We were in the midst of arithmetic when the clatter of a wagon pulled by a dappled horse drew the children to the window. The horse pranced into the schoolyard and halted with a shout from the negro driver. Two wool-clad gentlemen leaped from the wagon. As the driver leaned over and withdrew fishing gear from a wooden trunk, one of the gentlemen fastened the suspenders on his tall rubber boots. The second gentleman knocked on the schoolroom door, and when I opened it I recognized my benefactor, Deming Jarves.

“May we water and tether our horse behind the schoolhouse today?” he inquired. “We're hoping to snag some trout and shoot a few snipes.”

I consented to his request, bid him good luck, and shooed the children back to their seats.  Curious about Mr. Jarves’s companion, I glanced out the window. His ruddy face seemed carved of granite, his eyes deep black chasms under heavy black eyebrows.  He was smiling as he spoke to the negro and laid a hand on his shoulder as both erupted in laughter, clearly sharing a joke.  When their laughter died, he turned to Mr. Jarves and began another story. I not only heard but felt the deep, sonorous tone of his voice.  I laid my hand against the windowpane, fully expecting to feel vibrations there. Why, he’s a natural orator if ever there was one, I thought, and recognition struck me:  Senator Webster from Massachusetts!

Horace was standing by my side, the pencil in his hand ready for sharpening.  He glanced out the window, and then his shining eyes caught mine. “Black Dan,” he whispered.  He had recognized him, too.  We watched the men as they disappeared down the path to Peter's Pond.

The long, hard division on the children’s slates forced the visitors out of my mind, but when lessons ended, Ephraim and Horace rushed to the door.

“The visitors must be fishin’,” Ephraim said. “I haven’t heard any gunshots.”

“Too early for snipes,” Horace added.

The boys tossed their schoolbooks on the ground and traded them for their rifles.  Then they headed down the same path the hunters had chosen.

Much later, Horace recounted the events of that momentous afternoon. Side by side, step by step, skirting brambles and bushes, the boys trudged quietly toward Peter’s Pond. When a chattering squirrel scrambled up a tree trunk, both boys lifted their guns and aimed. Ephraim fired first, and his bullet struck the creature just above its waving tail. Horace heard Ephraim shoot so he held his fire.

The explosion woke a doe and two fawns hidden in a thick green glade of tall ferns. Startled, the deer crashed in breaking waves through the undergrowth. Horace heard the commotion and saw the animals’ bobbing white tails as they fled. Instead of shooting at the squirrel, Horace swung his gun to the side and fired.

Ephraim heard Horace’s shot but he assumed Horace had missed the squirrel. Ephraim raced to retrieved his prey, turned, and held the bushy-tailed creature high for Horace to inspect. But Horace wasn’t watching Ephraim. He had moved away.

Frowning, dead squirrel in one hand, gun in the other, Ephraim followed Horace as he made his way to the place where one of the fawns lay.

As Ephraim approached him from behind, Horace stood examining the prone animal and discovered a neat, round bullet hole in its flank.

Just then another squirrel ventured into view from behind a nearby tree trunk, scolding Horace for his violent deed. Always ready, Ephraim raised his rifle again, squinted, and aimed.

At the same moment, Horace, still with his back to Ephraim, stepped closer to the fawn, unknowingly inserting his leg into the path of Ephraim’s bullet. When Ephraim squeezed the trigger, the hot bullet ripped into Horace’s calf, imbedding itself behind and below his knee. The fawn cushioned his fall.

When Ephraim saw what he had done, he threw his gun to the ground as if it were a red-hot fireplace poker.

“Ephraim, you shot me!” Horace screamed.

Mr. Jarves and his companions were packing their fishing gear and stringing trout on Snake Pond’s sandy shore when they heard Horace scream.

The Lucky Shopper

“She loves you, ya, ya, ya. She loves you, ya, ya, ya.”

It was Beatles karaoke night in Roppongi, a neighborhood frequented mostly by gaijin, foreign businessmen and women like herself. She was exhausted after the long conference and her shopping excursion, but wanted to experience a little of Tokyo’s nightlife. Surrounding her table, a mixture of Japanese men in black suits and ties and Westerners in less formal attire tapped their fingers on tabletops strewn with napkins, straws, and drinks. The music was loud. People were singing, smiling, and having fun. She noticed a family with a group of young teenagers sitting together in one corner. Alone, she missed her husband and her two sons.

