Sunday Night Radio

Eventually, Donna just put Jimmy's hand directly on her knee. But he was still distracted, and she watched, disappointed, as it slipped off again. "Jimmy," she said, "are you going to keep fidgeting with that contraption, or pay attention to the girl who is sitting here with you?"

His face turned back in her direction, that adorable goofy grin back on it, but she could tell his ears were still turned toward the radio. Other than the starlight, its dial was the only thing casting light over the porch: pale orange, spreading out like firelight. It was actually rather romantic, if only he would realize that.

"Sorry," he said. "It's just... it's some kind of astronomy report. Which is kind of a hobby for me. Have you ever looked through a telescope? Like, a really good one?"

She bit her lip and shook her head no, trying to embody the word "coquettish", which she only dimly understood from Mother's French romances, sometimes left lying around where Donna could sneak glances at the dogeared pages.

"Oh, you oughta sometime. I've seen the rings around Saturn, the moons of Jupiter..."

Donna sighed. The radio had been playing nice dance music for a while; why did they keep interrupting it with news reports? "Look, Jimmy," she said, shifting toward him, causing the porch swing to rock a little, "we don't have long to sit here, you know, alone. My dad's going to get tired of trying to listen to Edgar Bergen on the little set inside, and then he's going to want to come listen on this one. Mother said she can keep him distracted in there for a while, but he's going to storm out the front door soon. Now, isn't there anything you'd like to talk to me about before he does that?" Which, in Donna's mind was equally as brazen as asking, "Am I going to get kissed tonight or what?"

That seemed to bring the focus back into Jimmy's eyes. While the sounds of an orchestra playing "Stardust" drifted out of the speaker, he turned fully toward her. He had been trying to keep the swing still and quiet so he could hear what the newsmen were saying, but now he picked up his feet and let it sway. Donna felt the movement, a subtle pull, deep in her stomach.

Jimmy seemed to be reaching for something to say. "Why did your Pa bring the radio out on the porch anyway? Mine has his next to his chair and guards it with his life."

Finally, he was making an attempt at conversation. That was progress, anyway. "Well," Donna began, "he brought it out here back at the beginning of summer so he and his buddies could listen to Joe Louis knock out 'some Kraut' at Yankee Stadium -- that's what Father said. But after that, the evening news started getting filled with stories about that Hitler guy, who I suppose wants to take over all of Europe. Mother found it all too upsetting, and didn't want to listen to it herself, so she talked him into keeping it out here for a while. They listen on the little set inside most nights. She says that one's easier to ignore."

"Uh-huh," he said. He was only half-listening again, wasn't he? What was she going to have to do to get him to pay attention, flick up her skirt and flash her legs? The newsmen were back again, and she thought she heard someone mention Grover's Mill, which actually wasn't all that far away. Clearly, this competition for Jimmy's mental attention was "escalating" -- another term she heard used a lot on Father's news programs.

She shifted the slightest bit closer to the boy next to her, making the swing sway a little more. "I know you've got quite a walk home, Jimmy," she said, "and can't stay too long. But I'm really glad you did. How long will it take you, you reckon?" She hoped this sounded like a reminder of how short their time was as well as a vague threat.

He considered this a little longer than she thought he should have to. "Half hour or so. Your house is almost exactly halfway between my house and church. But it's okay. Long walks don't bother me none, even at night."

Finally, something that made her smile. She knew he didn't appreciate how hard it had been for her to get him here, alone on the porch with her. Father said that people who lived as far out from town as Jimmy's folks did were all "low-class", but Mother understood. She had been the one who had talked both Father and Jimmy's parents into letting him stop by for a little while after church. She had even volunteered to drive Jimmy the rest of the way home, knowing full well the courtesy would be refused. But it was okay. Walking two miles home in the dark was just the right amount of trouble for himto go to, if he really liked Donna the way she thought she liked him.

She reached up and put a hand on his cheek, rubbing her palm across the light down that was just starting to turn into stubble. "You know, I was looking at your hair all through evening service tonight."

"My... my hair?" he asked, a little stupefied that she was touching him.

"Mm-hm," she said, marveling at the way its white-straw color seemed to emanate its own faint light in the darkness. "I like the way you cut it. It really suits you... My family always sits a few pews behind yours, and I was actually imagining what it would be like to... run my fingers through it." Her fingers slid under his ear and around toward the back of his head, moving from the close crop on the sides and back, up toward the longer, floppier part on top...

She felt his body stiffen, but realized it was not because of her hand; the music had fallen away again. Now the news guys were in some field where a meteorite had crashed down. And just like that, she had lost him again. Without removing her fingers from the softness of his hair, she began to half-jokingly scold, "You know, Jimmy, it's one thing to have a hobby--"

The look of concern that was spreading across his face made her stop. Even though the light on the porch was dim, she was sure that she could see his skin turning pale. The voices in the news report had faded away, and a strange grinding noise had taken its place.

Jimmy whispered two words, and their sincerity and heaviness made Donna's blood run cold. "They're here."

For the first time, Donna took a moment to listen to what the men on the radio were saying. They weren't looking at a meteorite, they claimed, but some kind of metal cylinder. As they took turns describing what was happening, she caught something familiar in one of their voices.

