I am in my room staring at a freshly squashed fly drifting down the window leaving a trail of fluid and fly legs in its wake. Behind it outside the rain is coming down hard. The thunder makes the windows quake when it

‘You love me, don’t you?’ she said. I paused and smiled and then said: ‘No... you’re just trying to play tricks with my head.’

strikes and the storm is not far away. Maybe only a mile or less. The sun will be coming up soon. I can’t remember exactly when it was I’d gotten home but I haven’t moved from here since. I’ve been staring at the fly watching it edge down slowly. It was in the middle of the window when I started watching. My mom brought in fresh towels when we came home and she turned on my bedside lamp and saw the fly buzzing around. She went out into the hallway and came back with a fly swatter and it landed right in the middle of the window where it was instantaneously crushed. She looked at it for a second and turned to me and said:
   ‘Alright, now try and get some sleep okay?’ and gave me a sympathetic look and a hug and then left closing the door behind her.
   I couldn’t stop staring at that dead fly. I kept imagining an unfamiliar face walking out of the rain to find whoever had killed it and enforce justice on them since it hadn’t hurt anyone. But the face never came. I waited but it never came.
   Soon the fly hit the sill and quit drifting down and the instant it did I blinked and it seemed like it was suddenly morning and the window pane was my ceiling.
   I looked out the window again responding to the sound of the rain. I tried to pick out the individual sounds of the raindrops but it was still raining too hard to do that. It was a giant flood and downpour of mixed sounds. Too much going on and too deeply buried to be discerned.

* * *

   ‘Is this what you were looking for?’
   The Chinese man smiled broadly and held out a little bonsai tree in a cube-shaped pot that couldn’t have been taller than 6 inches.
   I stared ahead at it blankly for a second.
   ‘Ummm... yeah, sure... what kind of plant food does it need?’
   ‘Just Miracle Gro and water.’
   ‘And I need clippers for it too, right?’
   ‘I have some if you want them.’
   ‘Yea, sure.’
   ‘And the plant food?’
   ‘Yes, plant food too, please.’
   ‘Alright then, I can help you up at the front,’ he gestured to the cash register by the front door.
   It wasn’t a very wide store but it went far back and every inch seemed to be covered with Oriental plants or black carved pillars and red walls. There was Koto music on in the background that started with one koto playing a slow, cautious melody resolving to a single chord. As it went on more and more kotos joined in playing different melodies until it sounded like trickles of running streams all resolving to the same chord.
   ‘10 dollars and 78 cents,’ he said.
   I handed $11 to him.
   ‘Could I have a paper bag?’
   He looked at me strangely.
   ‘It’s a gift.’
   ‘Ah,’ he smiled, getting out a paper bag and softly putting the plant in the bottom of it next to the Miracle Gro and the clippers.
   ‘Have a nice day,’ he smiled and handed me the paper bag.
   ‘Thanks, you too,’ I said a bit awkwardly.
   I hate it when people say that because they never mean it.

* * *

   I woke up in a dream and I was in a car, staring at a pair of plush pink dice with black dots on them hanging from the rear-view mirror and swinging to the rhythm of the car’s motor. I suddenly felt someone’s finger jab into my side tickling from the left side.
   ‘AHHH!!! Stop it!’ I said in a little kid’s voice.
   I was a little kid again and I turned to the person who had jabbed me and saw that it was Mia. She was a little girl too with her shoulder-length hair held out of her face with two turquoise blue duck barrettes. She smiled and laughed and began poking me in the stomach after I covered my sides with my hands. I started to tickle her back when I heard my mom’s voice from the passenger’s seat in front of me.
   ‘You two better behave,’ she turned around and shot us a sober look.
   We sat at attention like army people.
   As soon as my mom turned around she started tickling me again. Soon my parents stopped and let us out in front of a tall three-story mansion-sized house.
   ‘Have fun you two, and be good,’ my mom called from the car as they drove off.
   She grabbed my hand and I looked at her and she smiled. We ran into the back yard and climbed a huge apple tree. It was one hundred feet high and apples fell off as we climbed up higher and higher and I’d stop to watch them fall and they turned into curled fist-sized pink fetuses that would splatter on the brick porch below. Every time one fell it made my stomach turn and I felt terrible. Eventually we got all the way to the top and looked out over the treetops and watched the sun set. As it set and night fell it looked like the sky was being painted in by invisible hands. Once the moon and the stars came out it looked like scenery for a children’s play.
   After that we climbed back down and ran around through a giant garden with flowers higher than we were and I didn’t find her until I came into the middle of it where it was open and we stared at the moon. Then we ran inside the house and walked around inspecting all of the rooms. We came to a tiny room in the attic that had a bed up against the right wall and the back corner with a lamp at the foot of the bed. To the left was the dresser that fit in-between the lamp and the other wall. She took me by the hand and we knelt facing each other on the floor next to the bed.
   ‘You love me, don’t you?’ she said.
   I paused and smiled and then said: ‘No... you’re just trying to play tricks with my head.’
   ‘You do!’
   Silence.
   ‘Yea, well so do you!’ I shot back and her eyes glowed.
   ‘Well good then, because we’re going to be married someday and we will live in this house.’
   ‘You think so?’
   ‘Yea, but that’s only if you want me to be with you.’
   ‘Okay, I do, now what?’
   ‘We have to do just one thing.’
   ‘What?’
   She smiled and closed her eyes and leaned towards me and I closed my eyes and leaned towards her but the moment I felt the kiss of her lips she fizzled and turned into dust. I opened my eyes to the sound of wind chimes and her dust was on my lips. I was in an empty circular cornfield that seemed to be about twenty feet above an iced-over ocean. I was my regular age again. I looked to my left and saw the staircase in the same place it was when I was still in the upstairs room.
   When I went down the stairs I came out underneath a floating island and below the roots of the trees and the dirt. Nothing was supporting it and the island I was standing on was starting to sink into the ice. I remember feeling the sting of the ice on my skin and then it was over.

