Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies Read Online Free PDF Page A

girl about your age—might have been your sister, but she won’t admit it—who saw the cat and decided to teach it a lesson. She hid in the taller grass with two old kites under each arm and waited for the cat to come by stalking. When it got real close, she put on her mother’s dark glasses, to look all bug-eyed, and she jumped up flapping the kites. Well, it was just a little too real, because in a trice she found herself flying, and she was much smaller than she had been, and the cat jumped at her. Almost got her, too. Ask your sister about that sometime. See if she doesn’t deny it.”
    â€œHow’d she get back to be my sister again?”
    â€œShe became too scared to fly. She lit on a flower and found herself crushing it. The glasses broke, too.”
    â€œMy sister did break a pair of Mom’s glasses once.”
    The woman smiled.
    â€œI got to be going home.”
    â€œTomorrow you bring me a story, okay?”
    I ran off without answering. But in my head, monsters were already rising. If she thought I was scared, wait until she heard the story I had to tell! When I got home my oldest sister, Barbara, was fixing lemonade in the kitchen. She was a year older than I but acted as if she were grown-up. She was a good six inches taller, and I could beat her if I got in a lucky punch, but no other way-so her power over me was awesome. But we were usually friendly.
    â€œWhere you been?” she asked, like a mother.
    â€œSomebody tattled on you, “ I said.
    Her eyes went doe-scared, then wizened down to slits. “What’re you talking about?”
    â€œSomebody tattled about what you did to Mom’s sunglasses.”
    â€œI already been whipped for that,” she said nonchalantly. “Not much more to tell.”
    â€œOh, but I know more.”
    â€œWas not playing doctor,” she said. The youngest, Sue-Ann, weakest and most full of guile, had a habit of telling the folks somebody or other was playing doctor. She didn’t know what it meant—I just barely did--but it had been true once, and she held it over everybody as her only vestige of power.
    â€œNo,” I said, “but I know what you were doing. And I won’t tell anybody.”
    â€œYou don’t know nothing,” she said. Then she accidentally poured half a pitcher of lemonade across the side of my head and down my front. When Mom came in I was screaming and swearing like Dad did when he fixed the cars, and I was put away for life plus ninety years in the bedroom I shared with younger brother Michael. Dinner smelled better than usual that evening, but I had none of it. Somehow I wasn’t brokenhearted. It gave me time to think of a scary story for the country-colored woman on the rock.
    School was the usual mix of hell and purgatory the next day. Then the hot, dry winds cooled and the bells rang and I was on the dirt road again, across the southern hundred acres, walking in the lees and shadows of the big cottonwoods. I carried my Road-Runner lunch pail and my pencil box and one book—a handwriting manual I hated so much I tore pieces out of it at night, to shorten its lifetime and I walked slowly, to give my story time to gel.
    She was leaning up against a tree, not far from the rock. Looking back, I can see she was not so old as a boy of eight years thought. Now I see her lissome beauty and grace, despite the dominance of gray in her reddish hair, despite the crow’s-feet around her eyes and the smile-haunts around her lips. But to the eight-year-old she was simply a peculiar crone. And he had a story to tell her, he thought, that would age her unto graveside.
    â€œHello, boy,” she said.
    â€œHi.” I sat on the rock.
    â€œI can see you’ve been thinking,” she said.
    I squinted into the tree shadow to make her out better. “How’d you know?”
    â€œYou have the look of a boy that’s been thinking. Are you here to listen to