What Came From the Stars Read Online Free

sand and was dragging it out in etched canals. He drew in the iodine smell of the seaweed, and how the seaweed waved back and forth under the water when the tide came in. He drew in...
    Tommy stopped. He blinked. He made his hand move away from the paper. He tried to open his fingers, tried again, and finally got them to drop the pencil.
    He looked at what he had drawn. He listened to it. He smelled it. He felt it.
    Then, quickly, he crumpled it all up. The sound of the grinding stones grew less, less, less, then nothing. He stuffed the crumpled paper into his backpack. He left the stubby pencil lying on the sand.
    “Patty,” he called, and held his hand out to her.
    She looked at him.
    His hand was trembling a little.

    Tommy and his sister walked home quickly—until Patty started to run to keep up, and Tommy slowed down. Every time they stopped at a corner, the iodine smell of the seaweed came up to him, and he couldn’t tell if the smell was on the wind coming inland, or if it was coming from his backpack. He decided not to take a chance, and when they passed a trash can, he took out the crumpled paper and threw it away. He thought he heard the sound of pebbles pushed by water as it fell. And was the tolling only from the buoys out in the harbor?
    They walked past the neat boutiques and shops with flower boxes filled with late petunias, past all the restaurants for tourists and the parking lots for tourists and the trim information booths for tourists, and past the long green lawns of those who could afford to live in big white houses by the sea—past all the smaller houses with not such long green lawns, and then smaller houses with very little lawns, and then smaller houses with hardly any lawns at all and hemmed in by scraggly hedges.
    And when those houses gave out, the road sort of coughed, stuttered, and then died into a gravel path that went up sharply into the sand, passing the sign advertising PILGRIMWAY CONDOMINIUMS COMING SOON! UPSCALE SHORE LIVING!
    Beyond that sign, Tommy’s old and lonely house tilted against a dune. It had no green lawn at all. Only scrub and sand all along the railroad-tie steps up to the house that had once been white, but the paint had blown away long ago. It had a center fireplace, and only a few bricks were missing from the chimney on top—which was also tilted.
    The door squeaked when Tommy and Patty opened it, the floor of the front hall squeaked when they stepped on it, and the stairs squeaked when they dropped their backpacks onto them. Tommy thought that the house had been leaning against the dune so long, it was tired and ready to give out—something like his father these last few months.
    Tommy had never once had a friend over to his windblown, leaning house. Patty hadn’t either. Probably, Tommy figured, they never would.
    Tommy went on back to the kitchen. This floor didn’t squeak as much because it was covered with a layer of blue floral linoleum, but he could see through the holes in the blue linoleum to the red floral linoleum beneath it, and he could see through the worn patches in the red floral linoleum to the broad wood beneath. Someday, his mother and father had said, someday they’d take up the horrible linoleum. Someday they’d level the planks and sand them smooth as soap. It was a project his mother and father had wanted to do together.
    Someday.
    His father was there, making a birthday cake. A chocolate frosted chocolate birthday cake, which Tommy loved so much, it didn’t matter that it was leaning too. “How was your day?” his father asked.
    “Good.”
    “What did you do?”
    Tommy went over to the cake and ran his finger along the chocolate icing that dripped onto the plate.
    “Dug up dinosaur bones.”
    “What did you do with them?”
    “Sold them to the Museum of Science in Boston for a small fortune.”
    “And your share of that is...?”
    “Five hundred thousand dollars.”
    “Not bad for one day’s work.”
    “It only took a couple