The Fountain

He had begun thinking about it in the mornings. Not every morning. Mostly the quiet ones, when the coffee was hot, and the sunlight came through the kitchen window at an angle that showed the dust floating in the room. He would sit at the table and listen to the house settling around him. There were photographs on the refrigerator, a scratch on the floor where an old dog used to turn circles before lying down, and a small dent in the wall from a Christmas tree carried through the doorway badly many years ago. He had spent most of his life believing that important things announced themselves. Promotions. Weddings. Funerals. Birthdays ending in zero. But now he wondered if a life was measured differently. Perhaps it was measured by sandwiches made for children who were hungry, doors held open for strangers, lawns cut for neighbors who were sick, and phone calls made when there was nothing particular to say except, I was thinking about you. He had known love and he had known loss, and so...

  The garden was not much to look at. A narrow patch beside the back steps, bordered with old bricks that had settled crookedly into the earth. There were coneflowers and black-eyed Susans, a little lantana, some milkweed he had planted because someone told him the monarchs needed it. Nothing matched. Nothing had been planned on paper. He watered it in the mornings with an old green hose, pulling weeds when he noticed them and leaving some when he did not. The garden asked very little of him. Sunlight. Water. A little patience. Most days, that seemed like a fair arrangement. The butterflies began arriving in June. First a yellow one, small as a fallen leaf. Then swallowtails with dark wings and little blue moons along their edges. The monarchs came later, drifting down from the enormous blue sky as though they had remembered his address. He would sit on the back steps with his coffee and watch them move from flower to flower. They never hurried, though their lives were terribly sho...

People said he was always happy. They said it as though it were a condition he had been born with, like blue eyes or a crooked finger. Some found it admirable. Others found it suspicious. Nobody could be happy all the time, they said. Life simply did not permit it.  But he never claimed to be happy all the time. He had known hospitals and funerals. He had stood beside graves when the ground was still raw and watched men with shovels wait politely at a distance. He had received telephone calls that divided his life into before and after. He knew what it was to wake at three in the morning and stare into darkness while his mind inventoried everything that could still be taken from him.  He knew sadness. He simply refused to let sadness have everything. So he noticed things.  That was his secret, if there was one. In the morning he noticed the first smell of coffee drifting through the kitchen. He liked the small click the coffeemaker made when it finished. He liked hold...

The boy woke before the others, when the woods were still gray and the birds had not yet decided what kind of morning it would be. He crawled from the tent wearing yesterday’s jeans and a sweatshirt that smelled faintly of smoke. The fire was mostly gone, but beneath the white ashes he found a few red coals waiting for him. He fed them pine needles first, then twigs, then two pieces of wood his father had split the night before. He blew gently until a small flame appeared. It seemed like a secret the earth had trusted him to keep. He set the black skillet over the fire and dropped in three strips of bacon. They curled and snapped, and the smell moved through the trees faster than daylight. He cracked two eggs against the side of the pan the way he had watched his father do, although one shell broke badly and he had to fish a piece from the white with a stick. He laughed quietly. There was bread to toast near the coals and coffee boiling in the old blue enamel pot, though his father h...

  The boy decided God was an astronaut when he was eight years old. It happened one August night when the heat had finally loosened its grip on the earth and the fireflies were blinking over the backyard. He lay in the grass beside his father, both of them looking up because there was nothing else worth looking at. The Milky Way stretched across the darkness like somebody had spilled flour over black glass. His father pointed out Mars and Jupiter and a satellite moving steadily between them. The boy watched until his eyes hurt. “Where does God live?” he asked. His father was quiet for a while. “Everywhere, I suppose.” The boy considered this. Everywhere was a very large place. Larger than Georgia. Larger than America. Larger even than the maps in his schoolroom that rolled down over the chalkboard. “Then God must be an astronaut,” he said. His father laughed softly, but the boy did not. He imagined God floating between galaxies in a white suit, visiting planets nobody had named yet...

  The rabbit had a black spot on the end of her nose, as though she had pushed her face into a little pile of soot. That was why the girl called her Dirty Nose. There had been other names considered, proper rabbit names mostly, but none of them stayed. Dirty Nose did. She lived in a wooden pen behind the house beneath the pecan trees, where the little girl brought her clover and carrot tops and sometimes sat cross-legged in the grass telling her things that rabbits were particularly good at keeping secret. Dirty Nose would twitch her nose and listen, which was enough. The storm came one afternoon while the girl was inside. It arrived hard and sudden, bending the trees and turning the yard silver with rain. Thunder rolled over the house, and the wind pushed against everything that could be pushed. When the worst had passed, the girl ran outside in her bare feet and found the door of the rabbit pen hanging open. Dirty Nose was gone. She called beneath the porch and behind the shed. S...