Stories About Things Read Online Free Page B

some water, a lake or
seashore perhaps. He could even see the crests of the waves.
    There must be a real storm coming, Sal
thought, one with all kinds of rain and wind, and maybe even some
snow.
    He stared and stared at the orange and white
paintings in the sky, and then it occurred to him that he
recognized some of the features. That one hill (a giant cumulus
mass) looked like the hill beside his house. If the animals were
cows indeed, they could be his neighbor’s who always grazed in the
little pasture by Sal’s house. And there! His house was beside
them. Then a smaller cloud drifted out of the house-shaped one. It
was a person-shaped cloud. Why, that could almost be his mother!
She stood in the yard looking about and calling–he could see the
cloud open its mouth and cup its hands around it. He waved to her,
and called out, but she went on looking and looking.
    He tried to run towards his house, for he was
sure by now that his mother was calling for him, and it was time to
come in for dinner. As he ran, the sun sank lower and lower. Within
a few minutes it had slipped over the edge of the world, and the
hill, the house, and his mother disappeared in the shadows.
    He looked about him. The sun had sucked most
of the light down with it, and it was already deep twilight. He
could see enough, though, to wonder at the landscape. There was a
forest, close and black, and an obsidian lake that looked like
stone. He turned in a circle and saw that hills surrounded him,
even where a moment ago the sun had been. His house was not sitting
atop any of them. As he looked at the trees and the water, he
realized that they were not the trees and water that he knew.
    “Mother!” he called.
    There was no answer.
    “Mother! he called again.
    And there was a whisper, a high whispering
laugh, from the shadows. It was not his mother.
    Then the twilight vanished, and, in the dark,
there were voices and movements in all directions. Dinner was
indeed ready, and he was just in time.
     
     

TWO
Shark
     
    Nobody liked Josiah.
    Under the sun, he was a bleached bone laying
on the sand. Like a skeleton buried on unhallowed ground apart from
decent folk, he kept away from the living flesh. When the sun went
down, he was a shadow on the edge of our bonfires, a silence
outside our ring of laughter and flirtation and drinks, lots of
drinks.
    He was always on the beach. Every weekend,
every night, every day. Nobody invited him. They didn't need to; he
wasn't really in on the parties. He just shared the space. I guess
he just liked the water.
    A skinny kid even in the baggy clothes he
wore to school, in swimming trunks he was skeletal. In the light of
the fires at night, he looked like a snowy ghoul.
    "Shark," the girls called him, and
giggled.
    They laughed to cover up their unease,
because he was someone who made people uneasy.
    He was a shark, no doubt about it. Not that
he was vicious, at least, not in any way we could tell. Really, he
just looked like one. There was a pointed look about his face,
cheek bones all sticking out at unlikely angles, and a razor of an
upper lip. He had a finlike crown, smooth and narrow which,
situated atop a stretched frame, always stuck up above a sea of
heads.
    He moved like a shark, too, in a stalking
kind of walk with a pronounced grace about it. He had the kind of
grace that you almost wanted to watch, if only it didn't make you
so nervous.
    "Shark," they would say, and laugh. They
laughed together, because laughter in number is safer than laughter
alone.
    As creepy as he looked prowling the sand,
indoors he was a goldfish.
    He was the type of twerp I'd give wedgies to,
and push into the lockers in the hallways between class. He was the
type who had his name scrawled next to funny remarks on the walls
of the toilet at school. He was such an easy target, taunting him
wasn't even much fun. It was just an imperative of the social
food-chain.
    I intended to keep my place on it.
    This year, as soon as the sun rose on