She pulled her smartphone from her purse and opened the app she had purchased and downloaded in one of Tokyo's markets. The stall was run by a small, independent company, and software prices were high. "So advanced you'll question reality!" the hawker cried.

She asked the salesman if he sold any games that featured dragons. He paused to consider, and then knelt down to rummage under the cash register. Standing, he showed her two games.

"Each one very unique. One of a kind," he explained.

A teenaged boy in a striped tee shirt stood nearby, listening carefully to his explanation. One game featured a dragon named Futara, the other featured a giant millipede. When she chose the game with the dragon, the teenaged boy stepped forward.

"Please, I would like to purchase that game. Futara great dragon. I travel many miles today to purchase this."

If she wasn't so desperate, she would have relented, but her ten-year-old son Jason had asked her to bring home a dragon figurine, and she had been searching everywhere for one he could add to the collection he displayed on top of the bookshelf in his bedroom. She wanted to please Jason, but the closest she could come was this game.

The salesman apologized to the teenager, and he offered him the other game. The teenager nodded his head and purchased the other game, but he was clearly disappointed.

A short while later, she discovered a small dragon figurine in another stall that was perfect for Jason. It was small but golden, with an intricate pattern of inlaid garnets and scrollwork. Its eyes glowed like diamonds, and its claws were sharp.

She examined it closely, put it down, and continued to browse, hoping for something bigger. Unfortunately, the same teenager happened to be browsing in that particular stall, too, and, when he noticed her interest, he stepped forward to grab the figurine.

She tried to explain to the boy, politely, respectfully, that she’d like to purchase it for her son, but he had an earbud attached to the smartphone in his tee shirt pocket, and he didn’t seem to listen. She repeated her plea in slow English. This time he glanced at her, but his eyes hardened as she spoke.

"Westerner,” he muttered, "now the score is even. You have game, I have dragon, and he brushed past her, carrying the dragon to the register.

She was the unluckiest shopper.

A waiter approached her, but she asked for the tab. She paid it and left as the boy sang “Yesterday”.

The next morning she was determined to see the countryside, and she searched for the train station, passing an abandoned McDonald’s and hurrying under the elevated railroad tracks. Finally she located the grungy ticket office and boarded the rickety, rollicking train to Nikko, home of the emperor’s summer palace. The city melted behind her as the train entered Tochigi Prefecture with its emerald rice paddies and soft, round mountains.

After an hour in the pleather seat, she rose to stretch her legs. In the car behind hers she noticed the boy again – Was this the third time? - still wearing his striped tee shirt. His eyes were riveted to his manga paperback, and the bag holding the dragon was on the seat beside him. He may have been aware of her, but he did not deign to lift his eyes.


When she disembarked from the train in Nikko, it was raining, and she opened her umbrella along with all of the other travelers. She pulled out the map and directions the innkeeper had emailed her and crossed the arched, vermilion lacquered Shinkyo Bridge. She glanced behind her once or twice, but she didn’t notice the boy under all of the colorful umbrellas.


“Nikko is Nippon,” read the sign on the village restaurant. This village wasn’t Toyko with its cosmopolitan flavor. She noticed no foreigners inside the establishment. It wasn’t tourist season, and she felt conspicuously out of place in her sneakers and jeans. All of the Japanese women around her wore black high heels and sleek pantsuits. She had seen a few traditional kimonos paired with socks and sandals on the train.

The onsen at the inn was nirvana. She dismissed every care from her mind as she relaxed into the ritual and moist heat and later slept deeply and dreamlessly on the tatami mat.

At dawn, walking along the Daiyagawa River that flows behind the inn, a long row of red-capped, red-bibbed statues regarded her solemnly. Noticing others’ offerings, she deposited a coin in one lap. Should she make a wish? Say a prayer? “Make me a better shopper!” she implored.

After a breakfast of fish and eggs, she explored the summer palace with its traditional artisan’s architecture. She visited the shrines, stopping with the other tourists to admire the intricate carvings. Young girls giggled under the Three Monkeys of "see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil" fame. The guide informed her that Buddhism teaches that if we do not hear, see, or speak evil, we ourselves shall be spared from evil. She hoped that that was true.

