The Fountain

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...

  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...

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...

  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....

On Friday morning, the old man sat on the porch with his coffee and believed he understood the shape of his life. The dog slept beneath his chair. A cardinal worked the hedge for breakfast. Across the street, someone dragged a garbage can toward the curb, its wheels making that hollow plastic thunder against the pavement. There were bills on the kitchen counter, tomatoes ripening beside the fence, and a loose board on the back steps he had been meaning to fix. Nothing seemed particularly urgent. Nothing seemed about to change. He had lived long enough to know better, of course, but knowing a thing and believing it are two different matters. By Saturday night, rain had come. A friend he had not heard from in twenty years called just to say hello. The dog chased a rabbit through the wet yard and returned covered in mud and happiness. The old man found a photograph behind a drawer while looking for a screwdriver, a summer afternoon from forty years ago, everyone young and squinting into t...

  He had never meant for anyone to hear him sing alone. Singing was different when there were twenty other children around you, all wearing white shirts that smelled faintly of starch and the wooden closet behind the sacristy. You could disappear inside the sound. But one Wednesday evening, after choir practice, Sister Margaret touched him lightly on the shoulder and said, “I think you should sing the solo on Sunday.” The boy looked behind him, certain she was speaking to someone else. She wasn't. The solo was only eight lines long, but by the time he walked home they had grown into something enormous. He imagined forgetting the words. Or his voice cracking. Worst of all, he imagined the whole church becoming terribly quiet while everyone waited for him to fail. He practiced everywhere. He sang softly in his bedroom with the door closed. He sang while brushing his teeth, while taking out the trash, and once beneath his breath in the grocery store until his mother smiled and pretend...