small items, mostly Cassie’s toys that she had grown out of, but also some of her favorite storybooks.

  She waved brightly at him, making him want to laugh and cry at the same moment.

  “What are you doing, sweetie,” he said as he climbed out of the truck.

  “What does it look like, silly?”

  He knelt beside her and touched her shoulder. “This is some of your favorite stuff.”

  “I want to help.” Her eyes glistened.

  He rubbed her small back. “That is so great for you to offer. I can’t even tell you. But it’s not your job. It’s my job.”

  “I don’t need this stuff anymore. I’m growing up.”

  “Yes, you sure are,” he said. “Have you had any customers?”

  She nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes! Mrs. Rodriguez bought two of my books for her grandson.”

  “How much money did you make?”

  “Fifty cents! You want it?” She held out two quarters that had clearly been in her palm ever since.

  “You just save all that up.” He swept off her hat, kissed her sweaty little head, put the hat back on, and went inside.

  Hunter was in the house, reading a Harry Potter book from the school library, lying on his back on the living room floor under the ceiling fan, his calves on the sofa. “Hey, Dad.”

  “Hey, Son. How was school today?”

  “Am I going to be able to keep going to taekwondo class?”

  “I hope so, but I’ll be honest, it depends on how long it takes for me to get a job. If I’m still unemployed in two weeks, we might have to put martial arts on pause for a while.”

  “Oh.” He sounded disappointed in a way that carried more of a story behind it than he was letting on.

  “Is everything okay at school?”

  “Sure.”

  But Stewart could tell from the boy’s tone that something was afoot. “Are you sure?”

  “Yep,” Hunter said, extending the ‘Y’.

  Stewart let it go, for now, and set about combing the kitchen for something to make for dinner.

  ***

  After a meal of impeccably grilled hamburgers with a side of burnt mac-and-cheese, Stewart and Liz sent the kids off to their rooms and retired to the back yard, with the cooling of evening coming on, for some grown-up-style conversation.

  Sitting side by side in a couple of old lawn chairs, they looked out over the rocks and scrub.

  “Thanks for cooking,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Any luck today?”

  He shook his head.

  “So what is it?” Liz asked. “Spill it.”

  Her tone was kind, but Stewart knew he couldn’t hide from her that something really weird had happened today. It was more a matter of how to tell her.

  She waited patiently while he worked up the verbal steam. “So, I tried to take the...things back today.” He looked over both shoulders for any small eavesdroppers.

  “And...?”

  “The shop wasn’t there.”

  “You mean closed up?”

  “I mean, not there. As if it never existed.”

  “An empty storefront?”

  “No. I mean, the whole building.”

  “Torn down overnight?”

  “No. I mean, the building I remember going into doesn’t exist. I remember what was on either side. I remember the shop in the middle. Today, no shop in the middle. The businesses on the sides, it’s like they... It’s like they squashed it out of existence.”

  She looked at him for several seconds, searching his face. “Weird.” After a few more seconds, she said, “Oh, you’re serious.”

  He nodded. “And then, I never told you what happened yesterday morning. I went outside, right over there, because I heard something. Maybe it started like I was in a dream, but I was out there, near that boulder. And it was like I was in the middle of a battle. There was noise, and yelling, but I couldn’t see anything. And then there was this...monster, half again my size, he just appeared out of nowhere, ugly as a Gila monster’s hind end. He took one look at me. That’s when my leg got cut, I’m not sure how. I looked away for a second, and then the thing was gone. The sounds started to fade. And then it was like...it never happened.”

  She listened intently. “What?” he said.

  “I think that’s the most words I’ve heard you speak at once since our wedding.”

  He couldn’t help but grin at the memory of the speech he’d written for her—one paragraph long—at the tiny reception they threw in the Community Hall after their elopement. Her parents wouldn’t consent to a wedding.

  “And you know what else?” she said.

  “What?” Her eyes flashed with wonder and fascination. “It sounds absolutely magical.”

  “Really? I’m not sure I—”

  “Oh, come on, Stewart! You used to talk about magic all the time when we first started dating. That’s how I knew you were different from other people. How I knew you weren’t what everybody said you were. Magic, my loving husband, makes the world go around. Most people just don’t see it. But you did. You used to talk about all the crazy things that happened to you. I still remember the story about the glowing beetle.”

  “You remember that?”

  She turned toward him, her voice earnest. “I remember all that, baby. Please don’t tell me you’ve stopped.”

  “Stopped what?”

  “Believing in magic.”

  He sighed and looked out into the desert. “I just don’t know. We could sure use a little right now.”

  “Maybe we just have to settle down and look.” She took his hand again and leaned back in her chair, glancing toward the house. “So where is the big present now?”

  “Still in my truck. Hiding.”

  “Bring ’em in after we put the kids to bed.”

  They sat outside and watched dusk sweep across the landscape. Later they went through the nightly routine of trying to shoehorn their children into bed. Cassie always wanted a drink of water, or another story. Because of the situation, Liz indulged her with a few more pages of The Hobbit. And then Cassie wanted a third installment, but Liz finally declined, kissed the little girl on the head, and extricated herself.

