by David Lubar
“I’m a terrible artist,” Cindy said again as she followed Tracy out of the garage.
“That doesn’t matter,” Tracy said. She knelt on the driveway and drew a flower. Then she drew a fish.
“Wow, you’re really good,” Cindy said.
“Here,” Tracy said, handing her the chalk. “You try.”
“I told you I’m not good,” Cindy said.
“Just try.”
“You’re always making me do things I’m not good at,” Cindy said.
“That’s what friends are for.”
Cindy sighed, took the chalk, and started to draw. She figured that if she drew something really big, maybe it would come out better. Since she loved dogs, she decided to draw a puppy. As she was finishing the drawing, she noticed a wonderful fragrance. She looked at the driveway, in front of Tracy. There was a flower there.
“Your drawing,” she said to Tracy. Before she could say anything more, she was interrupted by the sound of a frantically flopping fish.
“It’s all turning real,” Tracy said, taking a step back.
“That’s perfect.” Cindy noticed that her drawing was taking form, too. It was starting to become solid. That was great. She’d always wanted a puppy.
“Why’d you draw that?” Tracy asked.
“Why not?” Cindy didn’t understand why Tracy looked so pale. “Are you afraid of dogs?”
“Dogs? Are you crazy? It’s a dinosaur. Run!”
“Come on,” Cindy said. “I drew a puppy.” She looked at the thing forming on the driveway. “Oh no … .”
Tracy was right. It was a dinosaur. As the head lifted from the driveway, it snapped up the fish and swallowed it whole. Then it looked at the girls.
“I told you I was a lousy artist,” Cindy said as she tossed the chalk aside and followed her friend at full speed down the driveway.
“Run!” Tracy screamed.
For once, Cindy totally agreed with her friend. Running seemed like a great idea. A much better idea than drawing.
DON’T EVER LET IT TOUCH THE GROUND
“Careful,” I told my little brother, Felix, when I saw him marching up and down the front yard with the flag. He had the pole on his shoulder, but he was so short that one corner of the flag hung just a couple of inches from the ground.
“Careful about what?” he asked.
“You’re almost letting it drag.” I didn’t even know if he was allowed to take the flag out of the house or even touch it. Dad kept it in the closet and only put it out on flag-flying holidays.
“So?”
“You’re not supposed to let it touch the ground. Everyone knows that.” At least, everyone but stupid little brothers, I thought.
“Why not?” he asked.
That’s the problem with Felix. He doesn’t accept what I tell him. He’s always asking for explanations. “Because,” I told him.
“What? Just because? That’s not an answer.”
“Well, you could get arrested.”
He shook his head. “You’re making it up. I don’t believe you. Watch this.” He swung the pole off his shoulder and brought the flag in front of himself. His thin arms were shaking as he struggled against the weight.
“Stop messing around,” I warned him.
“I’m gonna do it.”
“I told you to stop.”
“Here goes,” he said. He lowered the flag until it was just above the grass.
“Felix, don’t do it. Don’t ever let it touch the ground.”
He grinned at me and let the pole drop another inch. A corner of the flag rested on the grass. “Oh no, I’m going to get arrested. I’m a criminal.”
I rushed over and snatched the pole from his hands, raising the flag high off the ground.
“Hey!” he said. “Give it back. I’m telling.”
“And I’ll tell on you,” I said. “Then you’ll be in big trouble.” I carried the flag inside. Behind me, through the closing door, I could hear Felix shouting. He was calling me some pretty nasty names. Felix has a bad temper. But no matter what, he shouldn’t have let the flag touch the ground. I know that. I mean, I don’t know if there’s a law or anything. But that doesn’t matter. He just shouldn’t have done it. There are some things you just don’t ever do, like hit a girl or tell on a friend.
I put the flag in the closet. But instead of standing it in its usual spot, I untied it from the pole and hid it up on the shelf behind Dad’s old hats. Felix would never find it there.
