Sublime Messages

Fifteen, B

A ramshackle white house with a sagging porch as precarious as they came, a sad beacon at the beginning of the neighborhood, loomed gray-shadowed against the black night. There was a light on in one of the windows along the left side, but the woman slowly approaching the house was disinterested in its source; she instead focused on the little boy sitting in an unraveling wicker chair on the porch, reading a book. He was somewhere close to the age they'd been when they'd first met, though Vanessa was at this moment much older than he. She didn't think he'd be afraid of her, though—he wasn't that sort of child, and she wasn't a particularly frightening woman.

"What are you reading?" she asked calmly, once she'd hobbled within several feet of the porch, trying to keep her knee from turning.

He'd been so absorbed he hadn't noticed her, but now the boy popped his head above the pages of the large plastic-covered volume, which crinkled in his lap. He sat upright, having been slouched, and scrutinized the slight woman before him, apparently deciding she was all right. "Folklore," he told her.

Vanessa smiled benignly, crossed her arms over her chest; the air was crisp, especially without her jacket. "You like those kinds of stories? The old ones?"

The boy's eyes lit beneath his dark curls; his very freckles seemed to glow, and his smile revealed a missing eye tooth. "Yeah, I love them! The Greek ones are my favorite. I like the gods and the heroes. But this book, it has monsters and stuff from all around the world. My friend got it for me fom the library, said to keep it." He sank a little back into himself, suddenly, as if realizing he'd said something he maybe shouldn't have. "I mean, I—I'll probably take it back sometime, but he didn't have a card, and he couldn't check it out, so—"

"That's all right," Vanessa assured him. "I won't tell."

Whit sucked in his lips, grew sheepish, then gushed, "He took it from the library because he knows I like these stories, and I gave him a book earlier. My dad's old book that I don't think he reads anymore. I—I tried to read it but it was too hard."

"That's all right. Sometimes I have a hard time understanding what I read, too." She drew nearer the porch, near enough to prop her arms on its railing, and looked over it at the child. "Was your friend's name . . . Arlo?'

"Arlo Kirk? Ugh! No. I hate the Kirks. So does Ruby, too. She says they're degenerates."

Vanessa cocked her head in agreement. "They probably are. Damien, maybe, then?"

"How'd you know?"

"Oh," the woman shrugged, smiled, "we're friends, him and me."

The child raised an eyebrow. "Really? My sister says he doesn't have no friends. Except her, that is."

"Well, I've not known him too long. Just a few days."

"Oh."

Vanessa could tell in the pause that followed that she was beginning to lose him. She couldn't allow that. "So do you know a lot about monsters, then?"

"Lots."

"Can I ask you a question about them?"

The boy nodded eagerly.

"Well, suppose there was a monster who didn't really want to be a monster, but it'd been cursed by somebody to turn into one, and that somebody made it do terrible things."

Like a young professor, Whit bobbed his head as he took in the information, put a finger to the tip of his chin. "Like a golem, sort of," he said, not looking at her. "It has a master, and the master makes it do stuff for him. But I don't know if the golem cares about it. He's just made out of clay and mud so I don't think he really does lots of thinking on his own."