  “Time for sleeping, sweetie,” Liz said. “You have a big day tomorrow.”

  Cassie’s eyes glowed. “Epic!”

  Stewart watched from the doorway as Liz kissed her, then came in to do the same. Hunter turned off his reading lamp and held out his fist for a knuckle bump. Stewart obliged him, and then blew it up.

  The adults waited half an hour before bringing in the golden bag. Liz sighed again at the sight of the two beautiful dolls. Then she happened to spot something else in the bottom of the bag.

  She drew out the map. “What’s this?”

  Chapter Six

  “Something the weird old shopkeeper gave me,” Stewart said. “He almost wouldn’t let me leave without it.”

  As Liz unfolded the map, her eyes sp
arkled. “If nothing else, it’s nice work. It looks handmade.”

  He nodded.

  “Why did he want you to have it so badly?”

  “He said I should take my family here.” He poked the X near the lake on the map, the lake that didn’t exist. “If I did that, ‘many questions would be answered.’”

  “What’s convincing about it is that some parts of the map are real. Here’s Mesa Roja. Here’s the Colorado River. ‘Here there be monsters.’ That’s funny.” She pored over it, her face painted by a faint smile. “Here’s the highway. Here’s some sort of side road leading off into what looks like a forest. But this isn’t Lake Powell, and this town surely can’t be Page, unless the scale is completely wrong... What kind of questions did he tell you would be answered?”

  “‘Life, the universe, and everything,’” he quoted.

  “Good grief, that’s a line from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Couldn’t he be more original? But those do seem to be the kind of questions most on your mind, my dear husband. So, what are you going to do?”

  “Keep looking for a job—”

  “No, silly. I mean, about the map.”

  “Honestly, it hadn’t even occurred to me to follow it. Too much else on my mind.”

  “He gave it to you for a reason.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t believe in fate.”

  She grinned at him and snaked her arms around his neck, batting her eyelashes. “Oh, come on. Don’t you believe in magic anymore at all?”

  He chuckled. “Oh, I believe in that kind.” She was all the evidence he needed.

  “Wouldn’t it be fun to take the kids on a little road trip? We could go camping, exploring, have an adventure! Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

  “Sure, but we can’t exactly afford the gas. If we follow the map as far as we can, that’s probably at least a hundred miles there and back. Besides, you have to work and—”

  “I have a couple of days off saved up. Just think! We haven’t been camping since Cassie was three!”

  Stewart grimaced at the memory.

  She slugged him playfully. “Oh, come on, she can’t possibly get that sick again.”

  All Stewart remembered of that trip was fountains of vomit and diarrhea. The poor kid had been so sick, they almost took her to urgent care. Without health insurance—neither of their jobs offered it—they couldn’t afford a hospital visit. It had been enough to drive all desire for another camping trip far, far from his mind.

  “Hunter would love it!” Liz said.

  Maybe he could get the hunting knife he’d been working on for Hunter finished in the next few days. The boy didn’t know that Stewart was working on a twin to his own hunting knife. He got the idea from the way Hunter’s eyes lit up with avarice and admiration every time he saw the Damascus-steel hunting knife Stewart had made. “I’ll think about it. Let’s see how things go.”

  “Meanwhile, Cassie’s going to be over the moon about these dolls. I’m glad we still have them.” Liz took them from the bag and laid them on the kitchen table.

  They were so beautiful, with their lifelike skin and eyes, their beautiful, lacy dresses, soft, flaxen hair, the innocent expressions on their faces, one with a little smile, the other a little sad. They didn’t look mass-produced, because their faces were similar but not identical, as if they were sisters.

  Liz said, “I think I’ll just add a little pretty tissue paper to this nice bag they came in...”

  As she worked to prepare Cassie’s birthday present, however, Stewart’s attention wandered back to the map. One of the mountains beyond the lake looked like it had the face of a snapping turtle.

  ***

  The waters of Smithfield Quarry were ice cold, somehow, even in the Arizona heat, which is why it was so popular among the local kids. The twenty-foot cliffs, crystal-clear water, and terraced road down into the pit made for nice scenery and plenty of places to roll out a picnic blanket. Too small to be a real tourist draw, it was like Mesa Roja’s best kept secret.

  Stewart was ten. He was with his fourth foster family. These adults hadn’t beaten him yet. The scars were healing.

  His birthday fell within a few days of another of the foster kids’ birthdays, a cross-eyed boy named Jeff, who was a year older, wore thick glasses, lacked a chin, and had teeth that jagged toward each other like rodent’s teeth. To celebrate both birthdays, the foster parents magnanimously took their foster brood—maybe six kids in all ranging from four to eleven, Jeff being the oldest—out to the quarry for a picnic and some swimming. Stewart couldn’t remember any of their names—he had only been with this family for a couple of months—but he remembered Jeff. The two of them shared a love of comic books. Most of the comics in the house were lame ones like Richie Rich and Archie, but they were better than nothing at all. The two boys read the covers off the Spider-Man, Superman, and Avengers comics, but Stewart was creeped out by the comments Jeff made about some of the female superheroes. It would be a couple of years before he even understood what Jeff was talking about.