* * *

   We climbed onto the roof of the pavilion in the park and laid on our sides pointing in opposite directions with our heads touching. The lights from the city looked like the horizontal dividing line between a city-sized microchip and the void. I was on the side with the void.
   We were quiet for a while.
   ‘Did I ever thank you for the plant?’ she asked.
   I paused for a minute.
   ‘Of course.’
   ‘Well... just in case I didn’t, thanks.’
   ‘You’re welcome.’
   ‘I’ve never had one of those before.’
   ‘You have lots of plants.’
   ‘Yea... but that’s a bonsai tree—there’s an art to maintaining them. The others just have to have water and plant food.’
   There was a brief pause again.
   ‘I’m really going to miss this,’ she said.
   ‘Yea, me too...’
   ‘Apart from this I can’t wait to get out of here.’
   ‘Did you decide where you’re going yet?’
   ‘Yea, I’m going to Grinnell. It just feels better there.’
   ‘Yea. It seems to be a magnet school for incredibly smart and weird people. I wish I could go there.’
   ‘You’ll find a place to go to school.’
   ‘I know. Somewhere deep down inside I know; it’s just that I never really wanted to go in the first place and now since no one will take me it feels like "what’s the fucking point?"’
   She sat up and tapped me on the shoulder and I sat up and she gave me a big hug and then she smiled at me and made me smile and moved close so our noses touched.
   ‘What do you think will happen to us?’ I asked.
   Our eyes both turned down to the ground and our foreheads touched.
   ‘I’m not real sure.’
   Long pause.
   ‘I’m just scared. Not really just of that, but of everything. I don’t know what it’s like to not be around you. It’s been forever,’ I said.
   ‘I know, we don’t really know what’s going to happen. If seeing you every few months has to be enough for me it will be. If it’s not it won’t be. But something tells me we’ll be alright anyway.’
   ‘Yea... I know you’re right. There’s still just so much that I know I don’t know yet about much of anything.’
   I pulled her close and her head rested under my chin.
   ‘I love you,’ she said, ‘no roses, violins or strings attached. I just love you.’
   I put my hand under her chin and kissed her.
   ‘I love you too,’ I said and she put her head on my chest and I laid my cheek on her hair.
   Above us in the trees the sound of birds and bats chirping in blurred unison rose and made a thick wall of sound that trickled like rippling water. For some reason I thought that it sounded like a swarm of fighting cockatoos.

