A short story by F. E. Mazur . . .

---

DOREEN'S  SNOOZELEN

(Copyright 2004, 2008 by F. E. Mazur. All rights reserved.)

Pap comes home from work, carrying a bag. Mom is the first to ask.

"Feesh," says Pap.

"Fish?  You hate fish. Every time I make it, you complain."

Pap holds the bag up to his craggy face, shakes it a tiny little, and grins.

My twin sister Doreen says, "What sort of fish worth eating fits into a bag that small?"

"Bingo!" says Pap. "These feesh aren't for eating. These feesh are for looking at. Find me one of those glass blocks I brought home from a gravesite," he says to Mom. "They need to get into something bigger with more water, else they'll die."

He opens the brown paper bag and slides out a clear plastic one bulging with air and three inches of water. At the bottom seam two little fish begin jerking about and climbing over each other's dorsal as though some celebrity of their own, like Charlie the Tuna, has just appeared outside their new window.

Ricky sees what I expect him to see and he pantomimes an explosion of the inflated bag between his small hands, like it's an empty potato chip one. Never too sure about Ricky, Pap draws the fish closer to himself, out of my son's reach.

"Here," he says, moving to the kitchen sink. "Look at them under this fluorescent light where the red and blue really show up."

"Oh my, are they ever pretty," croons Doreen, who's pretty herself.

"They're tropicals. Neon tets they're called."

Ricky reaches for the bag and Pap slaps his hand. "They're for looking at," he repeats sternly.

Ricky, already making the face, turns to Doreen and me and with slow exaggeration, even resembling that big-lipped Channing actress who Mom used to talk about after seeing the only Broadway show she's ever seen, mouths Pap's words: They're for LOOOOK-ing at. Barely four, you wouldn't think the little shit would do such a thing.

Mom asks why Pap has brought home tropical fish when we don't have an aquarium, and Pap says that Jasky stopped off at a pet store to pick up some special food he'd ordered for his miniature schnauzer. Nowadays, Mom's usually too exhausted to press anything and she accepts his explanation without saying another word, although I can't see where he's answered her question.

Pap began working for Jasky last Thanksgiving. It's his second job and although it pays better than his regular employment as the groundskeeper at the cemetery, the hours aren't always much. What Pap does is solder tiny electronic parts onto a circuit board that becomes a switch.

"The switches are added to products already on the market," Jasky explained to the rest of us the first time he came by to pick up Pap in his truck. "The reason I modify these products is so people with severe disabilities and poor motor control can use them." He glanced at Ricky when he said this and Doreen believes this was intentional. She later explained that Jasky most likely had read the graffiti we went searching for before Ricky's birth, but never discovered. She told me also what she's always expected that graffiti to say. The rest I figured for myself, which is Jasky thinks it's only a matter of time until my son exhibits the signs of a mental retard.

Jasky operates his small business in the carpeted basement of a shoe store, and Pap can go inside at any time because he has a key and knows the code to shut off the alarm. Besides Pap, Jasky employs Mildred who keeps the books, fills orders, runs the Dirt Devil, and does whatever other jobs crop up. The schnauzer, bored with spending his time below ground, usually snoozes near the bottled water, showing he's alive only when someone fills a paper cone and the big air bubble wobbles to the top with an emphatic "GO-LUB!"

One day when school was cancelled because of a bomb threat, Pap took me with him for more than just another visit. This time I would learn to solder. "It's another thing you'll know how to do, and it may come in handy some day like it has for me."

When later he disappeared into the toilet, Jasky sidled over and watched as I handled the soldering gun. He's a big glob of a man with thinning white hair, and he has that suspicious kind of fleshy Jell-O rippling across the face and down through his neck into his body to cause a person to wonder seriously about his private life with its secrets. I connected my completed switch with alligator clips to a stand-up panel with pictures of different foods, and the red lights above each picture went on one after another in a timed sequence.

"What do you think of this boy, Mildred?  Only thirteen years old when he got his first piece. I had to wait until I was twenty."

"I'm sure you did," said Mildred.

"Now what's that supposed to mean?"

"Handsome man like you, Ed, you probably couldn't decide which female would be the lucky first, and so the years slipped by."

"How old were you?"

"That's none of your business."

"I was what they call a 'late bloomer.' I didn't even experience my first ejaculation until I was seventeen, and I was asleep when it happened."

"And your right hand has rarely enjoyed a night's rest since, isn't that right?"

"You're worse than I am, Mildred."

