IGMS Issue 17 Read Online Free PDF

dream. It was enough that Steve was sure he'd know her if he saw her again.
    "Somebody's been sitting on my fire escape!" he said to himself in the car, laughing with a new appreciation for Papa Bear and his family's plight. All this over what was probably nothing -- some neighbor's kid sneaking out to party with friends on a school night, for all he knew.
    When he got home, Matt was drawing pictures of birds -- brown and blue blobs with wings, most of them. Matt was hungry, so they had macaroni and cheese for dinner, and hot dogs, too. Matt ate maybe three bites of each, and, feeling guilty for being such a bad dad as to feed his sick kid junk food, Steve tried everything including bribery to get him to eat a handful of grapes for their token nutrition.
    "I don't need nutrition," said Matt. "I got vitamins and my medicine."
    Steve felt he had a moral obligation not to cave in on the important stuff -- like grapes -- just because the fear of losing his only son made him want to break down and cry. He pulled the ultimate Dad card instead: "No grapes," he said. "No dessert."
    After cookies and milk, there were video games while Steve looked over Matt's homework -- the bird drawings, and a detailed explanation of how much bird seed Big Bird would eat if he, like the sparrows and jays at the birdfeeder, chomped down on seven times his body weight every day. Matt and Leah had put together some alphabet work in a bold, red crayon, and Matt showed off his skill with a new math puzzle, racing the clock and winning. It was good. Outside the rain fell and the wind rattled the fire escape, but inside, it was all light and warm. They sat on the sofa and watched one of Matt's DVDs. Matt dug in with bony elbows and knees every time the bad guys took a punch. Steve was sure he'd be covered in dollar-sized bruises in the morning. If only Sharon had been there . . . if only bath time hadn't been followed by medicine time . . . it would have been perfect.
    Matt got tucked in. Then, it was story time.
    Cinderella, the very grim, Grimm version, because that was what Steve could tell out of memory. There were other versions, cleansed of violence. They sat wrong in his mind, twisted and somehow false. Liars on the page. Now, he told the story to Matt the way that felt right. The book, as always, sat unopened on his lap. He didn't need it, except as a place to put his hands. He knew the story. It was the version he liked best, the one with golden slippers instead of glass, and a golden gown shaken down out of the leafy, salt-watered, graveside tree. With the ambitious sisters limping on bloody, mutilated feet, and Cinderella's rescue coming on the wings of dozens of birds. No godmother fairy at all.
    Matt's medicines kicked in and he fell asleep before the end. Steve sat for a long, quiet moment, just watching his son's narrow chest rise and fall with each laborious breath. He could set the storybook aside then, and reach out to touch Matt's hair, his cheek, his hands. It wasn't to check for fever, but just to touch, to remind himself of what was real, what mattered.
    Steve rose then, tucked the blankets carefully up around Matt's narrow shoulders, crossed to the window, and opened it.
    There.
    The junkie stood as if she'd been waiting for him, a slim figure hunched against the fire escape, while the wind grabbed and tossed at the oversized, black coat she wore, so the tails of it flew out into the night like wings. She looked strangely as though she'd been both hoping and dreading he would appear. The two emotions beat back and forth across her face with the give-and-take of a pulse, as though she couldn't hold on to either feeling long enough for it to settle.
    He thought at first she was the teenager he'd expected, but there was something in the way she moved, the glance of her eye that said otherwise. She might, he thought, be any age at all. Her unlined face did not speak of youth. No, she looked as though she had been sitting in the winter