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“Are you proud of your old dad?” The Guesser answered himself. “I bet you are.” All the time his eyes were hunting the crowd for my father, a clue to my future. “Is your dad here with you?” he said finally.

I never knew my real father, but had no reason to suspect he would be any different from Marcel, so that's who I pointed at. The crowd turned to him and the smile dropped off Marcel's face. He looked down at his feet. For the first time I saw the guilt and shame that was probably always there, under the surface of the stories and drunken sprees. Marcel was King of the Alamo Apartments, but in the world of upright citizens he was just a drunken bum. That's what the murmuring crowd saw and I didn't blame them. How else could you judge the bulbous red nose, the gaps in his teeth, the creased map of his face?

Even the Guesser momentarily lost his composure, but he quickly regained it. “Kids like their teachers,” he said, winking at me. “I bet you want to be a schoolteacher.” This surprised me. I expected doctor or fireman. “But,” the Guesser added, taking a plaster ornament off his shelf, “I'm not always a hundred percent right on, so here—” He offered me the ornament.

I glanced at Marcel who was still looking down. “No,” I said, “you're right, I do want to be a teacher.”

I refused the ornament, but the Guesser forced me to take it anyway, as though he didn't believe me. It was a figurine of a pointy-headed troll.

When we got away from there Marcel put one arm over my shoulder, the other over Mom's and said, “A teacher? Well why the hell not?” We all laughed.

————

Who knows what anybody is going to become? Maybe at one time Marcel envisioned something different for himself, but now life was just a river he was being swept down, and he was happy. My mother believed we could alter the course of our lives if we were strong and lucky enough, and if we had faith. One out of three isn't bad. In a way I think they were both right: nobody gets what they deserve, but in the end we all become who we want to be, deep down. I don't know.

At about midnight Marcel took me onto the Zipper.

It was a mesh cage that spun and orbited around a greasy hub like a planet around a star. There were broken bolts and nuts in the popcorn and cigarette butts scattered around the base, but we didn't care. “We're here for a good time, not a long time,” Marcel laughed. And as he said this our cage
jerked, lifted us into the night sky, and we spun upside down, and Marcel's change flew out of his pockets, whizzed past our ears like shrapnel. My heart tore free of my chest and I felt it in my mouth. We dove toward the ground, but at the last minute were scooped up, swirling through the blackness, me and Marcel, screaming at the stars between our shoes.

Elizabeth Graver

Willa stood in the patch of light from the open freezer door and watched as the mist climbed in tendrils, swirled and rose. The milk carton in her hands was heavy, its surface smeared with yellowish cream—her mother had made more potato soup. Already the two tall freezers in the basement housed cartons and cartons of soup, enough to last them almost forever—carrot and broccoli soup, soup made of summer and acorn squash, rows of green and yellow frozen rectangles inside the cartons that had once held milk. And on the outsides of the cartons, rows of children—frozen too, their features stiff, their faces etched with frost.
Have You Seen Me? Do You Know Where I Am?
Each time Willa put the cartons in the freezers, she set up the children in pairs so they could have staring contests when she shut the door.

Go on, she thought to Kimberly Rachelle and David Michael, to Kristy-Ann and Tyrone. Stare each other down. She put them boy girl, boy
girl, catalogued them by age. Some of the missing children were babies, and these she put on the shelf closest to the bottom. The ones who were eleven, her age, she gave special treatment, tracing their names in the wax coating of the milk cartons with her finger, dusting the frost from their eyes. She could recite their DOBs, their SEXs, HTs, WTs, and EYES, the color of their hair. Willa's mother didn't know about Willa's ordering of the cartons; she was upstairs cooking or painting child after child lined up like soldiers, serious kids in uniforms carrying weapons or naked, puzzled kids looking up at the sky.

Willa's mother expected the end of the world. She donated her paintings to three friends in the town twenty miles down the highway, and they turned them into posters which they hung in the public library and in the windows of the real estate agency that doubled as an art gallery. “You Can't Hug Your Child,” they printed in fake child scrawl, “With Nuclear Arms.”

Willa thought everyone was overreacting. Sure, there might be silos under the ground and blinking lights that could go off, and escape systems that would lead to nowhere, and broccoli and cauliflower that would grow big as trees afterwards, like in the paintings her mother made. There might be all that, but still what did they know about the end, for she was sure something would survive, making it really not the end at all—maybe only an insect or two, a shiny blind beetle or an ant like the ones in the ant farm her father had given her—some sort of creature, hard, black and shelled, rolling from the rubble like a bead.

She would not go with her mother to the rallies in Chicago and St. Louis, would not wear the buttons and T-shirts or lend her handwriting to the posters. In her room she hung photographs of animals instead of her mother's art work—slow sea turtles and emus with backs like the school janitor's dirty, wide broom. They came from the Bronx Zoo in New York City, the animals on the postcards. Willa's father sent them now and then.