There were men down in the pit that the thing had gouged into the ground when it fell, and one of them had a microphone that he was using to listen to the hissing, scraping sound of the thing. One of them said it might be because the thing was cooling off after its burning plunge from the sky. Why did his voice sound so familiar? Was he some local newsman, who she had maybe heard hundreds of times on Father's news shows without realizing it?

There was a loud thunk from the radio speaker. Someone yelped that an end had fallen off the metal cylinder, and that it was hollow inside. She realized that the porch swing had slowed to a stop, because she and Jimmy were sitting frozen still, holding hands. Just as Donna's brain was wondering how she had missed that happening, her body was registering it too, a warm flush that was creeping up her neck to her face. This was followed by a very different, plummeting feeling in her stomach as the man on the radio described what was coming out -- no, not just that, it was *crawling* out -- of the hollow thing in the pit. His words were fast and breathless, describing its rubbery appearance, some kind of heavy, tentacled brown horror...

Jimmy suddenly jammed his feet down on the porch's boards and bolted to his feet. His fingers remained entwined with Donna's, jerking her forward a little bit. "It's them!" he whisper-shouted. "They've finally come!"

The harsh sound of his voice, so astonishingly present, brought Donna out of her radio trance. She was suddenly back on the porch with him, and perilously close to losing what should have been the romantic high point of her life so far. She stood up next to him, so the tangle of their fingers could mesh properly. "Who, Jimmy?" she asked, wanting to hear that passionate tone of voice again, even if he wasn't talking about her.

"The Martians!" he said. "They shot these things out of some kind of space gun on their planet, and now they're landing all over the place!"

A sudden, piercing whine came from the radio, followed by a sound Donna had never heard in real life before... men screaming in terror, and then in pain as whatever ray the Martians were using set them all on fire. She suddenly felt lightheaded, and started to wobble on her feet. Even after the broadcast was abruptly cut off, she felt like that rising heat Jimmy had stirred in her was zipping up her spine and over the top of her head, making her muscles lose all their strength. She was slumping against Jimmy's skinny form...

And then she found herself wondering when they had started dancing. There was music playing again, and Jimmy's arms were around her, and she was leaning against him. When had that happened? Then, after a blissful second, her body went to ice and she remembered what was happening. She tilted her head back, and looked up into Jimmy's face. He was looking down at her with concern, as well as a new resolve she had never seen before.

In that moment, he suddenly wasn't just the gawky boy she had a crush on anymore. She felt she was glimpsing the man he would become, someone strong and decisive, someone who would be able to "protect her". Sometimes Mother would describe Father in this way, and told Donna that this was a quality she should look for.

"Are you all right?" Jimmy asked her, and Donna couldn't keep a comforted smile from spreading across her face.

The man on the radio was talking again. One of them, at least, had escaped the decimating fire, and was being interviewed about this new, horrific weapon the Martians were using on people less than twenty miles away.

Then, without warning, the timbre of the speaker's voice dropped into place. She knew exactly who it was. It was The Shadow. The one Father sometimes listened to on his police shows, the one who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

"Jimmy..." she said, trying to get her feet back under herself.

Jimmy continued to hold her tightly, and stroked her shoulder in a way he probably thought was reassuring. "It's okay," he was telling her. "We'll fight them. They're going be sorry they messed with us."

"I know who it is," she said. She was trying to straighten up fully, but he wasn't giving her balance back to her. "He's an *actor*. I don't think this is--"

"Listen!" Jimmy hissed through gritted teeth. More breathless reports were flowing from the radio, now describing other falling meteors, and the giant mechanical tripods that came from within them. The Martians were using these to march across the land in huge strides, destroying power lines and returning fire on the Army, which had apparently arrived in record time. For almost two full minutes, Donna allowed herself to be held fast in Jimmy's arms, and the more she listened, the funnier it became.

What made it worse was that she could tell Jimmy believed every bit of it. She could feel his hands tightening on her as the radio play became more and more harrowing. She didn't know why she wasn't prying herself away from him -- was it because this was almost exactly the scenario she had hoped to be in this evening, just without the alien invasion?

She could feel the muscles of Jimmy's chest tighten, hear his jaw creak as his teeth gritted in resolve. "I'm going to get my father's gun," he said, low and meaningful, and Donna had to fight to stifle a giggle. "Then I'll come back, and we'll barricade your house... in case they decide to come this way." He sounded like he was ready to run off to war.

She gathered her composure, and then breathed, trying to sound as small as possible, "But what about your own house? Don't your parents need you?"

Jimmy's eyes turned up, scanned the horizon intently. "My brothers are there. They'll do what they have to. But tonight, your family needs me more."

Donna was biting the insides of her cheeks so hard that she thought she was beginning to taste blood. Part of her kept expecting Jimmy to break up and reveal that he was in on the joke, but the longer she looked up at him, the more she became that it wasn't going to happen. Her amusement began to slide into concern.

"I've got to go, Donna," Jimmy said -- was he intentionally trying to sound like some movie serial hero? "But I'll return with protection for you and your family. We'll make our stand here... when the Martians come."

Then she was pressing her hands against his chest, feeling how hard his heart was beating under her palms. It hurt a bit to know that it wasn't acting that way because of her, but it wasn't all that bad either.

As sonic Armageddon continued to play out in the air around them, the couple turned away from the house, facing the rough farmland on the other side of Donna's street. They had been outside for long enough now that the moonless night's stars seemed particularly numerous, and she could even see their shadows dimly fanning out across the entire length of the lawn, cast by the radio set's light.

