SOMEDAY, IN THAT SANDBOX

Harvey, you’re doing it wrong. Dig that part so it’s more “vrazoom.”

How am I supposed to know what that means? What are you even making, anyway?

A giggle. That’s a secret until it’s finished.

Rifling through buried memories as he tried to recall something, Harvey sometimes suddenly heard scraps of conversations as if they were happening all over again.

In the corner of the sandbox sat a little pile of sand, the evidence of someone trying to build something that hadn’t ever come to anything in the end. For some reason it tugged at his mind, and while he was cocking his head and trying to remember why, Kieli’s voice popped into his mind, and then his own voice in its wake. That became the trigger that finally brought back the memory. Kieli’d said she wanted them all to make something in the sandbox together, so he’d gone along with her on the second morning of Colonization Days, and this was the remains of the sand sculpture they’d started building.

He’d gotten tired of it before they finished, so he’d abandoned it and gone into town. Come to think of it, he still didn’t know what it was Kieli had been trying to make. He only had the echo of her playful That’s a secret branded into his ear.

This makeshift sandbox and half-finished whatever-it- was would both be cleared away without a trace tomorrow anyway. Maybe Nana would take the tin watering can and the shovel home with her, but that was it.

Harvey sat on the low blocks penning in the sand, and after a bit of struggling with his bandaged left hand, he lit a cigarette. If pressed, he’d have to say the most irritating thing about the plaster was that since he could barely move his fingers, he couldn’t handle the lighter very well. And here he’d just finally gotten used to being short one hand. Earlier, he’d asked one more time to have it removed, but Shiman and Kieli had both shouted him down with amazing ferocity.

He sucked the first puff of smoke into his lungs, and craned his neck back to look up at the night sky as he exhaled.

“Harry!”

Harvey couldn’t even work up the desire to correct the nickname anymore. He looked down to see a little girl approaching him with a radio around her neck, skirt flapping behind her as she ran.

No sooner had the foreboding struck him than, just as he’d predicted, she tripped over a dip in the ground not far from him. He put out his hand and caught her at the last second, so they were safe this time. Which was all well and good, but the weight on his hand still hurt like hell. It didn’t look as though he was going to convince anybody to take off the plaster anytime soon.

Nana sat next to him on the blocks and put the radio on her lap. Then she nodded to herself for some reason (maybe having the radio there was more comfortable?), and leaned her body right up against Harvey’s. He was getting very seriously uncomfortable the longer she stared up at him with those big, barely blinking eyes.

“You’re leaving tomorrow?”

“Ah…yeah.”

“Can we play again sometime?”

“Hard to say.”

Even if “sometime” ever came, who knew how old this girl would be? By then she might not be able to see invisible friends anymore.

As he evaded her gaze and blew a cloud of smoke in the opposite direction, a small head plunked down on his thigh. “Hey…” Harvey peered into her face, and then gave up on saying anything else. She’d been totally awake up until just a moment ago, and now in the space of a second she was dozing.

He sighed and let his eye wander again. Apparently it was pretty late for children to be up, but it looked as though the adults’ merrymaking would go on for good a while yet.

They’d built a bonfire in the camp’s central clearing, and the muffled sounds of high-spirited talking, laugher, and music reached his ears as a jumble of white noise. By tomorrow evening, all the troupes would pack up and head out to wherever their next gigs were. As it had been explained to Harvey, tonight there would be a little (not that it looked very “little” to him) wrap-up party. If they had the energy to do manual labor clearing away rubble in the park all day and then whoop it up late into the night like this, they must have even sturdier constitutions than the Undyings. Harvey was kind of impressed.

Dancers in their performance clothes formed a ring around the fire for a folk dance, taking the men’s hands and drawing them one after another into the circle. He scanned the clearing for a yellow bunny, but he didn’t see one in the field of vision his left eye afforded him.

He wanted to go say good-bye before morning, but he couldn’t quite get into the mood.

“So this is our last night, eh? We owe them big for all they’ve done,” said the radio from Nana’s lap. It was a gentler, kinder voice than usual; Harvey felt awkward just hearing it. Nana’s warmth and her slight weight pressed softly against his thigh as she lay there fast asleep.

“You’ll miss her, right? You want me to leave you behind with her?”