Late in the afternoon, she wandered away from the tourist hordes and followed the cobblestone path up a steep hill lined with tall evergreen trees that soared through the mist to the cloudy sky. A lonely shrine seemed to beckon to her from the summit.
The view of the surrounding mountains was worth the climb. The guide standing outside the shrine named the mountains for her; Mt. Fuji, Mt. Futara, and Mt. Akagi were like shadows in the distance. She recalled the dragon Futara from the app she had purchased for her son and smiled.

She removed her shoes and set them, all alone, outside the temple door and entered the enclosure with some trepidation, never sure of the proper deportment expected in such a holy place as this. When she saw the Buddha, she put her palms together and bowed as she had been taught.

Then she noticed the arrow labeled GIFTS, abandoned her supplicant’s pose, and entered the shop.

Inside the shop, in a small, glass display case, she spied the only souvenir sold there, a ruler-length dragon wrapped around a golden arrow - and the price was reasonable.

“Perfect! I’ll take that one,” she told the tiny gray-haired sales woman in the black apron.

Smiling and gesturing, she set her purse on the counter and searched for her wallet.

“Grandma, I will finish this sale,” she heard a boy’s voice say. The old woman spoke to her grandson in Japanese, probably scolding him for speaking English, but she stepped out the back door of the shop.

Looking up from her purse, she gasped. It was the same boy with the striped tee shirt. In her surprise, her hand grasped her smartphone, and she pulled that out instead of her wallet.

The boy glanced at her hand and drew his smartphone out of his pocket, too.

“Our score is tied. So you like to shop for dragon? Today I see you drop. The Battle of Sarumaru?” he asked.

She understood that they were choosing the weapons for a duel, and, inexplicably, she nodded her agreement. She had done nothing wrong. Why shouldn't she defend herself?

He tapped a key, and a gigantic millipede with a thousand legs emerged from the screen. Howling, it hovered beside the boy. Its gaping mouth breathed noxious fumes and sparks, and its teeth dripped venom.

"So advanced you'll question reality!" the salesman had promised. And he was right. Somehow the monster inside the game had achieved physical reality here in the gift shop.

"Attack!" ordered the boy, and the millipede swooped over her head. She stepped back in shock, gripping her smartphone in one hand and waving at sparks with the other as they descended upon her head.

“I want that souvenir for my son!” she shouted and tapped her smartphone, calling forward from its memory the Dragon Futara. Wouldn't Jason love to see me now, she thought.

“Sic ‘im, Futara!” she shouted, and the dragon that materialized from her screen rose into the air, thrashing its tail from side to side and baring its awesome teeth. From its nostrils, clouds of smoke issued forth. It exhaled with a roar, and fire swept across the surface of the glass case, singing the boy's hair.

In seconds, the monsters clamped their teeth around each other's throats, devoured each other, and disappeared. Only a thin, green vapor remained.

Before she could heave a sigh of relief, the boy began to change. His face became a devil’s mask. He wore a horned helmet, and a samurai’s armor covered his shirt. His earbud and smartphone transformed into daisho, two swords, large and small, which he pointed at her, menacingly.

She tapped her smartphone again and a dagger replaced it in her hand.

The samurai brandished his large sword. She ducked as the blade swept past her ear. He swung his small sword. She ducked again.

In response, she paused for one second and licked the tip of her dagger. Then she aimed and sent it flying. It pierced the samurai’s mask, protruding from one eye hole, and remained there, its silver handle reflecting in the glass of the display case. Inwardly she cringed.

The samurai's armor evaporated, leaving in its place the boy, his shoulders slumped, his head hung in shame.

“How did you know that human saliva could triumph over me?” he asked without looking up.

“I didn’t know. I was lucky,” she answered, “and now I’d like to buy that dragon’s arrow for my son.”

“You are very lucky. It’s the last one,” said the boy.

The next day she returned to Tokyo. Before her plane departed that evening, she stopped at the karaoke bar seeking a calming beverage. Her bulging luggage lounged on the floor beside her chair.

She wasn't at all surprised to see the boy in the corner. When he stepped to the mike and began singing, she raised her glass in a farewell toast.

