The Fountain

The Mule Man came into Columbus the way weather comes over the river, slow and steady, without asking anyone’s permission. His wagon followed behind a gray mule that knew the town as well as the streets knew themselves. You could hear them before you saw them, the soft clop of hooves on brick and pavement, the leather harness speaking in small creaks as they turned corners and passed storefronts. Children stopped their games when he rolled by. Shopkeepers stepped to their doors. The mule did the pulling and most of the thinking, and the Mule Man rode along with the quiet patience of someone who understood that a day did not need to hurry to get where it was going. One night something cruel came into the dark. A shot cracked the still air and the mule fell where it stood. In the morning the Mule Man knelt beside the animal that had carried his days and his work and the small living he made from town to town. They said he cried there in the dirt, the way a man cries when something faithf...

  The boys had pitched their tents the evening before in the far corner of the pasture where the grass grew soft and the trees leaned together like quiet conspirators. They had cooked hot dogs over a fire that popped and snapped and talked about the kinds of things boys always talked about when the night grew bigger than the field; baseball, ghosts, the possibility of treasure somewhere just past the fence line. The cows had been far off then, dark shapes moving slowly in the twilight, hardly worth noticing. The boys zipped themselves into their canvas tents and fell asleep believing the world had settled for the night. Morning came quietly, the way it often does in the country, not with noise but with fog. It rolled across the pasture and laid itself down over the grass until the whole field seemed to float in a pale gray sea. One of the boys woke first. He heard breathing that was not the breathing of boys. Slow. Heavy. Curious. He unzipped the tent flap and pushed his head into ...

  Autumn began with football. You could feel it in the air before anyone said it aloud. The boys ran across the playground grass with jackets tied around their waists, chasing a ball that wobbled like it had a mind of its own. Then the leaves thinned, the mornings turned sharper, and football quietly disappeared the way seasons always do, replaced by the hard clicking sound of marbles rolling across the dirt. Pockets grew heavy with cloudy shooters and chipped glass swirls, boys crouched low to the ground like small gamblers studying the universe. Marble season faded the same way, not with an announcement but with the slow turning of the school calendar. One morning a boy walked onto the playground with a yo-yo dangling from his hand, red paint bright as a stop sign, and by lunch half the schoolyard hummed with spinning string. Yo-yos slept at the end of their cords and climbed back again like obedient pets. Duncan tops came soon after, pulled tight on their strings and thrown hard...

The house still smelled of paint and cardboard, the quiet perfume of beginnings. Morning light stretched across the living room floor where the dog had already claimed a warm square of sun. The picture leaned against the wall, waiting to belong somewhere. He stood on a chair with a hammer and a nail while she studied the wall like a map. “Right there,” she said. He held the nail. “Maybe a little higher.” He moved it. “No… not that much.” The dog watched the whole thing with calm interest, certain that whatever they were doing was far more complicated than lying in the sunlight. The first tap of the hammer sounded sure of itself. The second went sideways. A thin crack ran through the plaster like a quiet bolt of lightning. They both stared at it. “Well,” he said finally, “that wasn’t there before.” She tried not to laugh and failed. The picture went up crooked, then crooked the other way. He stepped down, tilted his head, and squinted at it like a man negotiating with gravity. “It’s lea...

The boy sat on the back steps with the afternoon leaning warm against his shoulders. His glove lay in his lap, open like a small brown animal that trusted him. He worked the oil into the leather slowly, the way he had seen older boys do it, pressing his thumb deep into the pocket as if shaping the future with his hands. Somewhere down the block a ball struck a bat with a sound that traveled straight through his chest. He imagined the neighborhood team calling his name. He imagined the way the other boys would nod when he walked up, the way his glove would snap shut around a hard line drive and everyone would see that he belonged. In his mind the games were large things. Crowds gathered on the edge of the field. Dust rose in golden clouds when he slid into second. The boys on the team laughed and slapped his back like brothers who had always been there. He pictured himself walking home afterward, the glove hanging loose from his fingers, girls noticing him from porches and bicycles slow...

They lay on their backs in the grass behind the house, the earth still warm from the day and smelling faintly of cut clover. The boy held his hands on his chest the way he did when he was trying to be still. The man pointed upward, his finger steady against the dark. “There,” he said. “See that thin white line moving slow?” The boy watched it form itself across the sky, not bright like a star, not quick like a plane, but patient, as if it had all the time in the world. The man told him it was the first satellite, something men had put into the sky on purpose. The boy nodded, though he didn’t quite understand how something made by hands could belong up there. The line kept going, stitching the night together. The boy imagined it passing over oceans, over cities where people were just sitting down to supper or already asleep. He imagined men floating inside it, untethered, their feet never touching anything solid again. He wondered what it would feel like to sleep without weight, to wake...