The boy was tired—who wouldn’t be, after conjuring a hundred cats out of nothingness? He unrolled his blanket, but despite all the cats, he was lonely. He missed his parents, and he wished he were at home again, in his own house, in his own bed, with his parents sleeping beside him. He thought of his brushes, made from his father’s bamboo, his mother’s hair. He remembered the small gestures about them he missed the most: the way his mother raked her hand through his hair, smoothing it from his face; the way his father had hummed while he worked in the field, so quietly it might have been the buzzing of bees. He felt small, and suddenly he remembered the old woman’s words: keep to the small. He took his blanket and opened the cupboard and made his bed inside it. It was as close to his own little bed as he could get, and he crawled inside, with all of his things, and pulled the door shut behind him.
In the middle of the night he awoke to a terrible wordless wailing. It was an unearthly shrieking: like the groaning of old trees splintering as they fell, like the howling of a hundred winter winds, like the screeching of the earth as it shifted and tore itself apart. Even his eyelashes stood on end. He put his eye to a tiny crack, but all he could see outside was a ghastly red light, as if the whole room were full of blood. He shut his eyes and held his breath and pulled the blanket over his head. Whatever you do, he thought, don’t make a sound.
After a long time—he didn’t know how long—it was quiet again. Still he waited in silence. An hour passed. Two. He put his eye to the crack again and this time, no red: only a faint sliver of sunlight. Hands shaking, he pushed his way out of the cupboard. His cats were still there, on the walls, just as he’d painted them. But every cat’s mouth was red. All over the floor: the prints of hundreds and hundreds of cat feet, pressed into the dirt, scrapes and smudges and marks of a battle. Flecks of blood and foam sprayed on the walls. And there, in the corner—a huge dead shaggy thing. Still now, clawed half to shreds. A rat the size of an ox.
So what does it mean, Bird thinks, as he lies in his bunk that night. It’s well after midnight and below him his father snores once, then turns to one side, and is still. Outside, the city is quiet, except for an occasional siren wailing its way through the dark. We promise to watch over each other.
Bird tiptoes into the living room, pushes the edge of the curtain aside, slips behind it, and looks out. All he sees are the hulking forms of buildings, the far-off specks of streetlights. The flat dark band of the street. Newly blackened, but somewhere beneath it, a painted heart still blooms. So risky, he thinks, and what was the point? When a few hours later all trace of it was gone.
But the truth is: it isn’t gone. He can’t see that bare stretch of ground without thinking of it, the bright splotch flashing into his mind, sharp as a wildcat’s snarl.
Hadn’t they been afraid?
He tries to imagine what it had felt like, to be that painter. Tiptoeing into the street. Breath dragon-hot beneath a mask, heartbeat a deafening roar. Slapping stencil to pavement with shaking hands, spraying a sizzling cloud of red. And then running, lungs aflame with fear and fumes, finding a small sheltered corner to hide. Red paint like smears of blood on his hands.
And then it floods him. Rushing in as if someone has unstopped a plug.
A game they played, he and his mother, when he was very small. Before school, before he had any other world but her. His favorite game, one he’d begged her to play. Their special game, played only when his father was at work, kept as a secret between just them.
You be the monster, mama. I’ll hide, and you be the monster.
She’d taped sheets of paper to the walls and Bird drew cat after cat: with crayons, half-dried markers, pencil stubs. Simple cats, scrawls with ears, but still. Cats. Cats, all over his room. And then, when he tired of drawing, came the second part of the game. Inside his closet was a crawl space his parents had discovered when they’d fixed up the house. Too small, under the eaves, for anything practical, but his mother had kept it. For him. A perfect boy-sized cubby she’d furnished with a sliding panel, a pillow and a blanket and a flashlight. A dragon’s cave. A bandit’s lair. And sometimes, the cabinet in which the boy hid.
He would crawl inside and slide the panel shut and yawn loudly, then flop down and begin to snore. From outside would come a growl that peppered goose bumps up and down his arms. A series of snarling meows. Inside, Bird pulled the blanket over his head and shivered deliciously. After a few minutes it grew quiet, and he would crawl from the hot cubby back out into the closet and then the light of the room, and there, on the carpet: his mother on her back, arms curled to her chest. Deadly still. The mouth of every cat he’d drawn smeared with red.
He would run to her then and throw himself on her chest and she would catch him in her arms, warm and strong, and tickle him and laugh. Always, a moment of terror at seeing her there, and a hot rush of relief when she came back to life. Over and over they played it, this game, his mother indulging him again and again. So long ago that he’d forgotten. Kindergarten, new friends, new games arrived and swept it away. And then, after she’d gone, he’d packed that memory up, along with everything else he could, and left it behind in the house they’d once shared. Where maybe—just maybe, though he doesn’t even dare to think the words—perhaps he might find her again.
* * *
? ? ?
Something he’s never told anyone, even Sadie: he’s been there many times, over the years. It is just a few blocks from his new school, and though he’s supposed to come directly home, sometimes he detours, just a little, so he can walk past the old house. Just to see it. It is the only time he ever deviates from the path. Construction, he imagines telling his father, the main road was closed, I had to go around. Or: The police were detouring people—I dunno why. His father would never argue with that; he’s always reminding Bird to stay away from trouble, to avoid the police.
But his father never even asks. He is so certain Bird will always follow the rules, so confident in Bird’s unquestioning obedience, and on those days—standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the house where they no longer live, at its shaded-over windows like closed eyes—Bird resents it, this assumption that there could be nothing off his prescribed path that he wants or misses or needs.
No one has moved into the house in the past three years. His father hasn’t sold it—he can’t, without his mother’s signature, too—and no one seems to want to rent it, once they learn who’d lived there before. Every time Bird visits, it is just the same, windows obscured by blinds, tall back gate always shut tight. None of the houses in this neighborhood have front yards; the houses come right up to the sidewalk like pushy neighbors, elbowing their way in. A scraggly strip of grass runs between sidewalk and street in a threadbare ribbon, and this is the only thing that changes from visit to visit: first overgrown and tufty, then knee high and gone to seed, then buried under a bank of uncleared snow. One spring he visited and found it bristling with daffodils: he had forgotten his mother had planted them there, and their cheerful yellow—her favorite color—pained him so much that he did not come back again for a whole month, until the flowers had shriveled, leaving nothing but splayed stems and wilting leaves.