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Campfire Breakfast

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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...
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God Was An Astronaut

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  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...
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Dirty Nose

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  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...
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Counting Our Way to Heaven

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The little boy held the rosary carefully because there were rules to it. The crucifix came first, then the larger bead, then the three small ones, and after that the mysteries began. He knew most of the prayers by heart, or nearly so, but the beads worried him. Somewhere between the Hail Marys and the Glory Be, his fingers sometimes wandered ahead or stayed behind. Then he would look sideways at the boy kneeling beside him, trying to see which bead he was holding without moving his head too much. Losing your place during the rosary seemed to him a serious thing, almost a sin, though no one had ever told him that it was. The children knelt in two long rows beneath the colored windows of the church, their voices rising together and falling together. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners... The words moved through the pews like water over stones. Behind them stood the nuns in their black habits and white veils, listening. Every now and then one walked slowly along the aisle, her r...
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The Girl Who Knew the Sea

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  The little girl knew everything about sailing, though she had never been on a boat. She knew port from starboard and bow from stern. She knew that sailors watched the clouds and trusted the wind, and that somewhere beyond the places she had seen there were lighthouses turning their great lamps across dark water. She knew about storms and islands and harbors with strange names. Most of it she learned from library books and an old atlas that showed the oceans in faded blue. At night she sometimes opened it on the floor of her bedroom and traced the coastlines with one finger, wondering how much water there really was in the world. Because there was no ocean nearby, she made her own boats. She gathered twigs from beneath the trees and saved Popsicle sticks in a jar on the back porch. She tied them together with string and cut little triangular sails from construction paper. Red sails were for fast ships. Yellow ones were for exploring. Blue sails were for long voyages where no one h...
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What the Night Will Do to a Man

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It’s funny what the night will do to a man. In daylight, he could carry almost anything. Bills on the kitchen counter. The doctor’s phone call. The empty chair across from him. The words he should have said twenty years ago and the ones he wished he could take back. Daylight gave everything edges. There was coffee to make, grass to cut, groceries to buy. A man could stay busy enough to believe he had made peace with his life. But night was different. At two in the morning, the house became enormous. The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen like some machine keeping watch. Pipes clicked behind the walls. A car passed somewhere beyond the bedroom window, its headlights moving briefly across the ceiling before disappearing. Then everything was still again. That was when the dead came home. Not as ghosts. Nothing so dramatic. They returned as voices. His father laughing on a summer afternoon. His mother calling him in for supper. A dog scratching at the back door that had been gone fifteen y...
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What Would You Call It?

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  It started off as a cold. That was what everyone called it, including the doctor, and there was comfort in the smallness of the word. A cold was something you carried around for a few days like loose change in your pocket. You drank soup. You complained about your throat. You slept beneath an extra blanket and watched afternoon television with the volume turned low. His wife brought him tea with honey and stood in the bedroom doorway telling him he looked terrible, which was the sort of thing only someone who loved you could say with tenderness. Outside, November worked its way through the trees, stripping them a little more each morning. He watched the leaves tumble past the window and thought how strange it was that the world could look so beautiful while you felt so miserable. By Thursday the fever arrived. By Friday the cough had settled deep inside him, somewhere beyond the reach of tea and blankets. On Saturday morning his wife said, "We're going back to the doctor....
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