The sound of artillery reverberated around them, and Donna suddenly knew what she wanted. She allowed herself to believe that they really were in the middle of an attack, that the world as they knew it was about to end. The adrenaline of coming battle thundered through her, and the beat of Jimmy's heart was matching hers, hot and fast.

"Jimmy," she said, and had to physically take his chin in her hand and turn it toward her, away from the fearful sounds of battle. There was an intensity in his eyes that she had never seen before. "I think you're one of the bravest men I've ever met. I want you to go now, do what you have to do. Then come back to me. Please don't let them hurt my family. I'll be waiting here for you."

She was gazing deeply into his eyes, and he into hers, his face huge, so unbearably close. They were coming together amid the crash and boom of the huge guns... Their lips touched, pressed tightly, and Donna felt her knees wobble again as that internal heat set her entirely alight. For a moment she was acutely aware of everything around her, the light breeze that wafted the scent of imaginary Martian smoke, the firmness/softness of Jimmy's lips, the warmth of the orange-yellow radio light washing over them. It was perfect.

After a timeless moment, Donna pushed her hands against his chest, breaking off their kiss, long before she wanted it to be over. "Now go," she said, summoning all the drama she could. "Then hurry back, and save me."

Jimmy's features hardened in resolve, his pale cheeks flushed, and he broke off from her at a dead run. His church shoes slammed down on the boards, then launched him down to the ground without touching a single porch step. He thumped away at full speed.

Donna watched him go, the air around her suddenly feeling colder. By the time he got home, she figured, the truth would be revealed. He'd probably get swatted by the his older brothers for falling for such an obvious trick so close to Halloween. Oh, well. Her lips still burned from his kiss, and she licked them to attempt to preserve his heat, to keep the memory fresh for as long as she could.

A long pause came from the radio behind her, as poison gas finally engulfed New York and the gunners succumbed. Then a voice: "You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air, in an original dramatization of 'The War of the Worlds' by H. G. Wells. The performance will continue after a brief intermission."

Donna switched the set off and wandered inside, a big grin on her face.

The Drive Home

They should have been able to make it home by midnight. Connor was just as tired as the rest of his family, but he had assured everyone that he was fine to drive the rest of the way. And he honestly felt that he was; there was a part of him that wanted to hold onto the relaxed-adrenalized vacation feeling the weekend had given him, for as long as he could. So, as the sun started its downward dive off to their right, he threw back the rest of his caffeinated iced tea and settled in behind the wheel.

The kids were fine in the back; he hadn't heard a sound from them since just after dinner. Through glances in the rear-view mirror, he watched them settle in, noting the stages: from talking to each other, to gravitating toward their phones, then only listening via earbuds, finally falling asleep with their heads resting on propped-up pillows. The final step was the phones darkening to sleep as well.

Connor and his Miranda had talked in the front seats all through this time, taking advantage of the hissing white noise of the highway, and the fact that they didn't have to look at each other as they spoke. It always seemed that conversation with a spouse was easier and more truthful when you didn't have to look them in the eyes when you did it. But a little while ago she too had reclined her seat a little, and nodded off. Connor kept stealing glances over at her. The sun was coming closer and closer to setting in the window just beyond her, and it was kind of mesmerizing the way the angled light made her hair and blouse glow around the edges, as if she were an astral projection being beamed in from somewhere far away.

It made him smile to see her so relaxed and peaceful. The camping trip had made her less tense than he had seen her in a long while. Even though this alone would be enough to make him feel triumphant, it was sweetened by this fact: he had pushed the idea of the trip saying that it would help her unwind, and here was proof he was proven right. It was petty, he knew, but he couldn't deny that it was there.

As the sunlight deepened through the rainbow and eventually disappeared, leaving twilight behind it, the reddish-gold nimbus around Miranda's form dissipated too, although he found he was just as content to have the ungilded, real live woman nestled in the car's bucket seat next to him. He reckoned they must be about halfway home, and turned his full attention back to the winking yellow line at the center of the two-lane highway as it wound through the lightly wooden northern stretches of the state. That line was the brightest thing in the world now, the moon nowhere to be seen, and the lights of passing towns still infrequent and fleeting.

He wasn't quite sure when the fog started. By the time he noticed that he could see the edges of the cones of light emanating from the car's headlights, they were already well into it. It wasn't that he hadn't been paying attention; in fact, he chalked it up to the fact that he was paying too much careful attention to that center line. He had never actually felt distracted, but its near-hypnotic winking had certainly chased all other thoughts out of his head. He took a new look around, realizing that he and his family were now cruising through full dark, with a fair percentage of their forward-pointing lights being thrown back at them as they sped down an illusory tunnel bounded by mist.

Connor found that he wanted to turn on the radio, to hear something other than his own thoughts as they continued to slide forward through the dark. Any sign of the world beyond the grayness would have been a comfort. But the volume needed to ease his gently-jingling nerves (thanks, iced tea) would have woken up at least one member of his family, which would be followed by questions about how far they were from home, what's the deal with all this fog, and why didn't he slow down a little bit... all of which were questions he didn't have answers to. He just wanted to push through and get clear of the obscurity as soon as possible. It felt imperative that his family not lose their relaxed vacation-glow, and if he had to go through some tense minutes alone as they slumbered, he would.