I didn’t think any more about it that day. Felix wouldn’t tell Mom or Dad, of course, because I would have told them what he’d done. And Dad would have spanked him, because Dad’s pretty patriotic. So Felix knew enough to keep his mouth shut. And I’ll bet he knew I was right, too. You never let the flag touch the ground.
That night, after I’d gone to bed, I started thinking about the flag again. Felix was already sleeping. He got up way too early most of the time and usually crashed pretty soon after dinner. I could hear him breathing—slowly and deeply—in his bed over by the opposite wall.
Someone had to teach him a lesson.
He’d let the flag touch the ground. That wasn’t right. Nobody else knew, so it was up to me. I’d show him. As a big brother, that was part of my job. My favorite part. I couldn’t help smiling as I slipped silently out of bed. At first, I thought I’d just sneak over and shout something to scare him. It touched the ground! Or maybe just, Protect the flag! But that wasn’t enough to teach him a real lesson. It had to be better. I wanted him to remember what I taught him forever.
I went downstairs and got the flag from the closet. I was very careful not to let it touch the ground when I carried it back up the stairs. Right outside the room, I draped it over my head and shoulders. I wanted to look like Death does in the cartoons, with his hood flapping over his face, hiding his eyes. That would scare Felix. I realized I could hold a flashlight under my chin to make myself look even spookier. I’d wake him and pretend I was coming to take him away.
As soon as he started screaming, I’d dive into bed and hide the flag under the covers. Then, when the folks came, I could tell them Felix was having a nightmare.
That would teach him. Maybe he’d be so scared he’d even confess what he’d done.
I grabbed the flashlight that I kept in my desk and walked to the side of Felix’s bed. He looked so peaceful, I almost didn’t wake him. But he had to be taught a lesson. And I was willing to do it. It’s like Dad always said—this was for his own good.
I reached toward his shoulder.
“Which one?”
The whisper, from behind me, was so soft I thought it was just some stray echo of my own thoughts.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
The second voice was louder. I spun. And froze.
Two men stood across the room, dressed in tattered uniforms from the Revolutionary War. I could see the wall through them.
“Him,” the man on the left said, pointing at me. “He mocks the flag we died for.”
I shook my head. Not me, I wanted to scream. But fear had gripped my throat.
“He wears the flag we bled for, as if it was no more than a cast-off blanket.” The second man stepped toward me. “It was bad enough that he let it touch the ground. But we can’t allow this mockery to continue.”
“Not me.” This time I got the words out. “Him,” I said, pointing to Felix. “He let it touch the ground.”
“No honor,” the first man said. “See how he accuses others? He’s a liar, and a coward as well.”
He stepped closer, reached out, and touched my face. His fingers, cold as a marble headstone in winter, clutched my jaw. He pulled my face forward and put his own face less than an inch away. When he spoke, I felt no breath. No heat. Just the cold, damp smell of the grave. “Never let it touch the ground.”
The second man put his face close to mine, too. Nothing reflected from his dry eyes. I couldn’t even see my own fear.
“Never let it
touch the ground,” he said.
“Never let it touch the ground,” they both said, pushing me backward toward the wall.
It wasn’t me. That’s what I wanted to say. They had to understand. But that’s not what I said. I knew those words would anger them. I nodded; even that motion was hard. My head wanted to tremble in every direction. “Yes. I’ll never let it happen again. I swear.”
For a moment, the first man squeezed my jaw so hard I thought the bones would crack. Then he stepped away from me. “Never,” he warned.
“Never,” warned the second man.
They backed away. Then, still moving backward, they passed through the wall of my room.
My heart was slamming against my ribs so hard, I was afraid it would burst out of my chest. As soon as I could move, I took the flag from my shoulders and folded it—carefully. I was too scared to take it back through the dark hallways to the closet downstairs, so I put it on my desk.
Then I crawled under my covers, closed my eyes, and shivered until I fell asleep.
In the morning, I shot up from my bed as the images of the two ghosts tore into my dreams. Their voices, like wind in dry corn husks, clawed at my mind.
