pride, but he wasn’t a father. Other than his own mother, Christopher had never had someone look at him with so much love before.
“Close your eyes. Quiet your mind,” the nice man said.
Christopher did as he was told. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, losing himself behind the eyelids. Christopher imagined himself gripping the chains, whipping his legs, and swinging himself once. Twice. Three times.
Go.
With his mind’s eye, Christopher saw himself let go of the chains and launch like a slingshot through the air next to the nice man. He imagined the world slowing down as they rose toward the clouds. Higher and higher. The school small as a child’s model beneath their feet. He saw it all in his mind’s eye. The baseball field. The highway on the real side. The overturned cars. The dead deer. The path of destruction was almost complete.
He saw his body hit the cloud before he felt it.
The cloud wasn’t soft and pillowy. It felt like cold water vapor in the humidifier that his mother set up when he got sick. Christopher didn’t know why he was thinking of her now. She must be in the hospital with him. Rubbing his hair and telling him it would be okay. He couldn’t wait to get out and tell her about the clouds.
“They taste like cold cotton candy without any sugar, Mom.”
They drifted higher and higher, their bodies rising above the cloud line. Christopher looked down and saw them, big and beautiful, moving slowly over the town. The clouds bumped into each other like a pillow fight. They cracked together, making lightning. Within a few seconds, there was a rush of warm soft ozone and the sound of thunder. A snow began to fall. A gentle snow washing away the fear.
In floods.
Christopher imagined moving up into the sky. The stars twinkling like snowflakes in the twilight. For a moment, he thought this must be what Heaven is. Sitting on a cloud. Looking at stars. Feeling his mother’s warm hand on his forehead. Forever. He remembered when Father Tom explained that the Holy Trinity was God in three forms. Just like water can be water, ice, steam.
Or clouds.
They weren’t flying so much as swimming through water in the sky. It was all the same now. His imagination was the limit of his power. For a moment, he thought that’s why the hissing lady needed children. Adults are bad at remembering how powerful they can be because somewhere along the line, they were shamed for their imagination.
To think it is to do it.
“Get ready,” the nice man said.
He felt them begin to fall, hitting the clouds again at a much faster speed. Christopher had no idea how far they’d flown. How long they had been up there. Time was lost in his imagination. He dropped faster and faster. He came out of the clouds and looked down. They were all the way across town.
Above the Mission Street Woods.
But the woods looked different. Bigger and meaner somehow. The sun had melted the snow on top of the trees, but the clearing was still covered in white. The tree sat in the middle of the clearing like a black dot. It took Christopher’s mind a moment to realize what he was looking at.
The woods were a giant eye.
The eye looked up at heaven and watched the stars, shooting. A soul ascending or a sun dying. A son dying. The clearing was the white of the eye. The tree was its pupil. Its pupil. Its student.
They continued to drop. The nice man was heavier and fell faster. They were becoming separated.
“I’ll create a diversion! Get to her before nightfall!” the nice man said, dropping out of the sky. “Remember what you are!”
With his mind’s eye, Christopher saw the nice man fall hard on the street while Christopher flew to the side of the woods that Mr. Collins’ construction crew had already cleared. He saw great hulks of trees lying in piles around a freshly dug clearing. The trees looked like teeth pulled out of gums by angry hands. Tree stumps like gravestones. They surrounded a massive clearing of torn earth and mud and equipment.
That’s when he saw the hissing lady.
She stood in the middle of the muddy clearing, surrounded by a hundred deer. She didn’t speak. She just touched their heads, and they bowed like worshippers. Thousands of mailbox people stood around them. They each held the string that kept the next in line. The line stretched beyond