Belletrist Coterie

skillet, which was deep enough to cook vegetables from the garden and rice all at once. He poured the water into the garden, scalding the big toe on his left foot. The second day he pulled the slingshot out of the trunk with trembling hands and shot the bird, only to take her eggs for himself. He buried her body beneath the tree, piled her grave with forget-me-nots from the garden and a cardboard headstone colored in crayon: “Thanks for the eggs.” On the third night the boy awoke dully to the heat of his urine and blinked into the urgent brightness of the moon through his grandmother’s dress. He stole the bread and can of sardines from the open window of Mr. and Mrs. Five and Dime. Mrs. Dime snored luxuriously upstairs as the boy crept through the grayed aisles; Mr. Dime slept like the dead.

The boy had stopped attending school. At six, alone, he decided to engage was too heavy a daily task. He sent a note detailing the mystery of his mother’s disappearance and the brief story of her hair.

When the pointed man knocked on the door it had been nineteen days since the mother had vanished. The man had a mincing step, a pointed beard and pointed shoes. He had seen rabbits coming in and out of the opened shutters and merely wanted to address the issue. Was the boy’s mother home?

The boy rocked a rabbit in his arms, black and white and newly born, shook his round head no. The pointed man was framed by branches from outside. Behind him the sun was low and violet and he cast his eyes around the room, resting them on the wall opposite from where he stood in the doorway.

Rabbits shivered and stacked their bodies and the man pointed his chin at them. The pointed man was no Elder, but the boy knew it wouldn’t be long before they arrived.

The hair had arrived in the fireplace the following morning. It was neat as a bundle of kindling, bound with the black cord she wore. Burn this, it seemed to say. Burn this to fill your nostrils with a pungent odor of memory and to warm yourself. Curling in ordered ringlets at the ends, golden streaks like painted glass. The boy cradled the hair in his dimpled arms. It was less heavy than he had hoped it to be, as though in leaving his mother’s head the hair had lost its properties of warmth.

That night the soft moon projected images onto the wall for the boy to trace. The lines and shapes became maps of the places she might have gone: N or L or P. He saw them now on the wall, displayed by the moon’s light. Icy, wooded islands he’d not known. Sharp as India ink on the wall were the upside-down lands he had imagined, with hissing wind, glassine ponds bubbling with huge red and silver scaled fish. Hills of clouded ice. Argent castles, their polished silver turrets rising against the hills, limpid as dawn. Caverns halting the earth with cracked depths. His grandmother would have lived in a hovel like a rabbit’s, with pigs rooting in the yard.

Fearing the images would be gone in the morning, the boy rose from his bed and began tracing the maps on the wall. He drew the water and the docks and the storms that threatened their carefully moored ships. The boy drew whorls of black smoke and a consuming fire--for how else would they eat or stay warm? Those who watched the fire burning through the middle of their islands would suspend their disbelief, cover their faces (pale, amber-eyed, like the boy’s mother) with handkerchiefs and silence their fear. The world would go on. The smoke would clear and the embers die and the villages would remain. But on the wall, the fires raged in faithful permanence.

When the light left the room, the boy took the bundle of hair to his bed, in the straw he had 48