Jasmine

Jasmine’s mother rose before dawn to tend the coal fire that warmed their krill soup and illuminated the crystal-lined walls of their cave. “Rise, daughter,” she whispered, and Jasmine stirred on her pallet, drew a blanket around her, and crawled to the ledge that overlooked the colony. The researcher’s dome glowing near the edge of the Oblivion Sea was far brighter than the sun would ever hope to be here on Ceres.

Her mother offered her a steaming mug, and Jasmine accepted it without glancing behind her or speaking. Her mother crouched and began brushing Jasmine’s long, white blond hair. With gentle fingers she loosened the tangles, pulled each strand back and away from Jasmine’s thin face, and then swiftly braided a tight whip that hung down her spine.

From the softly glowing mouths of the other cave cells, Jasmine could hear the rustlings of women preparing for labor in the mines.

Suddenly an asteroid entered the atmosphere and seared toward the colony in a flaming, sizzling rush, like a hunter’s flaming projectile. Mother and daughter watched its descent. Glowing like lava, its trajectory ended in a smashing finale that scattered rocks and gravel on the deserted shoreline beyond the researcher’s dome.

“All of this,” Jasmine’s mother sighed, “and heaven throws stones.”

The asteroid’s arrival was no surprise. Almost daily, great burning projectiles strayed from their orbit and hurled toward Ceres, smashing into the surface with dramatic visual effects, sometimes splitting rocks with great explosions and creating wide craters that paid homage to the intruders. Since Ceres processes through the solar system with the other members of the asteroid belt, orbital rejects of various sizes regularly bombard the colony. Often they splash into the slushy sea, but occasionally they damage the colony’s domed greenhouses. Usually the inmates were unaware of their arrival. Supplied with pickaxes and shovels, the women mined the interior of the carbonaceous planet for coal and diamonds, spending little time under the black sky. An unsuspecting inmate, Daria, whose cell was above Jasmine’s, had been crushed on the ledge of her cave, and from then on, Jasmine’s mother warned her daily to keep an eye on the sky. But Jasmine looked forward to the challenge of climbing the gigantic new asteroid.

After Jasmine’s mother donned her thick-soled work boots, coarsely woven coveralls, and her helmet with its single headlamp, she reached up to pencil the number 5,475 on the calendar. Five more years until her sentence ended. She kissed Jasmine on the top of her head and whispered, “Be safe, my daughter,” and strode down the mountain path to join the line of inmates assembling at the mine entrance under the prison guards’ watchful glares.

Ceres was one of the many penal colonies established by the central government in conjunction with the space administration. Like Columbus, the space administration recruited its voyagers from prison rosters. Most were thieves, embezzlers, or failed financial wizards. Unable to resist the siren call of greed, they had been sentenced and banished by the legal system to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Offered an adventurous alternative to prison, healthy inmates willingly entered the lottery. Jasmine’s pregnant mother was one of these, having succeeded in hiding her first trimester by switching urine samples with another inmate. Jasmine was born, squalling in protest, on a pallet laid on a cold floor inside her mother’s cave cell. Her mother named her after the fragrant flower that blooms on Earth only at night.

*

Jasmine pressed the callused fingers of both hands into a long, narrow fissure. After the toes of her climbing boots found solid purchase, she trusted them with all her weight, straightened her legs, and pushed her slim body five inches higher. Feeling faint, pulsating stars danced in her vision, so she concentrated on inhaling deeply and exhaling slowly, patiently, and she rested her cheek against the asteroid’s pitted surface. As she waited for oxygen to reach her brain and revive her, she glanced sideways and glimpsed a flat space at the summit where she intended to plant her feet. When her head cleared, she lifted her right foot and sought another protrusion, poking and prodding. Discovering a sturdy nub, she lent it all her weight, stretched up, grasped another fissure, and hauled her chest over the rough upper edge. Flat on her belly, she welcomed the meteorite’s diminishing warmth. Legs dangling freely, she rested again. Next she snaked forward, causing threads on the front of her synthetic jumpsuit to snag on the meteorite’s rough surface. Her mother would be unhappy; the weekly space transport delivered jumpsuits only twice each year. Concentrating on her balance, Jasmine stood, permitting herself a brief, self-congratulatory grin. She had triumphed over the intruder; surmounted the unknown.