Mildred winked and smiled at me.

"When this early bloomer's father gets back from the john, I want to show you all some new things I'm considering adding to our product line. We might even do a small catalog." He reached over my shoulder and pressed the switch I'd made. The lights stopped their sequential blinking and the one under the milkshake stayed lit. "Good job, Jerry," he said.

Neither Pap nor Jasky is aware that Mildred and I previously met, and my growth over the past four years has apparently morphed my appearance enough that Mildred has forgotten more than just my name. Which is fine. The wink-and-a-smile was her way of letting me know she talked the way she had because dealing with Jasky requires it. It's the two photographs on exhibit beside her computer that made me think this. The person in both is her son. In the first picture the boy is about Ricky's age, while in the other he is ten at most. In each his mouth is open wide, like a traumatized cat's, and the wet tongue floats at the front as though he's tossed his liver. The day I had sex with Trisha, which produced Ricky, Mildred had him strapped in on the passenger side.

When Pap emerged from the toilet, drying his hands with a brown paper towel, Jasky waved him and me over to Mildred and her computer. He handed her a DVD to slip into the machine, an encyclopedia, he said, of just about every product available for the impaired and disabled. Jasky stated the item of interest and Mildred found it.

"What is that?" I asked when the second item flashed on the screen.

"That's the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test," Mildred informed me.

It was little more than a book with a plastic ring binder at the top.

"I've ordered easels from my supplier to position it at a somewhat vertical angle," Jasky said to Pap. "We'll attach some lights to the frame to correspond with the picture matrix, then make a switch that will allow the lights to scan."

After explaining, Jasky shifted his attention from Pap to me, and a grin appeared, like he knew something but wasn't going to come right out and say he knew. I interpreted this to mean he thought Doreen and I would become familiar in a very short time with this test and his addition of scanning lights, the latter obviously to be used with kids and others who are unable to speak and identify the items in the pictures. But Ricky can talk, except he rarely does, which is something Jasky doesn't know. And I realized then that Ed Jasky is, at one and the same time, a very smart sonovabitch and a very dumb sonovabitch; because on the latter, although we never had much to do with him before Pap began the soldering, he nonetheless passed through the neighborhood enough to have seen Doreen on the porch watering Mom's hanging plants, or sunning out in our postage-stamp yard, my smidgen of a fraternal twin who, if she ever does become pregnant, will resemble a baby hippo. There's no chance she will be the kind who "doesn't show."

"We'll have to come up with a name for each new item," he said, losing the grin. "Any ideas for this one? Nothing fancy. Just something to identify it and the modification we'll make. Think about it for the catalog, okay?"

The rest of the items were to require switches too, including a Polaroid camera that Jasky said children with Down's Syndrome would be able to use.

Mildred then surfed through a few additional screens. At one I asked her to back up because I hadn't seen a product.

"The entire room is the product," she said, and she clicked on the small picture that enlarged to fill the screen, and the motion and accompanying sound were eerily soothing.

"It's sensory stimulation in the form of lights, textures and acoustical tones that, together, provide a comforting environment," said Jasky, like he was reading from an advertisement. "Snoozelen. That's what it's known as in the field. Costs a bundle to install. Mildred has some first-hand knowledge about it and can tell you more than I can."

I let Mildred be while I studied the Snoozelen on my own. All the furniture looked like bean bags that were given shape. The light filling the room was of many different colors--soft, nothing harsh--and it stretched and ebbed, like I've heard about the northern lights, crawling faintly, even creepy-like, across the walls. In the corners large transparent tubes, tinted yellow, blue, pink and green, ran from floor to ceiling, and inside them air circulated through water providing the dominant sound, a broken but ongoing patter of gurgling bubbles, streaming upward. Doreen and I once watched some television re-runs of an old show Pap used to enjoy called Sea Hunt, which took place mostly underwater, and the only sounds heard were the breathing of the divers; the only light seen, the chopped rays from the sun above the surface. Everything in that program had seemed to be in slow motion, and the effect on both of us was to lie back and do nothing. I thought the Snoozelen would probably encourage the same.

"There's nothing there requires solder," Pap said to me.

"I'm sure he can see that," Jasky said, and he put a hand on Pap's shoulder as a signal it was time to resume the building of more switches.