Don’t ever let it touch the ground.
There was no flag on the desk.
A dream … ?
It had to be. I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. It was just a bad dream. That explained everything. There aren’t any vengeful ghosts bringing doom to anyone who allowed the flag to touch the ground. Vengeful and capable of making mistakes.
Surely not.
I looked across the room.
Felix wasn’t in his bed. No surprise. He liked to get up early.
I rose and stretched. My pleasure was brief. A feeling of unease settled on me. Faintly, from far off, I heard singing. At first, I couldn’t make out the words. But I recognized the rhythm. ONE, two, THREE, four. Then, as the singer moved closer, I heard the words.
“Over hill, over dale, we will march the dusty trail …”
A marching song. A song for walking and carrying a flag. I ran to the window. Below, in the front yard, Felix paraded with the flag over his shoulder. The flag he’d taken from the desk. Not from the closet where I’d hidden it. From the desk—where I’d thought I’d put it in a dream.
No dream. The men were real. I touched my jaw. My flesh burned with the memory of those frozen fingers.
Felix marched across the lawn with the flag he’d taken from the desk. The flag that had scraped the ground with one striped corner, sending a call to the night visitors.
He’d let it touch the ground.
They’d be back tonight. I knew that now. But not for Felix. They’d be back for me.
PICKING UP
John started with the clothes. That was the easiest part. It was a simple matter of sorting things. He put the dirty ones in the hamper. Then he folded the clean ones and put them in his dresser. The ones that might have been clean and might have been dirty also got tossed in the hamper, just to be sure. “I wonder how my room got this messy so quickly,” he said.
He looked around the room. There was a bit more floor space now, with the clothes taken care of. But that still left the scattered piles of toys, games, movies, and books.
“This is going to take all day,” he said as he started shelving the books.
There wasn’t enough room for all of them. He put the older ones, including all the picture books, in a box and took it downstairs. It was funny—he didn’t remember reading any of the picture books, but he knew he must have. They were worn and some of them looked like they’d been read hundreds of times.
He went back upstairs and started on the closet. That was the strangest part. As he sorted and stacked and straightened, he realized that, beneath the top layer of familiar possessions, he didn’t recognize a lot of the stuff. But it didn’t matter. He knew he needed to straighten up. That was the most important thing.
As John put the last game in its place, two boys walked into the room.
“Oh good, you’re done,” the taller boy said. He turned to the other boy. “Great model for stuff like picking up,” he told him. “But not much memory. I’m saving up for an expansion module. I figure I can get him another couple gigabytes someday.”
He reached over and touched something on John’s chest.
The world went away.
The world came back.
John started with the clothes. That was the easiest part. It was a simple matter of sorting things. He put the dirty ones in the hamper. Then he folded the clean ones and put them in his dresser. The ones that might have been clean and might have been dirty also got tossed in the hamper, just to be sure. He knew he needed to straighten up. That was the most important thing. Sometimes, he felt it was the only thing.
HEAD OF THE CLASS
Please, Rusty thought as he waited for Mrs. Grimkin to return his paper, let it be okay this time. But he knew from the angry sound of her steps as she approached his desk that his paper was not anywhere near okay.
“Well, Rusty,” Mrs. Grimkin said, holding the paper as if it were coated with a thick layer of wet germs, “you didn’t do very well.” She dropped the report on his desk and turned toward her next victim.
Rusty stared at the page—a sea of red circles and lines highlighted his mistakes. “Stupid assignment,” he muttered. Who cares about spelling and grammar? So what if I misspelled a few words? If he wrote “lite” where he should have written “light,” anyone reading it would still know what he meant. No matter what anybody said, Rusty knew that spelling wasn’t important. Especially not tiny mistakes like the ones his teacher loved to point out.
As Rusty watched Mrs. Grimkin walk toward the front of the class, rage filled him, pumping into his heart and lungs and gut. He wanted to shout at her. But he’d already been kept after school more times than anyone else in the class. Instead of shouting, he closed his eyes and spoke softly, trying to hold in the anger. “I wish whatever I did was right. I wish I made the rules.”