Like a leaf that naturally turns toward the sun for sustenance, Ennui turned toward the pinpricks of firelight she had left behind in the penal colony’s caves scattered across the mountain’s face like so many soulless eyes. The unceasing darkness of Ceres, so far from the solar life source, oppressed her.
She turned her back on the colony to reap the panoramic reward she earned each time she scaled one of these grounded asteroids. First she gazed at the dark and distant Oblivion Sea where several geysers spouted. She liked to imagine that ponderous whales lay beneath the geysers, but she knew that the endless gushing originated in hydrothermal vents hundreds of feet below the surface.

Jasmine (continued)

Next, seeking light and hope, Ennui turned her eyes to heaven where the sun slouched, the slit of a silvery eye in the profile of an ebony lynx. Her heart brimming with loneliness, Ennui stood and stretched her arms as if to embrace the universe. “Where are you?” she cried.

Realizing how foolish she would appear to anyone gazing at her from the observatory and cognizant that she could never reach even the nearest star, she hung her head in frustration and shame. She climbed down from the asteroid, feeling empty and sad. When a single tear splashed the toe of her boot, she bent to wipe it away with her gloved hand, but the tears flowed. Frustrated with her own fragility, she kicked a rock - and uncovered an asymmetrical crystal. She picked it up and examined it.

Jasmine had seen many crystals on Ceres: inside her own cave, in the dark mines below the surface, and lying in the lapping waves along the seashore, but this one was different. While most of the crystals she had seen were clear, pale yellow, or translucent pink, this one was emerald green. Smaller than a hen’s egg, myriad smaller crystals were encased deep beneath the multi-faceted surface, floating, revolving, and glowering in the twilight. Impulsively, Jasmine raised the crystal to intercept an intrepid ray of sunlight that had penetrated a cloud.

The effect was swift. Trapped, intensified, and refracted by the crystal, the ray of sunlight was transformed into a rainbow that seared her vision and seemed to envelope her. Indistinct shapes, human forms, appeared before her. She felt no emotion. She felt that she traveled, but her feet did not move from the asteroid.

“Take courage. Take joy, Jasmine,” a voice murmured. “We are with you always.”
The vision receded as swiftly as it had appeared, and she gradually lowered the crystal, awestruck.

If Jasmine wasn’t so enthralled by her discovery of the crystal, so entranced by the indistinct vision it had etched in her mind’s eye, she would have noticed the long, white tentacle inexorably snaking around her ankle, the beady eyes staring at her from the place where they had emerged from the sea. The creature was wrapping its tentacle around and around her lower leg like a rubbery winter scarf, suction cups firmly fastening themselves to her boot.

She would remember when she regained consciousness in the observatory’s infirmary, her clothes soaking wet, her hair dripping, her face bleeding and scraped, her lungs gasping painfully, that her foot was yanked from behind and that the backward impetus caused the crystal to fly from her hand.

Suddenly her chest slammed the asteroid as the tentacle dragged her across the rocky shore and into the roiling ocean. The scientist’s young assistant had been watching, and he rescued her with the machete that hung, always ready, near the observatory door.

Jasmine woke in the clinic, feverish, her throat dry. Her hands groped the bedcovers. “The crystal, where is it?” she wondered. Her head ached. Her ribs hurt. Her mother’s voice drifted into the room from the corridor. Jasmine listened to her conversing softly... with a male voice? There were few men - and no boys - on Ceres. Who could it be?

The scientist’s young assistant stepped into the room first. "She's awake," he said, and smiled, relieved.

Jasmine's mother reached out for her hand.

(Dis)honored

Just after the newspapers announced that Marie Curie had won her second Nobel Prize, this time for chemistry, Madame Jeanne Langevin, the wife of the man with whom Marie was having an affair, released the lovers’ letters. The newspapers focused much of their print on the affair rather than the award. Marie, born in Poland, was castigated by journalist Gustave Tery, who said that France was “in the grip of a bunch of dirty foreigners, who plunder it, soil it, dishonor it.” Certain members of the Nobel committee felt that Marie’s attendance at the award ceremony would create difficulties, and one wrote to her, begging her to stay in France.

Monsieur Paul Langevin, the inventor of SONAR, challenged Gustave Tery to a duel. Face to face, both men lowered their arms. Marie attended the dinner intended to honor her for her work with radium and sat with Sweden’s King Gustav V - who was also accused of an affair with a married man.

