1

Sunfall. Shadows moving slow across the bar on the window. Wooden bar. The guard nailed it there, the day after he tried to escape.

Escape. Run fast and quiet, like a wolf. Run home.

The professor said he must think in words, not pictures. Sunfall, wolf, home. Bar.

Room. This was his room. The square in the wall was a painting. At first it looked like nothing to him, colors jumping, lines twisting in front of his eyes. But now he could make it hold still. It was people eating food outside on the grass. There were trees, and a white thing on the ground covered with apples and plates and things he didn't have names for. All the people looked happy and safe. He stared at the painting, because there was nothing else in his room to look at. He liked the yellow-haired lady and the little boy. The boy had his head on the lady's legs, and she was resting herself against a tree, smiling with her mouth closed, and her body curved like an S.

He knew S from his book. He knew all the letters. But most of the words made no sense to him now. While visiting in your host's drawing room, do not shift your feet, drum your fingers, or play with tassels or knobs. Cultivate repose.

The sound of laughter came into his room on the breeze. A man's laughter, then a woman's under it, softer. What was the word he had used for laugh before he had learned it again? He'd already forgotten. It wasn't a word, anyway; it was a thought in his head, not spoken. And smells and sounds and tastes—they all had words that went with them, and Dr. Winter wanted him to say them out loud.

But he would be one of them if he talked out loud. He would be a man.

The wind died. He smelled the odor of dead meat from the plate the guard, O'Fallon, had left on his table. "This is beef," Professor Winter said. "You must eat it like this, cooked." Now he could take a little bit and not get sick, but it still tasted like ashes, like dirt. He had stopped eating insects, even when no one was looking. But nothing could make him eat those yellow sticks or those dark green stalks, "vegetables," hot and still smoking, soft and slimy and disgusting. His stomach rolled at the thought.

Quiet now. Before, a sound had come from the big house, and he knew what it was but he couldn't capture the word. M. Like water flowing through his head, through his blood. He had jumped up and walked from the door to the window fast, back and forth, holding his ears to keep the noise out at first, but then letting it in as his fear went away. The sound tickled his chest and made him feel crazy, even though it was beautiful. What was it? M.

Night coming. Birds going to sleep. He could smell the water, heavy and dark. "The lake," Professor Winter called it. Not like the water at home, which was bright and light and full of fish to eat. At home, the days would be getting longer. Leaves would be making the forest dark, and the birds would be looking for partners. Food would be easy to find, and he would get fat and lie on a hill with the old wolf, watching the sun slide down the sky.

A memory floated just out of reach, something about the grass, the smell of it now, just cut. "New-mown grass." How did he know that saying? Something old, old, before the boat in the water, something he didn't even know he knew. He closed his eyes to breathe in the sweet green smell of the grass, stalky and raw—and when he opened his eyes, a white angel was floating toward him through the trees, filling the night with her soft laughter.

"Come for a walk with me, Sydney."

Sydney Darrow looked up from the cards in her hand, avoiding her brother's eye. Just last night Philip had pointed out to her, "Charles is always ordering you around, Syd. Why do you put up with it?"

"Come, Sydney. While the sun's going down over the lake. Shall we?"

There, she thought, he asked me, he didn't order me. "You don't mind, do you?" She smiled at Sam, her other brother. "You've already won all my money, plus a note for all the money I'll ever have for the rest of my life."

Sam grinned in triumph, showing the hole where his last baby tooth used to be. "I beat you, Sydney," he crowed, "I won and you lost."

"Don't gloat, Samuel," Aunt Estelle reproved from her terrace chair a good thirty feet away. "It's vulgar."

Sydney, Philip, and Sam made identical silent grimaces at each other, a family gesture that meant, How could she possibly have heard that?

Sydney stood, and Charles put his hand on the small of her back, pressing firmly to get her going. "I'll play Flinch with you when we come back," she promised Sam over her shoulder.

Copyright © 1997 by Patricia Gaffney.