  They all laid out some blankets on the side of the road circling the water in one of the shady areas. The high cliffs nicely shadowed one crescent of water along the shore of the lake. The roadside was gravel and powdered rock, and the air smelled of moistness. A few yards away, the edge of the road dropped straight down into the crystal-clear water about twenty feet below.

  The four-year-old foster kid always made a fuss, and today was no exception. She cried a lot, even at night when they were supposed to be sleeping. Stewart didn’t remember her name, but he remembered the haunted despair in her eyes. He didn’t know how to help her, so he went and sat at the edge with his feet dangling over the water.

  “Stewart! Come away from there! You’ll fall in!” his foster mother called, but she was too busy with the little girl to pay attention to whether he obeyed.

  He just sat there enjoying the waves of air changing temperature across his body, looking down into the dark depths of the water, wondering if there might be sea monsters from the earth’s core down there, or mermaids.

  He could smell the cold hot dogs and potato salad from the Tupperware containers, the pickle relish, the brownies. This foster mother was a pretty good baker.

  And then two hands on his shoulder blades, a big shove, and then he was spread-eagled in midair over the water. Tumbling.

  He hit with a resounding slap, and the water exploded up his nose, into his mouth. He was choking. He didn’t know which way was up. The icy cold lake numbed his flesh. He flailed and kicked, but there was nowhere to stand or grab. Everything was a dim blur.

  The sensation of hands or something like them brushed the flesh all over his body. Were they lifting him or trying to drown him?

  He remembered a little fish so green it might have been made of chips of emerald, glinting with sunlight. It swam into his face, poking his cheek. The sight of it told him which direction lay the sky.

  He flailed some more, but he was going down, down...

  His lungs screamed for air. If he opened his mouth, the water would rush in and that would be the end.

  The belly of a whale drifted above him.

  No, not a whale. Its flippers were oars.

  The sensation of something touching him all over—and it was not water—intensified, squeezing or embracing him, as if he were inside the ring of an inner tube that was being inflated, and it made him feel buoyant. Tiny bubbles like in a soda fizzed in the water around him, caressing his skin, lifting him.

  But it was too late. He had to breathe. The water grew dark.

  A rough hand seized him by the collar of his shirt, lifting him. The bubbles danced and cavorted. He felt lighter than air.

  Then he lay in the bottom of a rowboat.

  The side of his head throbbed with pain.

  A distant voice: “Is he okay?”

  A nearby voice answering, “I think so. His eyes are open. He’s trying to breathe.”

  Warm water vomited
out of Stewart’s mouth and nose, and then he could breathe again, and he lay there sobbing and gasping at the sky, across the hard ribs of the rowboat as they dug into his back, and he saw the back of a man in a plaid shirt as he worked the oars. He smelled of old sweat.

  Gravel grated against the keel of the rowboat.

  Arms hooked under his and lifted him. The sun was so bright. Heads encircled him, leaned over him.

  “Stew, are you all right?”

  “Say something!”

  “Why’d you jump in the water?”

  “What happened?”

  “He’s bleeding.”

  Stewart raised a hand to the throbbing lump above his ear.

  “Must have bumped his head.”

  “How did you swim back up with a lump on your head like that?”

  That question he knew the answer to. “Magic,” he said.

  A few of the onlookers laughed.

  “He must be feeling all right now, making jokes.”

  Onlookers wandered back to their lives, excitement dissipating.

  His foster father helped him sit up. The gravel of the lake shore hurt his legs. His head swam with the movement.

  “That was a silly thing to do, Stew,” his foster father said. “You gave us all a terrible fright.”

  Behind them all, looking sheepish, Jeff hung back.

  Stewart looked back toward the water. A palm-sized fish gleamed emerald a few yards from shore, swimming back and forth.

  ***

  When he awoke in the dead of night, covered in enough sweat to make him believe for a moment that someone had just dragged him out of Smithfield Quarry, the fish was the last thing to fade from his memory.

  It was a familiar dream, but his heart was still pounding. He sighed and slung himself out of bed, evoking a murmuring sigh from Liz. His tossing and turning would keep her awake. Better to do something with himself. The dream was still too close for him to try going back to sleep. He had had this dream before, but this had been the most intense in years.

  He went outside, still rubbing his eyes and flexing his muscles to wake up, fired up the forge, and set himself to working on Hunter’s Damascus hunting knife. After last night with Eddie, the folding, welding, and drawing out were finished. It was all down to the grinding, then tempering, then etching, then polishing. As he ground the roughly blade-shaped chunk of steel into its more final shape, he could already see the “wood grain” of nickel and steel emerging. It was indeed a beautiful sight.