There was a flash of light off to to his left, a tiny glint that hit the corner of his vision. At first he wasn't even sure that it was real. It could have been a dashboard light momentarily refracting off the inside of his window, or any number of other things. He shifted his head around experimentally, to see if he could replicate it, but it wasn't until he stopped trying that it happened again. Not only that, but this time it had some kind of movement that Connor's mind somehow attached *swivel* the word to, as if the beam of a tiny lighthouse had swung across him. Again, it disappeared before he could find where it came from.

The air in the car suddenly felt stuffy, heavy with warm, exhaled sleep-breaths. They had rolled up the windows after the sun stopped adding heat to the car's interior, but he hadn't yet turned on the fans to bring in outside air. Now he felt tiny beads of sweat erupting on his forehead, and wanted cool air. He flicked the switch to the lowest setting, and heard the reassuring whoosh of fresh air entering the car. His hand froze halfway back to its spot on the steering wheel.

Smoke, he thought immediately. This isn't fog. It's smoke. The smell was unmistakable. It wasn't a cultured smell, either. Connor had learned long ago that the only smoke that smells good is the kind created by controlled fires. Bonfires, fireplaces, and barbecue smokers all were cautious and pleasant compared to this. Within the few seconds of outside he had breathed before he flicked the fan back off, Connor had smelled raw nature in the smoke: leaves, scorched earth, and what he imagined might have been animal hair. It was caustic and dangerously wild, stirring some primal fear deep inside his bones.

His eyes flicked to Miranda, and then the rear-view to check on the kids. Was their sleep being turned over by the smell of smoke? None of them stirred, and even as Connor vowed to get them through this undisturbed, he found he was relieving his foot's pressure on the accelerator. Was it possible that he was driving his family right into a forest fire? His eyes tried to scan everything before him at once. There was no reddish light coming from anywhere (although he had to admit he didn't know just how much he should expect to see through the encroaching smoke), nor had there been any kind of roadblock to warn him. Again, he barely resisted the urge to turn on the radio to see if there was any kind of news being broadcast.

Another flash of light, this time off to the right, just above Miranda's shoulder. This time his nerves were enough on edge that he could whip his head around and catch a glimpse of what caused it... and immediately wished he hadn't. He now could tell that what appeared to be a single flash was, in actuality, two. And below and between the pair of tiny, perfect circles, was a lean triangular nose.

It was a face, perched only about twenty feet away from the car.

As soon as Connor saw it, it was gone, obscured by Miranda's shoulder, and then the body of the car. Connor almost jerked sideways in his seat trying to look back and get another glimpse. It looked like whatever it was had been just off to the side of the road, but even as close as the face had appeared, it was just too dark and foggy (smoky, he corrected himself) to see.

When he sat back in his seat and firmly reestablished his hands on the wheel, Connor realized that the craning of his neck had turned the car slightly as well. The headlights were now angled just off the side of the road, but even before he straightened the car out, he saw four more of the little white lights, almost directly ahead of his skewed headlights.

This new pair of faces were turned toward him, their hunched bodies beside them. Connor blinked when he recognized the shapes. Gray wolves. There were wolves standing by the side of the road. Not moving, just standing there. Watching.

He kept a close eye on them as the car drifted past, going barely over twenty miles an hour now. Their heads turned to follow, their perfect circles of their eyes casting unwavering light directly into his.

Connor tipped the wheel so the car was heading straight again, and as he did he saw several more of those glowing eyes up ahead. At least five sets of them, randomly placed on either side of the street. His fingers audibly tightened around the wheel. Weren't animals supposed to run from a forest fire? So why were they just standing there, watching him drive by? They made no threatening moves, in fact had no menace in their features at all. He seemed to be drawing attention only because he was the only moving object in the still, smoky night.

Connor heard a barely-stifled gasp from the back seat. Julie. He instinctively held his finger up to his lips, making a silent shh, turning his head slightly to the side, hoping she could see the gesture from directly behind him. He looked in the rear view mirror to see her, and his heart dropped into his stomach. While he saw his daughter, her eyes wide as she looked forward out of the windshield, he also saw what was behind her.

In the middle of the road behind the car stood a pair of wolves, their eyes glowing red from the tail lights. They hadn't been there a mere second before, when the car had passed through the space they now occupied.

"Dad?" Julie whispered, her voice just on the near side of panic. "What are those?"

She clearly knew what they were. Connor knew she was asking the same thing he had been asking himself: *why* were they there? "I don't know," he whispered back in as even a tone as he could. "I'm going to just keep going, and pass them by."

"Should we wake them?" Julie asked, looking over at her brother, still asleep and leaning against a pillow stood on end and wedged against the duffel of future laundry.

Connor shook his head. "It's okay," he said. "Let them sleep. Nothing's going to happen." And he neglected to add, just don't look behind you, honey, and definitely don't think about how fast those things must have moved.

The ground was subtly rising on either side of the road. Connor kept looking ahead, continually hoping that the each tiny pair of bright eyes that appeared at the boundary where the road was lost in smoke would be the last, but there was always another pair beyond, and sometimes there were two. As the car drove deeper into a gulley that was slowly transforming into a ravine, the number of wolves visible by the side of the road continued to grow. And as much as he wanted to look in the rear view mirror to comfort his daughter, Connor couldn't. He could only imagine how many of the red-eyed things were behind them now, motionless and staring. The only safe place he could look was the flickering center line of the road, the only bit of color in this world of gray smoke, asphalt, and wolves.