This Trisha I've mentioned was seventeen at the time I had my first sex, and although a person is expected to remember all the details about their first sexual experience, to say I know how it happened would be a mostly invented story. She now attends an expensive all-girls college several states away while her parents continue to live in a wealthy housing tract not far from the local community park. The roads running through the development were newly paved four years ago and they have turns and dips, as the tract isn't squared off, nor was it gated as it is now. It was a great place for us kids to ride our bikes and skateboards.

This Trisha had owned a mysterious reputation and it attracted a group of us who made sure our route to and from the development passed her house, which is the largest and rests on a slope overlooking the others.

We saw her outside only once, and it was toward evening. An older and bolder friend of mine at the front of our bicycle convoy called to her. She sashayed down to the street in a pair of tight white jeans, taking her good old time, her long black hair swishing this way and that. I was at the rear and never uttered a word, the reason she insisted I stay once the others pedaled off toward home. A few moments later, a car appeared from the rear of the house and drifted down the driveway with the window on the driver's side all the way open. She introduced the two of us right away, adding that Mildred was their housekeeper. She had to ask for my name. Mildred's boy, she ignored. Once the car was gone, she curled her fingers around the handlebars and while climbing backwards, tugged the bike and me up the driveway, allowing the front tire to roll through her crotch.

Inside the fancy house we were alone, not even a dog or cat around, and as a friend of mine from school likes to say stupidly upon every surprise in his life, Vi-ola! Jerry Menard had his first sex.

When her parents eventually realized she was pregnant, they went off like a fire hydrant struck by a car, but all the more so after she told them I was the father and they learned I was but thirteen years old. Her own father, a big, big, B-I-G honcho with the electric company, refused to believe it. Even after Ricky was born, he paid for me to take a test to prove the fact I was, not wasn't. The day he came to the house he informed our family he had no interest in being the "grandfather to a child who's the offspring of a gravedigger's son." Pap politely said he was a groundskeeper, not a gravedigger, but it made no impression.

Mom then asked him, "Are you forcing your poor daughter to abort the baby?"

"We're a moral family," he replied, as if Mom had insulted him. "Of course we're not going to kill the baby. Trisha will be delivered of the child and then surrender it for adoption."

"What about our son?"

"He's still a kid, for godsakes. He'll do the same to someone else's daughter if you and your husband don't get a leash on him."   

"Then what about us?" said Pap.

And Mom said, "Being grandparents to your daughter's child, we would like that."

He shook his head in a manner that said, "No way," and it angered me that he thought so terribly little of Pap and Mom, and Doreen and myself. To him we were dirt, slime, absolute trash, and to make as certain as possible that nobody would associate his own with us, he was intending to sign my child over to some couple who lived far, far away.

"He'll put his name to paper!" Doreen boldly up and said. "We all will."

He interpreted this to mean we would hook up with a lawyer and fight the adoption.

"Surely you realize I have many more resources than you," he said, confronting Pap. "I can have my attorney drag this out till you've squandered every dollar you have saved, and the court still won't award the child to you."

"He'll sign a paper that says he won't ever reveal Trisha is the mother. But if not, then he'll start telling everyone right away that he is. And so will I! We'll tell it to all our classmates, all our teachers, everyone. I'll even personally write it on the bathroom wall of the girls' room at school."

His head swung slowly left like a motorized spotlight on a penitentiary tower as he suddenly realized Doreen was the family member he should be addressing, not Pap. And he didn't need to ponder the consequences of her threat for very long before buying into it.

When Doreen and I return from school, Mom is upset. The neon tets are dead. She discovered them on the floor. Pap says fish often jump out of containers, that he should have found a lid for the glass block formerly used for keeping candles burning at the breezy hillside cemetery; but Pap is covering for my son, not because he believes Ricky needs a break, but because Mom does. Because Mom, who is home all day, everyday, with my boy, needs hope this countless small disaster is of another's making, and that her grandson is not on course to become the criminal who will deserve every finger pointed his way. Yet I know the fish are dead because of Ricky. I know he belly-smacked his tiny hands into the block and tormented the little creatures by chasing them back and forth in the narrow container until they chose the only escape route possible, up and over its lip. I am certain, too, my son made no effort to save them, to scoop them up off the linoleum and drop them back into the water, that he fell onto his knees and watched them die slowly, that he most likely lowered his head to within inches of one and stared into its tiny eye until the gill behind lay still.

"Why did you bring them home in the first place?" Mom demands. "And you give me more than what you did the last time, or so help me!"