“Nah, that’s all right.”

Harvey had meant that as a joke, naturally, so he was blindsided and rather rattled by the dead-serious answer.

“After all, kids grow up so fast…”

“What’s with you all of a sudden?”

Creeped out, he pulled subtly away; Nana frowned and stirred. The radio lost itself in silent thought for a while before saying, “Say, once Kieli grows up some more—she can’t very well go around with me hanging from her neck forever, huh? I guess one of these days, she won’t need me anymore…” The words and the humble voice they were delivered in struck Harvey momentarily speechless. They’d known each other for a long time, but the radio had never come to him with anything like this before. In that moment of silence he did about a million seconds’ worth of floundering for a response, but in the end the only thing that came to him was banter.

“Come on, I thought you were looking forward to her turning seventeen or eighteen.”

“Shut up,” the radio retorted, “That’s another issue, involving YOU.”

“There you go pinning all the blame on me again,” Harvey grumbled. Then he adjusted Nana’s head on his lap, which had started to slide off, and whacked the radio’s case while he was at it. “Well, it doesn’t look like you’ll lay off scolding me anytime soon, anyway.”

“You oughta grow up a little more. Lately you’re more liable to get yourself in trouble than Kieli is.”

“Yeah, yeah, so sorry.”

He looked up at the sky and sighed out a puff of smoke, and then on a whim he let himself fall backward into the sand, careful not to move the leg Nana was using as a pillow. There was a small whmph when his back hit, and sand billowed up around him.

The thin white plume of smoke rising from his cigarette left him to be swallowed up by the sea of slate-gray clouds blanketing his field of vision.

“…What are you lying on the ground for?”

A girl’s face cut in between the nearby smoke and faraway sky along with her quizzical voice. Harvey shifted his gaze to her without moving from the ground. As soon as he took in the entire picture of the girl standing next to him and peering, his single eye blinked unbidden, and then blinked again.

That was a skirt.

“Oh, um, they made me wear this and told me to join the dancers—I told them I don’t know anything about dancing and stuff, but—” Kieli looked down at her clothes self-consciously, then grasped the knee-length skirt with both hands in a nonseductive, inexperienced way and lifted it up a little. Harvey’d had a feeling things might go this way, so he’d tried to steel himself for it—and sure enough, she tossed him a look as if she was trying to read his face, and said, “It doesn’t suit me?”

“It’s not quite that,” he said, still staring a little stupidly. He didn’t even get the urge to tease her. So he ended up blurting out the first thought that came to his mind, which was, “I’m not used to it.”

“Give her more to work with than that!” the radio remonstrated. Harvey thought for a bit.

“It doesn’t match.”

Then he got the feeling his second attempt had made things even worse.

He honestly didn’t have much of a standard by which to judge whether clothes “suited” or “didn’t suit” someone, but it did seem like a mismatched outfit. The thin, light-blue shoes from the dancers’ wardrobe were fine and all, but above the costume she wore her usual crude duffle coat.

As he looked up at her from below and to the side, he realized that the white legs peeking out from under the hem of her skirt were still scraped and bruised. He hadn’t been thinking about it, so he was caught by surprise, and he didn’t know what his face looked like for a moment. Kieli yanked the skirt down to cover knees, as though maybe she’d caught him looking.

“Ah, I’m fine now, okay?”

“You’re not fine,” Harvey overruled her immediately, mouth twisting. He felt the murderous rage against those punks from last night welling up again, making him sick—

“Um, okay, so if you keep…!” Kieli suddenly burst out. But then the wind seemed to leave her sails right away; she took a breath as if to firm her resolve, and started over again in a strangely stumbling way, sounding almost like Nana. “Okay, so, if you keep your promise, then I’ll be fine.”

“Promise?” Harvey remembered it by the time the question was out of his mouth, but he’d already started to echo her before he’d thought.

“…You said ‘Roger.’ At the park,” Kieli clarified, looking peeved.

She might seem as if she was monitoring his face hesitantly, but he knew she’d never be the one to break eye contact; her straightforward black eyes bored right into him. For several seconds two Harveys held a whispered conference in the back of his mind (Do we dodge the issue? What now?). In the meantime, the greater part of his brain that was left over directed its attention to other things, like the distant sounds of laughter and the drums livening up the dance.