He kept driving forward. There had to be an end to this, he kept thinking. They would have to come out the other side at some point. There was no major fire, no unnatural explanation for any of this. His family had only chosen the road home where a wolf pack had found the road as an easy means of escape from a smoldering lightning strike somewhere nearby. That's all. If he just kept following the yellow line, they would come out of it.

"I don't like this," Julie whispered from behind him. "Why are they just standing there?"

"It's okay," Connor replied, surprised at how calm and level his voice sounded. "It'll be over in a minute."

"Are you sure?" she asked, her voice starting to tremble. Nearly half the rising ground on either side of the car was now occupied by clusters of stoic, placid wolves, whose only movement was the turning of their heads as the family went by.

At some point, a rumbling had started underneath the car. It had started so subtly that Connor had missed it. The sound and feel was as if the ground were slowly turning to cobblestone underneath them. At the same time, he was noticing that the road itself was changing, too. The yellow line was become less distinct, the sudden new texture of the asphalt making its solid, predictable lines waver out of focus. There was more color creeping in too, a pinkish red that gave the edges of the road a disquieting meaty tone. On the shoulders of the road, in front of the ever-growing press of creatures, there now were low, yellow-white stones at periodic intervals, like markers. Where they appeared, it looked as if they were pushing up the pinkish, softer edges of the asphalt.

"What the hell are those?" he murmured to himself. He felt Julie's hand on his shoulder, gripping progressively tighter. And now he could see a general lightening, something far ahead through the smoke that was casting a strong, hellish light. Was that what was causing the pinkish appearance of--

Julie drew a sharp intake of breath and her fingernails dug deeply into Connor's shoulder, as if she had just figured out something. The road ahead had now taken on a full, undulating pinkness, the center line entirely lost. The stones poking up through the soil by the sides of the road, which formed a boundary the wolves seemed to not dare cross, grew taller and more triangular. The light ahead was starting to take form, a hazy, swirling ball that was always just a bit beyond the point where the smoke made it lose coherence, constantly threatening to rush forward and resolve its true form.

"Dad," Julie hissed, the words clearly requiring great effort not to be screamed. "We don't want to go there. You can turn us around."

Connor didn't respond, but kept the car moving forward. At some point he understood what she was seeing, too. The wolves with the glowing eyes continued to accumulate on the raised banks beside the road, the bumpy road vibrating the car growing more pink and more alive, the rows of sharp white rocks becoming taller and closer together, and a awareness was growing of the ridged red ceiling that was lowering down from above them... It would all close in on them when they reached that burning light, still straight ahead of them and rendering him powerless to turn his eyes away from it...

"Dad," he heard Julie's voice, very close and strained, speaking almost directly into his ear, "You. Don't. Have. To."

Her words made his eyes blink, and in that moment the spell was broken. He was no longer hypnotized by the fire lying ahead, did not feel compelled to drive directly down the burning throat of the biggest wolf that could ever exist. Connor wrenched the wheel to the right, aiming the driver's side of the car at edge of the narrow gap between the two nearest teeth, praying that there was enough of a gap for the car to slip through. He took one last, fleeting look over at Miranda, whose head had rolled to the side with the change of direction but still had not awakened, and then into the blazing eyes of the wolves that lay on the other side of the gap--

The car was wrenched upward on the right side, throwing him back in his seat, Julie's hand yanked from his shoulder, taking more of his strength than he expected with it. Then the car was bumping and rocking every direction at once, thumping and shuddering, the wheels spinning in air one instant, and churning through dirt and rock the next. The view through the windshield yielded nothing but gray smoke and gray fur.

After a few seconds they came to a stop, and Miranda was awake, yelling, "Jesus Christ, Conn, what the *hell*?" and Bryan was yelping incoherently from the backseat. It was a glorious, welcome sound, until he realized that Julie was silent.

There was less smoke ahead of them. Instead he could see trees, the tops of some of them, because the ground dropped away sharply before them. His headlights threw the leaves and needles into sharp relief, as well as the way the smoke drifted in front of them in pulsing waves. He called out his daughter's name and tried to turn around within his seat belt, painfully wrenching his shoulder as he did. But there was a familiar long-haired shape there, the eyes as wide and deep as her mother's, looking back at him.

Connor turned to his wife. "There's a fire ahead," he said, trying to soothe her continued shouts of incredulity. "I was just now able to see. We've got to turn around."

"And you had to run us off the road--?" Miranda began at the top of her voice, but stopped. She was now fully awake, looking at him clearly, and seeing the subtle way the burning forest beyond him was turning his silhouette into a frightening, wavering thing. She quieted.

Connor looked around, trying to determine where the wolves were. His eyes scanned the ground around the car, found nothing. Whether they had taken advantage of their speed, or had never existed at all, there was not a single glowing eye to be seen now. He checked the rearview, and there was the road behind them, solid and flat as it had always been. A broken wooden mile marker, which the car had hit as it left the road, was snapped off about a foot off the ground, pulsing red like a broken fang in the tail lights.

Connor took one more look at his family, noting the safety and preciousness of each and every one, Julie last of all. There seemed to be something that passed in a long look between the two of them, an understanding and a secret that they tacitly agreed to carry the rest of their lives. Connor put the car in reverse, backed onto the road, and headed back the way they had come. They would have to find another way home.