Once a girl in one of her mother's paintings had looked just like Willa, small and dark and suspicious, with the same mess of curly hair. Then Willa had screamed and kicked.

“Take me out of your fucking painting, who said you could paint me? Just take me out!”

“Okay, now stop!” her mother had said, catching Willa by the shoulders. “Just stop screaming and don't go crazy on me. Listen to yourself—listen to yourself, would you just calm down?”

And she had squeezed a big wad of beige paint onto her palette, speared it with a paintbrush, and spread it over the painted Willa's face.

“It wasn't even you,” she had said, but Willa had known it was, that her mother had put her there in that lineup of children with puzzled looks, had painted her empty-handed, naked, and puzzled next to an orange boy with wide shoulders and a bow and arrow in his hand.

“Just because I say ‘fucking' doesn't mean you should,” her mother had told her, but then she had kissed Willa's forehead and taken her far down the highway to McDonald's, where Willa ate two hamburgers and drank a thick chocolate shake while her mother drank water and tried not to look at the food.

Underneath their farmhouse was dirt, and underneath the dirt—if not directly underneath, then near enough, her mother seemed sure of it—were silos which were not really silos at all, but this was not Willa's problem. In a movie she saw once, a man drowned in the wheat of a silo, was smothered as the golden grain poured over him like sand, filling up his nostrils and his mouth. She told her mother about it afterwards, the danger of this silo filled with wheat. With
wheat
, Willa had said, which was what silos were supposed to hold.

“Actually silage,” her mother had answered. “They're supposed to hold silage—fodder for cows and horses. It must have been a grain elevator.”

No, said Willa. It was a silo. She saw it.

“I guess they could do what they wanted—it was only a movie,” her mother had said, and then, more thoughtfully, “Hmmm, I suppose it probably happens now and then.”

School was one thing, and home alone with her mother was another, and in between were her mother's three friends, who were thin and pretty like her mother and drove out to the house on weekends with bags full of magic markers, envelopes, and petitions that few people in the little town would sign. Sasha was a real estate agent and divorced, and Karen was married and taught kindergarten at Willa's school, and Willa didn't know what Melissa did, except stare sadly at her mother's paintings and say,
“Hello, Willa,” as if Willa's name were a password or something deserving of the utmost seriousness. Willa's mother gave her three friends homemade bread and sketched their faces on napkins. Sometimes they drank vodka and orange juice and stayed up talking late into the night. When Willa came downstairs in the morning she would find the women sleeping on the couch and floor, still dressed, still wearing rings and necklaces and sometimes even shoes.

At night when no visitors shared the house, Willa's mother told her stories. This had been going on a long time. First it had been her father and mother together. He would say a sentence: “Once there was a truck who lived alone in the Sahara Desert,” and her mother would add a sentence: “And he had no glass in his windows and at night the sand came blowing through, and he had no wheels,” and her father would add on, and then her mother, each of them perched on Willa's bed, always touching part of her—her knee or her foot, her hand or the small of her back.

Then, when she was seven, her father went to live with a woman he said he had loved in high school, and Willa only saw him twice a year when he left his new family, she left her mother, and they stayed in a hotel in New York and went to museums and the zoo. She always got blisters on those trips from so much walking. After her father left, her mother came home with a whole stack of glossy children's books. Willa couldn't stand the pictures of fat, dimpled children and pets, the stories about going to the dentist, getting a pony, or cleaning up your room.

“Tell
me one,” she would say to her mother, and her mother would try, but she never knew how to start, and the stories stumbled along for a while until Willa grew bored and fell asleep. But over the years her mother improved, or else Willa just grew used to her way of telling. She gave her mother rules: no stories about zoo animals, vampires, or kids named Willa who lived on defunct farms. No stories about the end of the world. Instead, her mother told her more stories about objects—superballs looking for somewhere to bounce, a barn which threw up because of the smelly animals inside it, a snowflake in search of a twin. Sometimes her mother sat at the end of Willa's bed and leaned against the wooden railing. Other times she cupped herself against her daughter and talked right into her ear. Sometimes she slept there all night, squeezed onto the edge of the twin bed.
Willa didn't like this, found it sad and embarrassing, though she couldn't say why, but she wouldn't kick her mother out. In winter they stayed warm that way, like pioneers, for the farmhouse was big and drafty in the middle of its field, and the wind came howling round.