"A salesman at the store saw me looking at them while waiting for Ed," Pap says gently, aware that today Mom teeters on the edge. "He asked how they made me feel. I said watching them made me feel relaxed. And he said that's the very reason many people display feesh in their homes. He said they find it calms them down after a hectic day at work or whatever."

"And you thought--"

"No. Not you or me. For him."

My son, for all the trouble he is, is not a dummy. He is aware he's the subject of his grandfather's talk; however, he will grow into a man who will not care what others say about him, whether good or bad. He will hear their words, but none will ever matter, and that's because other people will never matter to him. Not even me.

"I was mistaken, thinking the feesh alone," Pap says, his head shaking from disappointment. "I don't know what I was thinking."

Besides being the good-looking twin, Doreen's the smarter. "She just got the better egg," Mom liked to say before Ricky's arrival, while Pap, pretending this was an important moment in the battle of the sexes, would laugh and counter with "Pretty sure of yourself, woman, aren't you?" Our English teacher told the class that Doreen is able to intellectualize the world. What I think this means is, we can look at the same thing, and while others and myself will see what's there, my sister will see what isn't--and yet really is. It's not a simple idea to grab onto and explain, and I can feel the envy inside, along with regret that she and I did not develop from a single egg.

Although Doreen herself had yet to have sex, she knew at once the first time I did, and she asked a few questions about the experience and wanted to know with whom. After I told her, she made me promise not to boast to my friends and reveal Trisha's identity, which is the reason I was later surprised that she threatened to do exactly that to her father. Of course she'd realized very quickly that Mr. Big Electric Executive wasn't so worried about his daughter as he was about himself.

There never was a document to be signed that would have forbidden me to reveal the name of Ricky's mother. Although Doreen had introduced the idea, she's the only one of the family who really didn't expect such a thing to happen. By the following morning she had it all figured, and on our way to school I listened to her explanation. Trisha's father, in spite of his regard for our family as low-lifes, would trust our word not to spread anything, she said. She also predicted it would be otherwise with him. When I asked what she meant, she said I could find out for myself over the weekend.

So on Saturday morning she shouted me awake and after breakfast, we rode off on our bikes. The places we visited, to my complete disgust, were men's toilets. She said I was to read whatever graffiti was on their walls. Most I entered, or the two of us together. A few she dared advance into alone when I crabbed what we were doing was nuts. We must have visited the john of every convenience store and fast-food restaurant operating in our area, but came up empty. There were only the usual scribbled messages, and they meant nothing to me. I'd had enough and told her so.

"We're doing something wrong," she said. "Do you know what it is?"

"I don't even know what I'm looking for because you won't tell me. I know only it has something to do with Trisha's jerk of a father. But do you think he ever eats at a fast-food joint?"

"Hey, you're right," she said, her face lighting up. "We've been exploring the wrong places." And for a moment I thought maybe my egg wasn't so bad after all, but in the end I figured my knowing something Doreen didn't was just a fluke.

And so next we headed out to the rich golf country club known as Sugar Bush, which spreads across the flats east of town and is overlooked by the cemetery where Pap works. The club seemed to provide scrubbed and fancy restrooms in just about every corner and down every hallway, as though people who are much better off than most of us can't wait very long once they get the call. Doreen and I checked the walls and stalls of each. Again we discovered nothing. Of course, there are other places where the area's wealthy hang out and Doreen wanted to persist with the search. But by this time I'd really had enough and started for home.

Doreen, too, reluctantly surrendered that day and went home with me, but it was certainly not the end to her quest. She would continue into the following year to visit the area's numerous men's rooms, even revisiting most because of the possibility that either of us might have overlooked "it." Still, in spite of her perseverance, which sometimes included a disguise using a piece or two of my clothing, she never found what she was seeking. Neither would she say what she was expecting to find, although this unwillingness may have been keyed to her age of thirteen when she was not inclined to swear, the reason she wanted me to see for myself. At seventeen there was no such reluctance, and when Jasky provided the cue in the form of a questionable glance at Ricky, she finally let out.

"'Jerry Menard fucks his twin sister.' That's what's written on the wall of a toilet somewhere in this town, Jerry. And Trisha's old man is the one who wrote it!"

If I gave the smallest hint of a response, it didn't show, and Doreen was expecting one.

"You don't believe he would do such a terrible thing, do you?" she said. "You think because he wears a suit every day, lives in that rich house and drives a big fancy car, that writing a thing like that on a restroom wall is beneath him. Well, Jerry, writing it on a wall at a dozen locations would be beneath him. Scratching it on a single wall where others just like himself will see it isn't the least beneath him.