Then he propped himself up on his right elbow and levered his back up off the sand to catch Kieli’s hand at her skirt with the restricted fingers of his own injured left hand and tug, just lightly. Awkwardly careful of the hem of her skirt, Kieli plopped down to sit in the sand next to him with her hands clasped primly in her lap.

“Hey, what’s this ‘promise’ about, guys?” broke in the radio at Harvey’s feet. He fumbled blindly for the power switch, and the voice cut off with a short burst of static.

The smell of tobacco and a faint puff of breath brushed her lips—

—and that was all.

When she opened her eyes, Harvey’s face was just a few millimeters from touching her own; his single copper eye blinked once before, without warning, he dropped his gaze straight down. Kieli bent her own neck, following it, and found that Nana had crawled halfway up his chest and was staring intently at them.

She exchanged another look with Harvey at that very close range.

He averted his eye and abruptly stood up, sending Nana sprawling down into the sand, and the radio around her neck with her.

“Looking back on it, I don’t think I made any promises.”

Harvey’s face assumed a look of complete, and belated, innocence as he adjusted the cigarette in his mouth and brushed the sand from his clothes and hair. Then he got up and started walking away from the sandbox. After an interval during which Kieli sat in stunned silence, she leapt to her feet as if struck by lightning, and started running after his tall form.

When she caught up, she stalked after him from right up close, pulling at the back of his coat with both hands. “What?!”

“What!” Nana mimicked, coming up beside them and hanging off of the hem of Harvey’s coat.

“That’s not fair!”

“Not fair!”

“Argh, leave me alone. Knock off the stereo effects, you’re bugging me.” Harvey strode forward in long steps, half-dragging the two clinging girls after him and not once looking back at them.

“Oh, I can’t believe you…!”

“Hey, you three, time for fireworks!” someone called to them from a distance. When Kieli peeked over Harvey’s arm, a mouse in striped overalls was waving from in front of the fire in the clearing. Harvey, who had displayed zero intention of even going near the party up until this point, jumped at the chance and transferred his interests in that direction.

“Listen to that—fireworks. Have you ever seen those before?”

“Hey, you’re changing the subject!”

“Fireworks!”

Kieli resisted, pouting, but Nana had immediately lost interest in the issue at hand, and was apparently all about fireworks now. She brought the radio up to stomach level and cried excitedly, “Corp’ral, Corp’ral, it’s time for fireworks!” Then, confused, she started shaking it and turning it upside down.

“Corp’ral?”

“Gah! You idiot, don’t—”

But by the time Harvey hurriedly tried to stop her, her young finger was already touching the switch.

“You bastard, what was that for?!”

Out came the expected bellow of rage, and also—

“Here we go!” came the shout from the clearing, and a sudden hush fell over the boisterous ring of partying entertainers.

Nana let out a little whoop and took off running for the clearing; and the radio, its rant cut off, streamed protesting static as it bounced against her back. “Come on, Kieli,” whispered the man next to her, and a bandaged hand wrapped around her shoulder and urged her forward too.

While the whole crowd looked on with bated breath, a streak of light shot up from the center of the clearing and straight into the sky as if to rip the blue-gray curtain of night.

They all looked up as one, following the light, and—

“…Wow…!”

A chorus of cheers filled the air.

The beam of light reached all the way to the clouds covering the sky, and then little bursting sparks of light filled her vision like scattered sand and rained down on them from above. “It’s beautiful…” was all Kieli breathed, staring stunned into the sky. It was such an uninspired thing to say, but it was from her heart, and it was all there was. Without any conscious thought, she reached up to squeeze the hand on her shoulder.

Could this same sky be seen from the park right now, too?

Could this same sky, those same pinpricks of light, be seen from that school in the ruins, too? Kieli hoped so. She hoped that somewhere out there, little Elisha was running around squealing just like Nana was now, reaching up with both hands and trying to catch the lights. She hoped that the young eyes of the kids looking up at the sky from their classroom window—Elisha’s and the little boys’, and Sarah’s and Joachim’s, and the sunset eyes of that boy with the matching copper hair—were seeing those same sparkling grains of light.

That those grains of light would rain down just the same way on the tiny stone grave markers in the corner of the schoolyard, sparkling and sparkling and sparkling.