Halloween and Other Seasons

SLEEPOVER

By Al Sarrantonio

“Chickens were green,” he said.

“They weren’t,” she answered. “They were yellow. Frogs were green.”

“That’s the sky,” he said, grinning slyly to himself. He had a secret grin even when his lips didn’t smile. “The sky was green. Grass was blue.”

She shook her head back and forth, almost violently. “You got ‘em mixed up, Ty. It’s the other way ‘round. Grass was green, sky blue.”

“It was the way I say,” he replied, and his eyes were hard enough that he meant it.

“No, little brother, it was the way I remember.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, and she looked at the ground. “I think…”

~ * ~

They were on a plane of black smooth glass. Where the sky—which was maroon and devoid of clouds—met the horizon there was a faint curved thin fuzzy line, like a charcoal-drawn heat wave. The temperature never seemed to change, though sometimes Ty complained of being cold at night. Willa pressed up near him when this happened, but always reluctantly. There was a part of her that was sure he claimed cold just to get attention.

Ty was seven, as close as Willa could remember. He had been seven when they woke up one morning in this place which had, during the night, replaced the second floor bedroom of cousin Clara’s big white house with the white picket fence. Sometimes Willa had trouble remembering some things about the white house now—such as if the garage doors had needed painting or not, or if the mailbox post at the road was crooked or straight. But there were other things that Willa did remember—the sharpness of the red metal flag on the mailbox, which felt like it might cut your finger when you raised it to tell the mailman there was mail to be taken, or the tart ammonia smell of the cat litter box when it hadn’t been cleaned, or the way Aunt Erin and Uncle Bill’s smiles lit up their faces when cousin Clara said something clever. She remembered Clara’s science project, the working windmill, with it’s gold first-place ribbon hanging from it (it had been gold, hadn’t it?—Ty would now say it had been tan, or orange)—that was displayed prominently on the fireplace mantle.

But she couldn’t remember if the fireplace bricks had been red or white.

“I’m hungry again,” Ty said, and this time Willa knew he was looking for nothing but attention. They hadn’t been hungry since they had found themselves here. They hadn’t gotten dirty, or had to brush their teeth, or even had to go to the bathroom.

Which had led Willa to conclude—

“And we’re not dead!” Ty said, reaching over to jab her in the ribs. “We’re just…here!”

“And where is that?” Willa responded.

Ty began to cry, true frightened sobs, which made Willa pleased and then, instantly, sorry. She reached over to brush the hair away from his forehead. “It’s all right,” she whispered, “We’re not dead.”

But he was consumed by one of his out-of-control times, and clung to her, shivering. She could feel the wetness of his tears against the skin of her arm, soaking into the upper cuff of her nightdress.

“Ty, it’s all right—”

“No it’s not, it’s not! We’re dead, we’re dead!”

“I was only joking—”

“You were right, you were right! We’re dead dead dead!”

The arm that wrapped around Ty began to tremble, and Willa felt her own tears rising, though she kept them down.

“There’s only one other thing we could be,” she said in the faintest of voices, and only to herself.

~ * ~

A while later the light show began, as it did every night before sleep came.

First came the yellow streaks, which crossed in parallel pairs overhead, cutting the maroon sky in half. Then the maroon sky split into two parts, like an overhead dome opening, and the darkest sky Willa had ever seen met the black glass plain and they could see nothing. But this lasted only a moment, not enough to keep them in darkness: for the lights of what looked like a billion stars came on overhead, coming brighter and brighter like novas until their light merged into one overwhelming brilliance like the Sun. They were blinded by the light and closed their eyes, seeing a round retinal afterimage against the insides of their lids, and when they opened their eyes again the world was as it had been, with maroon sky and black glass underfoot and the fine line of fuzziness at the horizon.

“I’m sleepy,” Ty said, and curled up on the black glass and closed his eyes, which is what he always did after the light show. Willa fought it but also found herself tired, and then they slept, and always when they woke up they expected to find themselves back in their sleeping bags in cousin Carla’s bedroom in the white two story house that, Willa was almost sure, needed painting and had an old clock in the kitchen that had a crack in the face and was a little fast.

But always, for nine sleep periods now, they found themselves here.

~ * ~

After this, the tenth sleep period, the same thing happened.

Only—

Something was different this time.

They were not alone.

In the near distance were two shapes huddled on the ground, one of which began to wail.

Ty roused himself and looked at them wide-eyed. “The sky was blue, I’m pretty sure…” he whispered.

“Yes,” Willa said, though she wasn’t positive anymore. In her own dreams the white house had been gray, the clock in the kitchen a minute slow.

The two figures saw them and began to approach, at first tentatively, then running.

“Help us!” the one in front sobbed.

Willa held on to Ty, and the two of them stood waiting.

The two figures stopped ten feet away.

They were children: two girls, younger than Ty. One had blonde hair and the other’s hair was red, curly all over.

They stared at Ty and Willa, then looked up at the sky, then back at Ty and Willa.

The red-haired one began to moan, but the other one got out: “Where are we?”

“Where were you?” Willa asked. “Before you came here?”

“In bed!” She had a breathy, annoying voice. “Asleep!”

“Where?” Willa demanded.

“At Janna’s house!” Seeing the probing look on Willa’s face, she rushed on desperately: “In Kentucky! In the U.S. of A.!”

“What were you doing at Janna’s house, in Kentucky?” Willa persisted, almost unkindly. “Why were you there?”