The smoke and light lessened the farther away they got, until the air was once again clear, but Connor did not turn the fan on.

Black Stairs

The stairs are made of black glass, thick and sturdy, but clear enough to reveal what lies beyond, which is more stairs. Flight after flight crisscross each other ad infinitum, stretching out in myriad profusion toward every horizon, and an unknown distance above and below. There are no railings to protect her from the empty spaces that lie between them, however they are so densely packed together that there really is no need. All that exists in this dim world are the stairs.

Lorianne walks up and down these frequently, after almost every day she spends deep in her research. She knows the dream is her mind's way of reconciling the rafts of information she has gathered, assembling all the abstract facts into some construct she can more easily process and contextualize. This doesn't stop the experience from being entirely bewildering, but it at least tries. There is no wind, and no sound. She is neither hot nor cold, but she does occupy a body. There is a simultaneous sense of vast space and near-claustrophobic closeness as she glides up and down flight after flight, exploring the many platforms that are the only other structures in this world, and what the stairs connect.

On each of these stand a pair of figures, facing each other. They are the male and female halves of a dynasty's beginning. Surrounding them, playing around their legs and chasing each other like little orbiting solar systems, are the children that resulted from their union. Sometimes there is only one, sometimes as many as twenty. And whether the parents loved each other, or even knew each other, is irrelevant; the children are theirs only biologically, and Lorianne is very aware that there are stories going untold here, other loves and other arrangements left out by the cold impartiality of genetics.

More often than one would expect, there are multiple spouses and intersecting clouds of progeny from different parental pairs, all of which occupy the same platform. It can make things pretty crowded, and hard for Lorianne to pick her way across to get to the stairs that will lead higher into the spreading tangle of black glass. This is almost always her goal, because the parents at the bottom of the stairs also are represented as children at the top of their own particular set, being displayed also as part of the generation that came before.

This mental representation of her family has been growing for years, ever since her interest in genealogy was first piqued by her grandmother. The woman had already been very elderly when Lorianne was a small child, and claimed that their family was descended from "the bluest of bloods". Nan was always the one who could point at old photos made of thick cardboard and easily recognize old relatives regardless of the point in their lives, and she often would pull a then child-sized Lorianne up into her lap and turn the heavy yellowing page and introduce her to everyone. When the pictures devolved further back in the books, turning into little rectangles of metal, Nan would go on to describe the parents and grandparents of each increasingly distant, fading relative, going back centuries to when they all lived in castles -- or so Nan would have her believe. Nan to wanted to make sure that Lorianne never forget that was the product of multiple long processions of kings and queens. And ever since then, Lorianne's slow, incremental studies had shown that this was true.

So, on these nights, she walks the stairs of her heritage. She has found that, if she walks up to a particular ancestor -- which more often than not shares at least one facial feature the what she will see in the mirror upon waking -- they will notice her, turn toward her and smile. Then the stairway that leads up to their parents' platform will become illuminated. Not brightly, but strong enough so that it is made visible even if there are multiple black stairways blocking it from view. Then the parents' ancestral stairs will light as well, and the grandparents', the branches multiplying in a dizzying fashion as they spread ever upward and outward, from two to four to eight to sixteen to thirty-two to sixty-four, off into the increasingly hazy distance of nothing but stairways upon stairways. This gives Lorianne comfort.

More unpredictable is what happens when she bends down and touches one of the unceasingly dashing children. The child will stop for a moment, distracted from his or her play, and look up into Lorianne's face with the same beatific smile, and stairways below -- those of their direct descendants -- will begin to illuminate. Sometimes the light will explode downward like a burning cataract, because while every person has exactly two biological parents -- no more, no less -- they might have dozens of children. Or, again more often than one might think, no stairways light up at all, and Lorianne realizes she is interacting with the last of a genetic line never to be replicated. It may be a child who didn't reach maturity, dying of plague, or battle, or possibly became a nun or monk. She has tried to spot differences between tumbling children who go on to be parents and those who do not, but can find no easy pattern.

This gets her thinking. If Lorianne were to follow the right stairways all the way down to the bottom, she would find her own platform, and the Lorianne that stands there alone. She has not yet done this in her dreams, mainly because of what she might learn... Will there be stairs beyond hers, or will there be a dead end? And what would either possibility even mean? Maybe there will be nothing but endless void below her spot, and she doesn't particularly want to witness that either. She consciously knows she walks through a dream, a construct her mind has invented, but she also realizes that there many more stairs, far in the distance above and to the sides, that represent people she doesn't consciously know exist yet. And if they are already there, then maybe this knowledge isn't exclusively hers... perhaps she's tapping into some kind of ultimate accumulation of genetic memory. In any event, she always puts off finding out anything that might lead her toward an answer. Maybe the next time I dream this, she thinks, even as she understands that she will always be better off not knowing.

While she spends a lot of time along the thin (as in, mildly-incestuous) upward spiral of her royal ancestry, she's aware that it is because her inner vision is clearest there. She knows enough about these people, their histories fleshed out enough, to appear as what are probably fairly accurate portraits of themselves. They wear fine clothing that softly runs under her fingers when she makes contact with them, and their rougher features have been smoothed by painter's brushes to appear just as they do on castle walls and in art galleries. In other, less verified lines, features become hazier, less distinct. In some obscure places they all but fade out, until they are transparent, faceless shades, mere placeholders for people and lives that she does not know.