It remained a stretch. "That's all we really know about him and it isn't much," I said.

"We know more than you think. Look at Trisha. She's in her last year of college. Four years she's been away from her father."

"What's that prove?"

"Has she ever called you once, or written a letter, asking about Ricky?  It's not like she couldn't do it without her father knowing."

"Oh," was all I could say, as I understood what she was getting at.

"You know, too, Jerry, I think I gave him the idea when I threatened to write it on the walls at school. He wasn't worried about how uncomfortable and embarrassing that would be for his daughter. He was worried that one of us might write it where the kind of people with whom he hangs out would see it. And that's the reason he didn't wait to put out a little graffiti on his own. It's like he figured if he planted the seed, Ricky's birth would serve as the proof to others that the statement was correct."

Perhaps I am gullible, but it still remained hard to believe that a wealthy man, as he is, would ever take time out of his day to scratch something horrible on the wall of a men's john, realizing, surely, that he might even be caught in the defacing act. Still, I half-smiled to give her something.

"Someday, you'll run across it when you're not expecting," she said.

"Or you," I said.

"I'm too old to enter your restrooms. Someday, Jerry, you'll look up when you're finished doing your business, and it'll be on the wall right before your eyes."

On the street at the front of the house there's commotion. Mom and I go to the door, open it, peer out. Pap and Jasky are standing at the rear of Jasky's pickup, both working hard to release a jammed tailgate, while Jasky's schnauzer is scampering wildly from one yard to another, barking madly in the process. "Stay out of the street!" he shouts at it. Mom, displaying a worried face, follows the little dog with her eyes. I'm suddenly anxious for Mom. In the bed of the pickup sits an aquarium; it's rather large. The gate finally yields and Jasky starts to pull on it. Pap points to its support stand.

"You're right," says Jasky. "This tank weighs a ton. No sense putting it down, only to lift it again."

They slide the wooden stand off the truck bed and carry it toward the house. It's heavy, too, made obvious by their fast walk and shortened steps that cause them both to look a little sissified. When Pap sees me, he indicates with his head there are other things, smaller items in the pickup, to be brought in. He doesn't look at Mom as he and Jasky pass through the open door and disappear inside.

From around the corner of the house come Doreen and Ricky. I am already at the bed of the truck, searching for the other things. They've been tossed willy-nilly into several cardboard boxes: hood, pump, tubing, a fluorescent bulb, several bags of gravel, a filter of some kind, some fake plants, a plastic tall ship with a hole in its hull and broken masts, plus there's a bucket containing a thermometer, tube connectors, a bottle of some chemical to remove chlorine from the water, and other odds and ends.

Doreen stops next to me and looks at the various items in the boxes. Ricky is watching the frenetic schnauzer. Pap and Jasky reappear, and I now notice that my father is wearing a smile.

"What are you waiting for?" he says. "Grab a box and take it into Ricky's room."

I offer to replace him with myself for hauling the heavy aquarium inside.

"Then you take Ed's end," he says. "Give him a break."

I scramble onto the bed and step among the boxes to get behind the aquarium.

"Fifty-five gallons," Pap says, beaming. "It's used, as is the rest of the stuff. But the storeowner swore it's all in good shape, right Ed?"

"I've known him a long time. He wouldn't gyp a soul."

Doreen is staring through a window on the cab with one eye on Ricky, who continues to stare at the schnauzer.

"Is there a net?"

"You don't need a net, Doreen," says Pap. "You just take those bags with the feesh and float them in the tank until the water temperatures are the same. Then open the bag and the feesh swim out."

"I think he did throw in a net," Jasky says to my sister as he opens the door on the cab. "It might be in that box with the hood."

Jasky reaches inside and pulls out one of the bags containing fish. "Hey, little Ricky," he calls. "You can help too. After all, these are for you."

Jasky holds out the bag and Ricky turns his attention away from the dog and approaches, almost suspiciously, his eye on Jasky as much as on the plastic bag.

"Go on. Take it inside."

Jasky reaches out and grabs my son's hand. He places the bag in it, then grabs the other hand and folds it over the first.

"Rick-eeee," says Doreen, her second syllable a slow rise.

My son elevates his arms to the heavens, then dashes the bag to the ground. It's only luck it doesn't break.

"Well now," says Jasky, making a face of stretched-out muscle as he lowers his head and looks away like someone who wonders why he ever involved himself in a matter.

