On the Magnavox a big yellow sun is coming up. Time for Trustyfriend to fly back to his roost. Time for Starboy to fly back to the Firmament. Best friends best friends, Starboy sings,
We’re never apart,
I’m in the sky,
And you’re in my heart.
When Seymour opens the sliding door, a magpie sails off the roof and lands on an egg-shaped boulder in the backyard. It dips its tail and calls wock wock wock.
A bird. Not a scorpion at all.
An overnight storm has cleared the smoke and the morning is bright. The thistles nod their purple crowns and tiny insects sail everywhere. The thousands of pines stacked against the back of the property, rising toward a ridge, seem to breathe as they sway. In out in out. It’s nineteen paces through waist-high weeds to the egg-shaped boulder and by the time Seymour climbs on top, the magpie has flapped to a branch at the edge of the forest. Splotches of lichen—pink, olive, flame orange—decorate the boulder. It’s amazing out here. Big. Alive. Ongoing.
Twenty paces past the boulder, Seymour reaches a single strand of barbed wire sagging between posts. Behind him is the sliding door, the kitchen, Pawpaw’s microwave; ahead are three thousand acres of forest owned by a family in Texas no one in Lakeport has ever met.
Wock wock-a-wock, calls the magpie.
It’s easy to duck under the wire.
Beneath the trees, the light changes entirely: another world. Pennants of lichen sway from branches; snippets of sky glow overhead. Here’s an ant mound half as tall as he is; here’s a granite rib the size of a minivan; here’s a sheet of bark that fits around his midsection like the chest plate of Starboy’s armor.
Halfway up the hill behind the house, Seymour comes to a clearing ringed by Douglas firs with a big dead ponderosa in the center like the many-fingered arm of a skeleton-giant thrust up from the underworld. Parachuting through the air around him, blown out of the firs, are hundreds of pine needles bundled in twos. He catches one, imagines it as a little man with a truncated torso and long slender legs. The NeedleMan ventures across the clearing on his pointy feet.
At the foot of the dead tree, Seymour constructs a house for the NeedleMan from bark and twigs. He is installing a lichen mattress inside when a ghost shrieks ten feet above his head.
Ee-ee? Ee-ee-eet?
Every hair on Seymour’s arms stands up straight. The owl is so well camouflaged that it vocalizes three more times before the boy sets eyes on it, and when he does he gasps.
It blinks three times, four. In the shadow against the bark, with its eyelids closed, the owl vanishes. Then the eyes open again and the creature rematerializes.
It is the size of Tony Molinari. Its eyes are the color of tennis balls. It is looking right at him.
From his spot at the base of the big dead tree, Seymour gazes up and the owl gazes down and the forest breathes and something happens: the unease mumbling at the margins of his every waking moment—the roar—falls quiet.
There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you.
He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.
* * *
When Bunny finds him there’s bark in her hair and snot on her Wagon Wheel polo and she yanks him to his feet and Seymour could not say if a minute or a month or a decade has passed. The owl vanishes like smoke. He twists to see where it might have gone, but it’s nowhere, sucked deeper into the woods, and Bunny is touching his hair, she’s sobbing, “—about to call the cops, why didn’t you stay put?—” she’s swearing, pulling him home through the trees, ripping her jeans on the barbed wire; the microwave timer in the kitchen is going boopboopboopboop, Bunny is talking on her phone, she’s getting fired by Manager Steve, she’s throwing her phone at the love seat, she’s squeezing Seymour’s shoulders so he can’t squirm away, she’s saying, “I thought we were doing this together,” she’s saying, “I thought we were a team.”
* * *
After bedtime he crawls to his window, slides it open, thrusts his head into the dark. The night exudes a wild, oniony smell. Something barks, something goes chee chee chee. The forest is right there, just past the barbed wire.
“Trustyfriend,” he says. “I name you Trustyfriend.”
Zeno
Downstairs adults clomp through Mrs. Boydstun’s living room in their heavy shoes. Five Playwood Plastic soldiers climb out of their tin box. Soldier 401 creeps toward the headboard with his rifle; 410 drags his anti-tank gun over a furrow of quilt; 413 gets too close to the radiator and his face melts.