LITMIR.BIZ

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us to turn off our flashlights and “trust the stars, your eyes will adjust.” For three or four minutes (it could be longer; I don’t have my watch) Dad whistles the theme song to The Andy Griffith Show.

      The woods smell like the sweet-and-sour soup they give you before the good stuff at Ming’s Chinese Garden. “Smell the musk?” Mom asks. “It’s nettles. Be careful, they’ll sting.”

      I stop and sniff. The smell is strong and getting closer.

      Nettles and soup, but more than that too. Something familiar that isn’t the raccoon poop in Mom’s flower bed; isn’t Dad’s wool army coat, dog chow, or the cold cement floor in the garage. Something else is in the air. A whole lot of something elses. I hurry a little and accidentally step on the heel of Lauren’s shoes.

      “Dummy,” she mumbles.

      Suddenly, a huge bird darts over our heads and Lauren gasps. “An owl!” Mom shouts and, pretending to be scared, hurries to Dad’s side. I read that owls are warnings, sometimes of death, sometimes of danger.

      The others walk on, but I stop, then take three short breaths and inhale deeply. Exhale. Repeat. Three short breaths (for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; for Mom, Dad, and Lauren) and inhale deeply. Exhale. Repeat.

      The scent is some combination of familiar and unfamiliar, but sticky sweet and wet too. I open my arms like crucified Jesus, stretching my fingers and bugging my eyes, and make myself into a smell antenna.

      The scent is coming toward us: the closer it gets, the more it fills my lungs . . . The more it fills my lungs, the more the ground vibrates under my feet . . . The more the ground vibrates under my feet the more the smell vines up my legs like a pea plant until the stink and sound and vibration slip through my ears and nostrils, filling me up, inflating me like a rubber balloon, or Jiffy Pop. Will I explode before it gets here?

      “Mommmm!” Lauren flips on her flashlight and walks back to me. “Lily’s being weird again.”

      Listen, can’t you hear them . . . ? Dozens of snapping sounds and growls, panting breaths, high-pitched barks, and finally the smell—I recognize it—the warm dusty smell of dry soft dirt, a cloud of it pushed ahead of their thrumming, drumming feet.

      How close? I fall to my knees and press my ear to the ground.

      “Lily! For God’s sake, stand up.” It’s Mom. I see the toes of her dusty white deck shoes. They’ll be washed and sitting in the morning sun by the time I get up tomorrow. “Lily!” I feel her warm worried hands on my shoulders. “Paul!” she calls.

      “I’m okay,” I say, or try to say. But dogs don’t talk.

      I smell their hot sour breath and wet fur as we race through Crawford Woods together, their thick muscular bodies brushing mine as we run side by side, feeling the tendons in my legs stretch and contract as I run—only I’m big and slow and sick and I fall behind the pack . . . behind . . . slowing . . . slowing . . .

      Then find a burst of energy and rejoin them. My face is wet with the saliva that flies off the tips of their long speckled tongues. Their fur brushes my face, their musk fills my nose. When the hair on my arms stands up, they recognize me. I’m one of them. In a blur of dust and dirt, claws and fur, we nip at each other, yip, and bark.

      “Lily!” It’s Dad. “Can’t we do one simple family thing together without you . . .”

      On my knees in the starlit woods I see what Mrs. Wiggins sees with her tired milky eyes; flying over stones and potholes, struggling to focus through the cloud of soft thundering dirt while dry prickly brush whips her face, she keeps going, putting on even more speed when she sees her family, us, up ahead on the trail.

      The others will fly past us before she does, but somewhere up the trail the dogs will slow down. Then. Finally. Stop. They’re only pets, after all, out-of-shape purebreds and mutts, not feral dogs, wolves, coyotes, or (their distant cousins) bears; no T-Rexes or Thunderbirds. Finally, they’ll wander home (Mrs. Nelson is calling Offie right now), exhausted.

      But proud they didn’t forget: they were wild once.

      They’re nearing us! The heat of the pack, the yelping, the dust—

      Suddenly Dad cries, “Off the path! Now!” And my family jumps, making startled complaining sounds when we land in the brush, seconds before the dusty snarling dogs race by.

      I raise my head and watch Mrs. Wiggins lift off the ground. Floating above the others, she looks back at me with her milky eyes, and her warm cancerous breath heats my face.

      “Thanks,” she says in Pig Latin.

      * * *

      “Everybody okay?” Dad calls. His flashlight bleaches the trail. It finds Lauren. “Lima Bean?”

      Lauren nods. She looks scared and confused. Her freckles spring on and off her face like Mexican jumping beans.

      “Lily?”

      The muscles in my legs relax as I pull sticks and vines out of my hair. The thick callous pads on my feet dissolve. I’m still panting from the run, and chilled by sweat I stand up in the bushes and press my hand to my burning chest.

      “Okay?” he repeats.

      Yes. No. “Okay,” I say, clearing my throat.

      “Kit?” Dad shines the light on Mom, curled around him. “There you are,” he jokes, kissing the top of her curly auburn head. They found each other first; they always do.

      Mom laughs too, then reaches for the picnic basket and says, “Whew! That was wild! Where’d they come from?”

      I know. My eyes are good at night. I recognized some of them, dogs from the neighborhood: the German shepherd from Sherwood Court, two yellow labs, the old boxer, the chubby beagle, the short-legged Lassie.

      At the entrance to the quarry, Dad unhooks the chain gate with the No Trespassing sign and gestures us through. “Bet the dogs passed here hours ago,” he laughs.

      Mom smiles, but Lauren and I don’t. We glance at each other. The dogs were cool but it’s wrong to break the law like Dad is.

      We follow our parents into the starlit open sky. The trees stand back from the big hole, silhouetted against the clear night sky like rows of spears. The heat of the day still clings to the barren ground. It’s a weird place, like the surface of the moon in comic books. Lauren slips her hand in mine. She looks around for the Flintstones’ steam shovels, but they’re nowhere to be seen.

      “Don’t forget what I told you about . . .” Mom peers at the sky. “Look! There’s one!” She points at the twinkling star mass. “How beautiful! There, did you see it? Stars, meteors, everywhere!”

      Meteors fall around us without touching the ground; they hang in the trees and shine in Lauren’s red hair.

      When Mom calls the stars “kisses from angels,” Dad grabs her and kisses her on the lips.

      “Girls?” Mom starts again. “You remember what we discussed about the pit, right?”

      Lauren puts her flashlight beam under her chin. “Do I look like a jack o’ lantern, Mom?”

      “I take that as a yes then?”

      “Stay away from the pit,” I answer for us both.

      “Is that your jump rope?”

      “It’s my lucky charm,” Lauren explains as we lay out our blankets. My sister doesn’t go anywhere without her jump rope. Sometimes she loops it over her bicycle handles or wears it as a belt; tonight she carries it in her afghan.

      Lauren jumps rope, chews gum, sucks her thumb, and throws up because of anxiety, bad ears, and motion sickness. When Mom told Dr. Goodnight that Lauren was a “nervous child, a perfect candidate for ulcers,” he smiled and wrote Mom a prescription for more happy pills.

      “A

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