Incident

on a

Summer Day

BY FRANKIE ALMITRA

It was late afternoon.

The boy was large with wonder; large as the trembling tops of the clouds, trailing their scarlet fingers behind them. Above him, the summer sky was an inverted blue bowl, bright with eye-hurting beauty, bright like one of the silver dollars granny hid under the brick by the fireplace at home. The far-away barking of a dog drifted up to him, the sound adding to, rather then breaking, the stillness.

He flung himself down onto the grass, grinding his face into the greenness so that his nose and cheeks were stained and he tasted the sickish sweet taste of earth. The sun was hot on his shoulder-blades. He sat up and stripped off his shirt, making a pillow for his head before he lay down again. This time, he lay on his back, his eyes half-shut against the little insects that flew by the hundreds through the air and swarmed across his chest.

He waited for the sound of granny's voice calling him for supper. He knew he would not answer. She would get angry, very angry, and when he finally left the hill and went home, she would be waiting for him at the door of the farmhouse. She would scream and hit at him with her cane, the spittle flying from her old jaws like drops before a storm.

No matter.

He still would not answer her.

For a while he thought of granny; of how the wrinkles in her face looked as though someone had thrown a spider-web over her head and the web had grown to her skin, becoming a part of her, inseparable.

The thought was unpleasant to him so he shoved it unceremoniously from his mind, content to lie in a torpor, not thinking, just existing.

Here, granny did not belong, nor anyone else.

Here was just him and the Hill.

The Hill was his.

He was its sole owner and it was his home.

The farm, and granny, belonged to a different, secondary world, a life in which he did his chores and said his prayers and ate ham and grits and gravysoaked bread. A life in which an old, old woman, older than time, older than God, even, sometimes beat him with a cane.

The only real world was here and now and the Hill.

The other world existed only because he allowed it to exist. If he banished it from his mind, it ceased completely and had never been. Someday, if granny got him really, terribly angry, he would just will her out of existence, and she would no longer be, nor any memory of her, except maybe a little pile of dust on the floor. This he knew with all the certainty of his eleven years.

He lay unmoving for a while, drugged by that nebulous half-world between sleeping and waking.

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