Sometimes this is not the fault of the ancestors themselves. Beyond one particular set of grandparents there is a particularly dark and amorphous section, and Lorianne is forced to acknowledge it will always remain that way. That particular pair came from a country horribly ravaged in war, all findable evidence of their heritage erased. Not only this, but they have themselves passed away, so any other information they might have been able to tell her in waking life is forever beyond reach. This is when the inability to interact with the specters on the stairs is most infuriating. Her grandparents seem perfectly real and clear, and she can approach them as easily as she did when she was a child. But all she can do is put her hand on their shoulders and accept their mute smiles. When she does this, the branching lightning that outlines their ancestry appears, but every flight of stairs is vague and barely existent. They are only there because of logic -- after all, her grandparents had to descend from *someone*.

Sometimes it strikes Lorianne that, although her stairs are full of people both present and past, and the whole experience feels intensely personal, it isn't uniquely hers. As time goes on, she becomes intensely aware that everyone is part of their own vast web of relations, and not only this, but all these disparately vast networks are ultimately the same one. She always awakes from the dream with the sense that she could pick out the person she has least in common with in the world -- ideologically, ethically, ethnically, physically-- and whether she knows how or not, that person is somewhere on her stairs, and she on theirs. Inside this titanic web of black glass, the idea that anyone in the world could *not* be related to every other person is revealed as utterly ridiculous. She imagines that, somewhere up near the top, the widening web narrows to the very beginning of human existence, and she's almost as reluctant to see what lies at the very top as she is about the very bottom.

Part of Loiranne's protective melancholy about this place is because what comes next. Just as a person wakes up convinced that they will be able to recall the details of the dream they've just left, she always wakes with the thought that if only she could share this vision with others, so much could be solved: wars ended, families mended and reunited, misunderstandings resolved. But just as dreams unfailingly evaporate, this conviction disappears as well. How can the vividness, the importance, the sheer *size* of what she has experienced be transferred to anyone else? In wakefulness, the impossibilities of the real world inevitably drag these lofty thoughts to the ground.

And so, Lorianne invariably spends the next day walking in and among countless family members she does not -- and probably cannot -- know. She watches them being cruel and indifferent to each other, actively alienating themselves from each other when they could be helping. They fight over trivialities, never knowing what they truly mean to each other. And so she trudges on, passing through a perpetual family reunion that its participants do not even realize they're attending.

Scrap

Josh never noticed how loud the sound of opening his locker was, until he did it with no one around. In all the activity surrounding graduation ("the clangor and the fury", as Mr. Ridlack would have said), cleaning it out had been an activity that got continually pushed down to the very bottom of his list. He hadn't even been down this hall since before his English final, the last one before he was free to kick back for the summer. Now he had returned to it, on the last possible day before the doors would be locked, the hall feeling huge and empty now that it wasn't full of people he knew, all of whom were glad to see him and wanted to talk to him.

His only companion now was his backpack, sitting on the floor beside him with a gaping open mouth, ready for the piling in of eight months of stratified books and papers. He did so without looking at what he was pulling out, or bothering to sort the trash from the stuff he meant to keep. He was in a hurry; a bunch of his friends were going to head to the local Mexican restaurant to push too many tables together and make too much noise.

He almost didn't notice the tight little packet of paper that fell out and bounced off the toe of his shoe. It was clear right away that it wasn't his. The paper was purple, for one thing; he'd never owned anything other than standard ruled white in his whole life. Not only that, but it had been folded over a few times and tucked in on itself at one end, much more effort than he would have put into anything.

He stared at it for a second, puzzled, then bent down and picked it up. It even felt different than all the other paper he had been pulling out his locker. This was softer, and Josh thought maybe it was so old it had stared to disintegrate, but then realized it was just made that way. Inspecting it, he saw that he could see faintly dark, curving lines through the paper.

Handwritten lines. A note. Someone had written him a note on purple paper and stuck it in his locker.

He unfolded it as quickly as he could, the tight origami folds taking more than a little effort to get undone. The packet apparently had to be thin enough to be shoved through the tiny vent slats at the top of the locker. As he spread it out into one layer, he could see that it was a complete page, a few inches on a side, clearly ripped out of some girl's mini-journal. The words were written in distinctly feminine swirls and loops, in purple gel pen.

Its message was short, consisting only of the words "I wish you had."

Josh stood there, staring at them, as if more of the thought might magically appear after a few seconds. But none came, and the period at the end of the sentence seemed to make it clear that no more were coming. He looked up and around, instinctively searching the far ends of a hallway he already knew was empty. What did he expect to see? Half a face peeking at him around a corner? He heard Mr. Ridlack in his head again, a quote from an old poem read aloud in class, that stuck in his head for some reason: "Darkness there, and nothing more."

Just to be absolutely sure, Josh flipped the note over in his hands. The back was blank. His brow furrowed, and then he tossed the note aside. After all, there wasn't anything else he could learn from it. The creased curves of the paper caused it to tumble end over end in the still air, gliding right back into Josh's locker. It landed on the remaining layers of detritus, as if reminding him where it had come from. He sighed, exasperated.

He saw messages like this all the time online, half-formed thoughts that weren't really intended for anyone specific, just words that people threw out into the world to get them out of their own heads.