A Friend Is a Friend

How could he have known that the way he dropped his r’s, his choice of sneakers instead of leather boat shoes, and his quick and easy smile would establish him in the minds of the older, sophisticated yacht club members as someone to be tolerated but never accepted or respected. Jerry grew up in Brockton and graduated from high school there. He took courses at the community college, a twenty minute walk from the club. If it weren't for Liam, whom he met on a trek to club's dumpster hidden behind the hedge in the sideyard, he would have quit after the first week.

Liam was Liam, so fully comfortable inside his own skin that Jerry knew immediately that there would never be a need to fear condescension. Liam studied at Yale, but he wasn’t Yale, not the way his father was Yale and his mother Vassar. Jerry's parents were Stan the firefighter and Maura the dental hygienist. They had never seen the view of the harbor from the back porch of the yacht club, and they never would.

Jerry worked in the club’s basement kitchen on Wednesday and Friday evenings when they served barbecued chicken, oily salad, and chocolate cake to the members. Liam manned the bar upstairs in the rec room adjoining the spacious deck where the members sat and drank after their meal and sometimes played bridge or cribbage with cards that Liam stored under the bar. They called to Liam from behind their tightly fanned cards, ordering refills. His uniform an immaculate polo shirt as white as his perfect smile, Liam joked with the men as he poured their private labels and mixed their wives’ martinis on the rocks.

After work when everyone else had gone, in that warm part of each summer’s night when water and air seem to merge, Liam and Jerry sat on the club’s dock beside Liam’s painted wooden rowboat. They dangled their legs and feet in the murmuring waves as they shared a joint. Liam always had a joint in his shirt pocket hidden inside a folded joker. After a swim, they stepped into the rowboat, slid the oars into the oarlocks, and explored the night harbor, the rhythmic plash of the oars and the low cadence of their voices muffled by the breeze sighing from the shore.

Of course the yacht club girls loved Liam and tolerated his friend Jerry.

The Cavity

She lived alone in a house that was slowly decaying, like a tooth with an untended cavity that needed a filling. She had moved there to care for her deceased mother’s dog, Trixie, but when Trixie died, she kept on, surviving on her military pension and the income from the quilts she sewed and sold at the local co-op. She was fighting cancer, a tumor lodged beneath a rib that devoured frequent doses of radiation. At night she watched the yellow eyes of stray cats in the woods behind the house, the golden eyes of coyotes, the slitted silver eyes of owls on the wing, all watching her through the kitchen windows. One noontime, as she prepared a tuna sandwich with mayo and sweet pickle relish, a wiry tomcat with a crooked tail meowed at the sliding door. She shooed it away, drew the curtain. At midnight the serenade began, an unorchestrated, ungodly cacophony, shrieking, yowling, howling, and hooting. Next morning she scuttled to Stop & Shop, purchased a case of cat food, and set bowls on the deck at twilight, a sacrificial offering.

Ode

My mother says I cried from the moment I was born until I learned to read. At eight, she allowed me to walk out of our neighborhood, down Samoset Street (named after the Native American who trod that path before me), past the convenience store where my father stopped for Table Talk pies after work, right at the stoplights and past our church, past Pilgrim Hall, past the windowless building where my father donned a headset to receive telephone calls, then left on North Street with the harbor below, and past the shoe store - to Plymouth Public Library, my haven. It was a long walk, and sometimes when my feet were sore I had to stop for a rest.

I visit every library I can, always weighing the children’s room against the children’s room of my childhood. First, there was the entrance, separate from the adult entrance. Like a magical portal to a fantasy world, the entrance was not just a door, but a cobblestone alleyway. It shone when it was washed with rain. If you continued past the stairs that led down to the children’s door, you’d arrive at the funeral home, a place I didn’t want to contemplate. Instead I ventured alone into the lively realm of books – poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson, picture books by Robert McCloskey, and as I grew, chapter books like Nancy Drew and Jean George’s My Side of the Mountain. There were so many books I loved in that children’s room that I promised myself I’d remain like Peter Pan and never climb the narrow stairs to the adult collection.

Every Saturday, I’d run my fingers from spine to spine, neatly returning each book to its original position as I’d been taught. There was a three book limit and a long week ahead until my next visit, so I had to choose carefully. One book I returned to again and again was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. There was a mystery here that I couldn’t quite absorb. Meg is the only one, in spite of her admitted flaws, who can save her little brother Charles from IT, the gigantic, disembodied brain.