————

After Willa filled the freezer with several loads of soup, she took her book on ants to the kitchen and settled by the wood stove. When the doorbell rang, she didn't look up, too busy with a glossy color photograph of a magnified ant with legs like shaggy black trees. But then her mother came back to the kitchen followed by a girl, or maybe a woman—to Willa the stranger looked young, though she carried a child who hid its face in her coat. Willa's mother showed the girl and baby to the living room, and then she returned to the kitchen and whispered to her daughter that this was a new friend, her name was Melody. They had met at a demonstration in St. Louis; Melody had worked in a nuclear power plant for four years, but now she had quit and was waitressing. She had come to the house for a lesson because she wanted to learn how to draw. Her son was blind and had just turned three.

“It should be fun for you,” said her mother after she had called Melody and the child back in. “Isn't he awfully cute? Would you do us a big favor and watch him while we draw?”

Willa had watched the tiny, silent granddaughter of the farmer down the road while the farmer rode his tractor, but she had never babysat for a blind child, had never met anyone who was blind.

“I don't, I mean—” she said. “I don't really know—”

“Oh listen to you, you're just being modest,” said her mother. She turned to Melody. “She's terrific with kids. Already she's babysitting at her age.”

“He's pretty much like any other kid, aren't you, Tiger?” said Melody, readjusting the child buried in her arms. “Better, even—he's good as can be. If he wants anything, you can just give a holler. We'll be right upstairs. Or, if you want, we can take him with us.”

“I'll watch him,” said Willa, for her mother was giving her that look.

When they went up to the studio, her mother and Melody left the child sitting on Willa's baby quilt on the kitchen floor, his back to Willa.
For a while she hunched over her book and ignored the boy at her feet, but when she finished the section on carpenter ants, she lifted her head and stared at the child, who had settled on his stomach on the red and yellow quilt. As she stood and leaned over him, she saw that not only was he blind, but he had no eyes, just skin and a row of pale blond lashes where the eyes should have been.

Willa gasped and brought her hands up to her face, then stood for a moment peering into the darkness of her palms, trying to make herself look again. When she lowered her hands, she saw that the boy was sucking his thumb and using the end of his index finger to trace circles on his face. She stared. Did he have eyes under there, so that he wasn't actually blind at all, just confined to a view of his own pale skin? She moved closer to see if she could make out a bulge of eyeball above the fringe of lashes. The skin was smooth and flat like part of a back or stomach—as if nothing were missing, as if eyes had never been invented. Then the boy wrinkled his brow, seemed to be looking at her: Could he see through those eyeless eyes?

He could have been born that way, thought Willa. Not because his mother worked in a nuclear plant, but just because he was born that way. Paula, a fifth grader at school, claimed she had gone to a fair in Florida where they had people like this—Siamese twins joined at the head, children with flippers like dolphins and claws like lobsters, or as hairy as apes. Paula said she had seen the lobster family, three kids and two parents. They were ugly as anything, she said, but they loved each other, that family. They just stood there smiling like goons and holding claws.

As Willa leaned over the child, he reached a hand into the air.

“Ma?” he said.

And she said, “No.”

“Can you talk?” she asked, kneeling by him. “What's your name?”

He was perhaps the palest, blondest boy she had ever seen, his hair like milkweed puffs standing straight up on his head, his skin so white you could see veins running underneath it, could see how his blood was blue. He wore a red turtleneck and pink flowered overalls that should have been for a girl. From the way he clenched his fingers to his palms, it seemed he must be angry, or else cold. He did not answer her. As she leaned closer, he reached up and grabbed a fistful of her hair.

“No,” she said, starting to unclench his fist with her fingers, but he opened his palm and batted at her curls, swinging them back and forth.

“Girl,” he said, and she nodded yes.

He lowered his hand, and she rocked on her heels and looked at him. She could stare and stare, tilt her head to examine him, and it wouldn't matter, for this boy had skin in the place of eyes. He reached out again.

“What?” she asked, backing up. His face grew red as if he might begin to cry, though she couldn't imagine where the tears would go.

“What?” repeated Willa, and the boy lifted his arms toward her, so she bent down and scooped him up. He was awkward in her arms, his legs dangling down, but surprisingly light. Willa was used to the house, wore four layers in winter, but this boy's whole body was shaking. With his arms tight around her neck as if he might pull her down, he began, quietly, to sob.

“Oh don't,” she said, wanting to drop him and run.” “Please don't cry. Don't cry—”

A thread of spittle ran down his chin; perhaps, she thought, his tears flowed like a waterfall down inside his head and out his mouth. She began to circle with him to warm him up, boosting him a little higher each time he threatened to fall.

“This is the kitchen,” she told him, and he stopped crying as she went to a bag of onions on the counter and had him touch the brittle skins. She held an onion under his nose, and he batted her hand away. She went to the fridge and pressed his cheek against the side. “Listen,” she told him, so he would hear it purr. She took him to the dining room where the table was covered with petitions, posters, and books.

“We don't eat here,” she told him. “Usually we eat in the kitchen.”