* * *

   He looked up from his notepad in his plush gray chair directly across from mine.
   ‘Your parents said you’ve been having trouble sleeping,’ he said.
   I nodded.
   Short pause.
   ‘About how long have you been sleeping when you do?’
   ‘Ummmm... not really sure... A few hours, I guess... It’s hard to tell. It’s kind of like I’ll be at school and then when I get home I’ll blink and suddenly it’s dinner time or the sun’s gone down or something like that.’
   ‘Do you ever dream?’
   ‘Yes... a little bit.’
   ‘What do you dream about?’
   I told him about the dream about the house with the garden and the apple tree with the falling fetuses and the upstairs room that turned into a hovering island.
   ‘Is that the only one you’ve had?’
   ‘No... there are a few others...’
   ‘Like what?’
   I told him about the other one with the red car and the camera case.
   ‘Hmmmm...’ he said.
   I forced a weak closed-mouth smile and brought my feet up onto the chair and hugged my legs, resting my chin on my knee.
   ‘Do you ever cry?’ he asked.
   I paused.
   ‘Sometimes...’
   ‘When is that?’
   ‘Not very often... sometimes I just get kind of sick for no reason and I can’t sleep and then I go into the bathroom and lean my head on the toilet seat and I wait for a few hours and I never throw up. I wait and I wait but it never happens. Then I get kind of frustrated and I want to shatter all the mirrors but then I just close my eyes real tight and then... I don’t know... I can’t stop making these little animal noises and wails and then water just runs out of my eyes for what seems like forever.’
   ‘Do you feel any better afterward?’
   ‘Well... usually I don’t feel like I have to puke any more but I usually don’t really feel any better. It’s always in the back of my mind that it’ll happen again.’
   Long pause. Lots of scribbling on his yellow notepad.
   ‘What do you do during the day now that you haven’t been to school in a while?’
   I paused again.
   ‘I just play the guitar all day. I record a lot of stuff. Or I just play solitaire and listen to the Cocteau Twins.’
   He nodded approvingly, ‘Who are they?’
   ‘One of my favorite bands.’
   ‘What do they sing about?’
   ‘Nothing.’
   ‘It’s all instrumental, then?’
   ‘No, the words are all made-up words and the ones that aren’t made-up words don’t make much sense except in how you interpret them. Their best stuff has no words though.’
   ‘Give me something to interpret.’
   I paused for a minute and stared into the stained wood rings of the coffee table.
   ‘"Fig up, my love paramour, ease out and away, onehow."’

* * *

   I was sitting in the hallway in the police station. My eyes hurt so bad I had to keep them closed. If I opened them they were cloudy and burned like peppers on my tongue. I felt a hand on my left shoulder and opened my eyes to see a blurry black-eyed, black-haired head over formless slivers of gold and silver on a backdrop of navy blue.
   ‘Son, I need to ask you a few questions,’ said its voice.
   ‘Yea?’ I choked on the word.
   ‘Could you tell me what happened tonight? You’re the only person who saw it.’
   ‘I can’t.’
   ‘Why not? You were there.’
   ‘I know, but I didn’t see it.’
   ‘What did you see?’
   ‘Nothing. There was a man cracking the windshield of a car, then he grabbed her and everything just went red. I couldn’t see anything until later when there was red everywhere and it was all over my hands and all over the ground. Then it was so quiet again. I couldn’t move, there was just red everywhere and I couldn’t tell who was alive or dead, or if I was alive or dead, and then that’s when the car stopped in front of me. It was like it hadn’t even happened— it was too fast.’
   ‘Is that all you remember?’
   I paused and closed my eyes and swallowed.
   ‘No.’    ‘Do you remember what the man looked like?’
   I closed my eyes really tight and the tears began to sting like needles.
   ‘No. He was wearing a black mask. I never even looked at his face.’
   ‘Tell me what else you remember.’
   I stared through him like a blind man.
   ‘There were crickets chirping.’

* * *

   The air was cold when I woke up and it widened my eyes quickly like I had never been asleep. I was in a large field of grass surrounded by trees. The smell of pine trees filled my lungs. I got up, looked around and saw a small red car. I walked towards it and folded my arms as the wind blew my hair out of my face. I came to the car and saw the passenger’s side window was facing me. It was a two-door hatchback with a small back seat and triangle shaped back windows. The front seat window had a hole shattered into it. The edges were covered in blood and I reached up to touch it and as soon as I did it cut my finger at the lightest touch. I sucked at my finger and walked around the car to see a trail of three bodies that made a path from the street towards the trees. They all had large puddles of blood underneath them that reflected the cool blue moonlight in them. The first man was bulky and maybe a few years older than I was. Next was a man in his mid-twenties who was taller and skinnier than the first man and the last one who sat at the foot of the darkness of the thick trees was also very bulky and lay on his back in the shape of an ‘X.’ I paused and heard the same sound of wind chimes from the other dream and it bled into what sounded like the loud whir of a rotating sprinkler and I felt a sharp club to the head and then I woke up in my room. It was pitch dark but I could hear two flies buzzing around in rotating circles above my bed. They gave the sound of the rain outside a rotating whir.