Perhaps it was because I had several younger brothers and sisters at home that I felt so close to Meg. Perhaps it was because her secret weapon was love, something I took for granted, not intelligence, something that everyone else seemed to value so highly. I knew at some wordless level that love was devotion to hard work while intelligence was a matter of luck and passion, and Meg and her friends brought that to life in L’Engle’s story.

When Madeleine L’Engle died a few years ago, I was sad. I had thought of writing to her over the years, sometimes with suggestions for books I wanted her to write, but I never did. What follows is a prequel I wrote for A Wrinkle in Time shortly after this great author tessered to the other side of reality.

Wrinkled in Time

The Man with Red Eyes tessered: from Camazotz, through the Black Thing, across space and time, and through Earth’s hazy atmosphere to an antiseptic storage room on Princeton’s campus. He scanned the shelves and located the glass jar that held the severed chunks of Einstein’s brain. Grasping the jar, he tessered back to Camazotz.
The streets were devoid of life, but traffic zoomed by him in the darkening gloom created by the Black Thing, an evil fog that enveloped the planet. He approached a circular building with a translucent dome. Once inside CENTRAL Central Intelligence, The Man with Red Eyes held his A-21 card against the green marble wall. Suddenly the wall was no longer there, and he strode into the laboratory.
He unscrewed the glass jar’s cap and fished the remnants of Einstein’s brain out of the fluid. He placed these on a dais in the center of the circular room, flicked a switch on the reactor, and waited. As the severed parts melded, the brain began to pulse and quiver. Soft and exposed, IT lived.
The Man with Red Eyes crouched before IT. His eyes began to twirl. A tic in his forehead mirrored IT’s pulsating rhythm. Hypnotized, he stood, ready to assume his position in the chair on the platform. He and IT were one, and as IT reached into the brains of every being on Camazotz, the planet would be called to order.
“Stop fighting. You make the pain worse. Just relax.” That was IT’s message, and all seemed to listen.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“What’s that nasty, red-eyed brother of ours doing now?” Mrs. Whatsit whined. “No one would ever guess that we knew him once as Mr. Whynot, the sweetest little gentleman there ever was.”
“‘Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.’ James 4:7,” Mrs. Who answered. “Mr. Whynot never tried.”
A pair of binary stars from thA Large Magellanic Cloud, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Whatsit fretted.
From far away in the Centaurus Cluster their oldest sister’s voice reached them. “Nnoww, ssistersss, it’ss time to mmaterialize,” Mrs. Which, a white dwarf star, commanded. “Mmrr. MMurry is sso cclosse tto achievving a tesseract, wwe mmayy as wwelll hhellpp hhimm.”
When Mr. Murry saw Mrs. Whatsit, he laughed. It was difficult for her to think in a corporeal way so when she had to materialize she dressed in a hodgepodge of clothing gathered haphazardly during her speedy jaunt. Now she wore rubber boots and a man’s coat under multicolored shawls ad scarves.
“Our brother…”
“Mr. Whynot,”
“The sweetest little boy,” they all blurted at once.
“Ssshh!” Mrs. Which hissed, shimmering in her peaked cap behind her two sisters. “Mmrss. Whatsittt wwill exxpplainn.”
“Our brother has committed a great folly, a great theft. Even a brain as powerful as Einstein’s couldn’t resist the Black Thing. Is there anything you can do to help?” asked Mrs. Whatsit.
Mr. Murry shook his head. “The tesseract concept eludes me. I can’t calculate the formula.”
“Don’t worry, dearie,” Mrs. Whatsit said. “We have the last equation.” She picked up a pencil from Mr. Murry’s desk and scribbled on the notebook he was holding.
Mr. Murry scratched his shaggy head and adjusted his thick bifocals as he contemplated what she had written. Grasping the notebook, he crossed to his computer, tapped a few keys, and disappeared.
“Thhee secret’s revealed nnoww. I jusstt hhope wwe’ve ddone thhee rrightt tthingg,” sighed Mrs. Which.
“We’ve forgotten something, girls. Cling to hope,” Mrs. Who admonished them. ‘“You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” John 4-4,” she quoted. “We’ve already won!”
“That has yet to be seen,” Mrs. Whatsit muttered.