That's why it should have been so easy for him to ignore it. He was actually reaching for the note again, ready to ball it up this time before throwing it as far down the hall as he could, when something else his English teacher had said came to him. "Every word is put there for a reason, and an author makes the conscious decision to use each one that way. If you really want to understand the written words, you have to think about why those particular words were used, in that particular order."

It was funny. On any other day, after taking any other test, Mr. Ridlack's disposable wisdom wouldn't have been so clear in Josh's head. He knew that as soon as he was done cleaning out his locker, he could go meet his regular friends, order his usual food, and see what kind of typically stupid stuff they were all going to do that evening. But once that purple paper was in his hand again, he lost his hurry. He found himself going over it again, searching it for more clues.

"I wish you had." This wasn't someone fishing for attention. This was a note, written in actual handwriting, and put specifically into his locker, so only he would see it. It was anonymous, too... either the person assumed he would know who wrote it, or they didn't want him to know. He didn't recognize the handwriting at all, although to be honest he probably had never seen anything physically written down by over half of his friends. So he had no way of figuring this out.

Or did he? One of the upper layers of excavation in his locker had contained his yearbook, which had been in there ever since they had become available. There had been a mad scramble that day to get everyone's signature, which monopolized almost an entire school day. But he now had handwriting samples from everyone in his circle. He dug it out of his backpack and now started flipping through it.

Most of the signatures were on the inside front and back covers, since it was the place that had the most blank space, and in Josh's both areas were filled with handwriting of all sizes and orientations. Some were heartfelt (he noted the nice things Tanya had said about him, even though she had been seeming to avoid him lately), and other friends went out of their way to write the most comically offensive things they could, notably the classic epithet from Brandon that began "I love you dearly..."

But Josh wasn't looking for content, he was looking for form. He held the note next to the pages so that he could compare the swirly loops. He even noted that the "i" in "wish" was an incomplete circle. But he couldn't find any sampled handwriting that even came close. No purple gel pen, either. So unless one of his friends had an unusual talent for disguising their handwriting, it wasn't any of them.

And then there were the words themselves. "I wish you had"... had what? He had just been thinking, as he had started cleaning out his locker, about how great the last few months had been. Everything about high school had been reaching its high point and ending at the same time, which gave everything an extra layer of importance. He felt like he had been on an adrenaline high for two months. But here was someone who was pointing out that he had somehow forgotten something.

If he knew who had written it, he'd have some idea of what that thing was. He knew he should just ignore it and carry on. So, what, some girl he didn't even know put a random note in his locker, and he was supposed to devote time to solving the puzzle? But he couldn't put it down, either to throw it into his backpack for later contemplation, or to chuck it into a corner where the school's summer janitorial crew would take it away forever.

Until this moment, Josh had pretty much known what was going to happen, tonight, tomorrow, this summer, next fall, next year. He was going to go hang out with his friends when he wasn't working his crappy part-time job, then go to college in the fall, make new friends, and then just keep going. The path was clear, and not only was he fine with that, he hadn't even stopped to consider if it was really what he wanted. But here he was, staring at this maddeningly vague piece of paper. He couldn't shake the feeling that the message was explicitly designed to trigger something in *him*, and once it did he would know what this mystery girl was talking about.

What was it he hadn't he thought to do? He could almost picture this young woman he had clearly overlooked, watching him all year from somewhere nearby but infinitely removed, looking on in silent pain as Josh missed some opportunity, fretfully chewing her lip but unable to speak... until now, when she felt she couldn't stand by any more. What was it she knew that he didn't?

Now that he was being forced to think about it, Josh realized he had never consciously decided whether the path he was following was the one he should be on, or if it were even really the one he wanted. There was someone out there who didn't think so, so why did he? The books he had studied in Mr. Ridlack's class had been full of characters making choices about the path of their life. "The Raven", The Great Gatsby, Things Fall Apart, Crime and Punishment... Josh realized it had secretly been the theme of the whole semester. Mr. Ridlack said it point-blank one time: "Do you take hold of your life, and control it yourself? Or do you let others make the choice for you?"

It suddenly struck Josh that, in the guise of a few purple words on a scrap of purple paper, he was being asked the question again. And this time it wasn't in a book, where some old person who had never really existed in the first place was having an existential crisis, this was about *him* and his life. The whole rest of his life.

He suddenly thought about tonight, the Mexican restaurant, and the whole stretch of thousands upon thousands upon tens of thousands of days that would follow. When had he given up on trying to change the course of it all? Did he even really want to go to college at all? It was his parents that did. It was even their alma mater he was enrolled in.

He didn't even want a summer full of hours at a shitty, minimum-wage job he only had so he could make enough money to spend in the evenings, hanging out with the same people in the same places over and over again.

Was it too late to change it? Any of it? To bend his future into anything other than what he was supposed to do next, the things hat everyone expected him to do? All of a sudden, it seemed vitally important that he find out. He dragged the rest of his stuff out of his locker, crammed it into his backpack, and left the school at a dead run.

---

Maria was sprawled across her bed, adding another entry to her little purple journal. She gave a sigh, then wrote a few more lines, loving how easily the purple gel slid out in exaggerated swirls and loops under her fingers:

"I didn't hear from her today either. Oh well, who cares really? When she doesn't see me this summer, she'll know how disappointed I was. Funny thing... For just a second after I slipped the note into the vent, I thought I accidentally put it in the locker next to hers. But then I realized I got it right. At least, I'm pretty sure I did."