He almost managed to calm down. But when he opened his eyes and saw the paper again, the anger exploded. He crumpled the sheet, squeezing it with all his strength into a tight ball. Leaping to his feet, he launched the paper across the room, not aiming anywhere, just trying to fling his rage away. The wadded paper shot toward Mrs. Grimkin, hurtling straight for the back of her head as she reached her desk.
Rusty froze, his arm still extended.
Mrs. Grimkin bent to pick up a book.
The paper zipped past her head, just brushing the top fringes of her hair. It struck the blackboard and bounced up, following a perfect arc until it landed with barely a rustle in the half-filled wastebasket.
As Mrs. Grimkin rose with the book in her hand and turned to face the class, Rusty realized he was still standing. He sat quickly.
“Man, are you lucky,” Steve said, leaning toward Rusty from his desk in the next row. “That was a million-to-one shot. Maybe a zillion to one. She’d have kept you after school for the rest of the year if you’d hit her. Maybe even gotten you expelled for good.”
Rusty nodded. He felt incredibly lucky. But the luck didn’t last long. It vanished completely when Mrs. Grimkin said, “Clear your desks, class. Time for the spelling test.”
Test? Rusty grabbed his spelling book. “I forgot to study,” he said.
“You’re doomed,” Steve said. “This is a hard one.”
Frantically, Rusty flipped the book open. What chapter was it? Rusty looked at the page. No, those words seemed too familiar. They’d already done them. He flipped more pages but went too far. Those words weren’t right at all. Sweat rolled down the back of Rusty’s neck. He continued to search through the book. Finally, he found the page with this week’s words.
“CLEAR YOUR DESKS, CLASS!”
Rusty almost toppled off his chair as the shout crashed through his brain. Mrs. Grimkin was standing directly over him, glaring down with the undeniable danger of a stick of
dynamite with just a billionth of an inch left on the fuse. Feeling that doom was about to grab him and squash him no matter what he did, Rusty shut his book and jammed it in his desk.
“Stupid spelling,” he muttered as he took out a piece of paper.
“Barrel,” Mrs. Grimkin said, giving the first word.
Rusty muttered several phrases that would never be on any spelling test. Why did they have to start with that word? He could never remember whether it was “barrel” or “barrle.”
“Holiday,” Mrs. Grimkin said, spitting out the happy word like it hurt her mouth.
Quickly Rusty wrote “b-a-r-r-e-l.” It didn’t look right. He erased it and wrote “b-a-r-r-l-e.” That’s it, he thought. He hurried to catch up. His teacher was already on the third word.
Rusty knew, as he handed in his paper, that he was in big trouble. On the way home that afternoon, he saw something that made him stamp his foot against the sidewalk. There, right on the corner of Main and Madison, was a delicatessen called the Pickle Barrel.
“I’m so stupid,” Rusty said. He couldn’t believe he’d gotten it wrong.
The next morning, first thing, Mrs. Grimkin threaded her way up and down the aisles, handing back the tests. Rusty slunk deeper into his seat, knowing that doom was headed his way. When Mrs. Grimkin reached his desk, she dropped the paper in front of him without saying a word. Rusty stared. His mouth fell open. There, in red ink, where he usually got a 65 or a 70, was a score of 100—a perfect A+ grade. Never in his life had he gotten that high a mark. It had to be a mistake. Or maybe it was a joke. Maybe Mrs. Grimkin would start laughing, then take out her pen, scratch off the grade, and write an F instead.
Rusty scanned the sheet. Right at the top was “barrle.” He knew it was wrong. And he knew he should say something. But he didn’t.
While Rusty stared at his paper, he heard the tap and skritch of Mrs. Grimkin writing on the chalkboard. Around him, kids groaned. Rusty looked up. It was a history test this time. He hadn’t studied. He’d known there was going to be a test, but he’d been too angry last night to open his books. He read the first question.