"When everything's set up, he won't do that," says Pap. "So let's get at it. These things can't stay in these bags forever."

Before lifting my end of the aquarium, I shift my gaze to the doorway to read Mom's reaction. Only she's disappeared.

Ricky's windowless bedroom at a back corner of the house is the smallest, and the aquarium seems even bigger than it actually is. It dominates the space, especially once it is filled with water, the plastic plants and two dozen fish are added, the tiny pump is pushing countless bubbles of air through six transparent tubes extending from what Pap informed everyone is an underground filter, and the fluorescent light under the chrome hood is switched on. The inch-long neon tets--this time there are eight--school from one end of their new environment to the other, their colors brilliant under the light, as are the pink and white gravel and the green artificial flora. And the room itself glows softly.

This could work, I think. And Pap, I can see, has recaptured his smile since the incident earlier involving Jasky. Even Mom seems hopeful, as she positions herself so that Ricky, already dressed for bed, does not see that she is submerging a hand into the aquarium to move the tall ship with the broken masts among the plants and on its side where the gaping hole of its hull becomes of immediate interest to the tets.

"It's supposed to be a sunken ship, so it should look like one," she says to the rest of us.

As a finishing touch, Doreen brings in several pillows from elsewhere in the house and pushes them together on the throw rug in front of the aquarium. Then she leads Ricky over and sets him down among them. The only sound is the quiet, reassuring hum of the air pump and the bubbling aeration coming from inside the glass tank. I'm feeling optimistic, we all are, it's on our faces, except Doreen's remains all business, and Ricky's--well, my son's looks are often a mystery.

"We'll just have to wait and see," says Pap. "Let's leave him alone for the rest of the evening. And Doreen, since you're always the last person in this house to go to bed, will you look in and turn out the light in the hood?"

Early in the night the need to relieve myself gets me up. I leave my room for the hall and the bathroom at one end. But at the opposite end, there is light seeping from under the door on Ricky's bedroom. The rest of the house is dark so that I can only conclude Doreen went to bed, forgetting what Pap asked her to do, although that would be very unlike her. First I pee, then pad down to where I hope my son is sleeping. I push gently on the door.

Still lounging among the pillows, Ricky remains awake, his eyes fixed on the glowing aquarium, inside of which there is not a fish to be seen.

A strange thought strikes me. My four-year old son has eaten all his fish, swallowed them whole.

I tiptoe over to the aquarium. He doesn't shift his attention the least from it to his father. Are all the tropicals hiding inside the damaged hull of the ship, where it is dark and where they can avoid his penetrating gaze?

No. The fish, simply, are gone, and yet I am relieved not to see any of them lying dead around my feet, although there are a few tiny pools of water that keep me from enjoying my relief completely. Leaning against the rear of the stand is the net. I reach down to touch its mesh and discover it is wet.

"They're next to my bed," I hear Doreen say in a hush. She's behind me, at the door.  "I put them in a bucket. I'm taking them to school tomorrow. To the biology room."

When I turn to look at her, I see that she is staring at Ricky even though she's speaking to me.

"Pap," I begin to say.

"Pap means well, but he's wrong, Jerry. He would have destroyed them all. This is better. This will accomplish what Pap wanted in the first place. This will give Mom some relief. Have you looked at him?  Look at his jammies. He's wet to the shoulders."

Ricky is, I can see that now. Both sleeves are sopped with water, and on the pillow beneath each arm is a widening circle of dampness.

"They were dry when I removed the fish," she says quietly, at the same time now looking at me because it is clear there is more contained in what she has said, and she wants me to realize what it is. Try as I do, I'm unable. It's the two eggs again.

She raises her whisper a notch, for emphasis. "Look at him closely, Jerry. Look at his eyes!"

I do as she says and stoop, getting almost directly in front of my boy's line of vision. The eyes are wide open and they are cycling. The things they track are the unending bubbles shifting and bumping against the insides of the tubes as they rush to the surface. From bottom to top, and back to bottom, that's the movement of my son's eyes.

"He tried to kill them, Jerry. He didn't know. I'll explain to Pap in the morning. But it's going to be all right."

Still, something, I don't know what it is, worries me as I watch the eyes of my son continue to cycle. I can hope only that soon enough it will worry my sister as well.

Home Spine The Buckseller  bUSEs  Crusher Run  Operculum  Somalia Unvisited Spaces A Root Cellar Memory Doreen's Snoozelen A Bigger Case