“We were having a sleepover!” the breathy girl answered, and then she too began to cry.

Ty joined them.

“Be quiet!” Willa shouted, staring sharply at Ty, and then at the newcomers.

All but the red-haired girl complied.

Willa looked at Ty. “They were in Kentucky. We were in New Hampshire. That means nothing.”

Tears threatened again, but Ty kept them down. “The sky was blue,” he insisted quietly.

“You’re sisters?” Willa asked the breathy girl.

She nodded, studying the sky with frightened eyes. She said, “How do we get back?”

Willa gave her a long steady look. “You don’t.” She turned to Ty, her back to the two new children, and said in a whisper, so only he could hear: “I know what happened.”

There were pooling tears in Willa’s eyes, which frightened Ty more than anything up till now.

~ * ~

The nightly light show was ending. Willa opened her eyes, still seeing a vestige of fading sun image. The two little girls, Eva and Em, were rubbing their own eyes, sitting Indian style twenty feet away where Willa had ordered them to be. Willa watched Eva, the blond-haired one, curl up on the floor and then Em nest into her like a sleeping cat.

In a few moments they were both breathing shallowly, eyes closed.

Willa waited another full minute, fighting the urge to sleep, and then shook Ty gently awake beside her.

He stirred, sought continued sleep, then rubbed his eyes and sat up.

“All right,” he said, yawning and stretching. “Tell me.”

“This is the truth,” Willa answered. She had decided not to cry, and kept her voice steady and low. “Do you remember the night we sneaked down after bedtime, and spied on Mother and Father through the stair rails while they sat at the dining room table with a bottle of wine?”

Ty was concentrating, his brow furrowed. “The dining room was brown.”

“It was white,” Willa said. “Do you remember holding your hands over your ears, because you didn’t like what they were saying?”

“The dining room was white,” Ty abruptly agreed, and then a further amazed spark of remembrance touched his face. He put his hands to his ears for a moment, then lowered them. “They said…”

“They said that some people should never have children.”

His eyes widened with a faint catch of breath. “I remember…”

“They talked about how good it had been before we came along, how much they missed those days.”

Ty’s mouth dropped open in wonder. “Yes…”

Willa said sharply, with conviction: “They found a way to send us here.”

Sudden anger boiled up in Ty’s face. “That’s not true! They would never do that!”

Twenty feet away, the two little girls stirred, and Willa said calmly, “If you don’t quiet down I won’t tell you the rest.”

Ty fought to hold his rage: he made fists, counted to ten, but at the end of it he still wanted to scream and cry.

Willa warned, “Be quiet.”

Another count of ten, and Ty snuffled. “Tell me.”

Willa took a halting breath. Her eyes held a faraway look, as if she was staring at a place she didn’t want to believe had existed, but knew had been real. “They wanted to be alone again. They would never kill us, or drive us out into the country and abandon us, or put us on a bus with no identification and just enough money for one-way tickets. But in the back of their minds, they knew that if they ever had the chance to make us go away without hurting us, they would take it.”

Willa was gazing over Ty’s head, her voice flat with shocked belief. “And they found a way…”

Ty’s anger returned. He stood up, yelling, “They would never do that to us! Dad would never do that to me! He helped me build a model airplane! He taught me how to throw a baseball! And mother taught me how to tie my shoelaces!” His face was livid with anger and fear. “They loved us!”

The two little girls were awake, holding on to one another.

Willa said, “They loved us because they had to. But I’m talking about what people really want, in the center of their hearts. Haven’t you always felt it, Ty? When they went away on vacations together and left us at cousin Carla’s? The way they looked at each other even when we were with them?”

Willa’s eyes were haunted. “Haven’t you always felt that the two of them had no room for four?”

“I don’t believe you!”

Em, the one with red hair, began to wail, and her sister, the breathy one, sobbed, “Stop talking! It’s time for sleep!”

Willa continued, “Did you ever watch the way Uncle Bill and Aunt Erin looked at cousin Carla? They never had those thoughts. They were meant to have children. Their hearts were big enough.”

“Sleep!” the breathy one insisted, curling down to troubled slumber beside her sister.

Willa ignored them. She was staring hard into a place of remembrance that was fading. “That night,” she said to Ty, “when you put your hands over your ears, Mother’s face got a strange look on it, and she told Father she’d found a way.”

“You’re lying!”

Willa gave a single, strangled sob. “And when she brought us to the sleepover at cousin Carla’s, she had that same look on her face.”

“I won’t believe you!” Now Ty clung to her, and closed his eyes, and shivered. “I’d rather be dead…”

Suddenly—so suddenly it made her gasp—Willa wasn’t sure if Aunt Erin’s kitchen had had a clock in it after all.

Or even what a clock was.

Ty moaned, “No…”

And then he closed his eyes.

Willa whispered, stroking his hair, “We’ll have to make a new life here.”

She stifled an abrupt, overpowering yawn.

Beside her, Ty was asleep, still trembling. This time he wasn’t looking for attention. Willa lowered him gently to the hard obsidian surface and lay down beside him.

She looked over at Eva and Em.

“And now, other parents know the way…”

She snuggled close to her brother, and closed her eyes.

~ * ~

She awoke to a wailing moan to transcend the sadness of Limbo, and a world filled with children.

Beside her, Ty sat up and rubbed his eyes.

“Chickens were green,” he said.

Willa answered, without hesitation, “Yes.”