Read the Whole Thing at Once

You can now buy The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God as a paperback or ebook!  This is not the final published version, but an advanced printing for friends, family, and anyone else who wants to read it.  Clink the links below to order your copies.


Paperback ($9.50 plus shipping)


Ebook (free)


Kindle (free)
Order Here 

You also get to enjoy Adam Hunter Caldwell's beautiful cover art!

Chapter 28a (Special Rewrite Bonus)

This is a new chapter, part of my rewrite.  It comes at the end of Gavin's Kansas trip, right after Chapter 28. Thanks for all your support and patience as I revise; I am working hard and will be ready to put out a paper copy for friends and family soon.

Something was wrong.

Gavin’s eyes popped open, but it wasn’t 8am.  Not in Indiana, not in Kansas, not anywhere.  It also wasn’t six thirty, which was when he’d set the alarm for because Jomo was coming at seven to drive him to the airport. The time now, according to the green glow of the bedside clock, was three twenty-seven.

Like really, seriously wrong.

His heartbeat was all weird. Racing, bum bum bum bum!  Slow for a few beats, fast again.  Too much stress. He tried to breathe through his nose, but he couldn’t get enough air.  He tried again. Worse. Like something was blocking up his nose. Like he was drowning.  

Shh. Just anxiety. 

He rolled onto his side, fumbled his hand around the plaster base of the hotel lamp looking for the switch. There. Things would be better in the light.  Now he could see the pinstriped wallpaper, the untouched second bed between him and the door, the opaque brown curtains, the seashell painting next to the television.

Breathe.

You weren’t supposed to have to work at breathing, right? Wasn’t it supposed to just happen naturally?

He switched on the TV—which meant touching the remote, germiest thing in a hotel room—and flipped through the channels. Baby bats in a cave. Sewage treatment plant. How to train aggressive dogs. Plastic surgeon drawing black lines on a lady’s belly and love handles. 

A candy factory.  He put the remote down on the bedspread.  Vats of doughy white candy. Machines spraying liquid color, yellow, blue, red.  Other machines pulling long stretchy ropes, chopping them into bright pieces.

Happy little candies. But they were zooming backwards, into some far-off dimension, like he was watching them through binoculars. Everything was through binoculars: the candies, the television, seashell paintings. Gavin’s bent knees under the brown bedspread. He blinked a bunch of times, tried to make the room go back to normal, but each time his eyes opened the colors were more distant, more faded, more fake.

Enough.

He jumped up out of the bed, which was a horrible idea.  It made all the blood in his body move the wrong direction, like his arms and legs were about to fall off, like his brain was going to burst.

The room was too small.  And there wasn’t any air in it.  He needed to get outside, to open the door and let some but air in. But outside was Kansas, all dry and flat and huge and windy, and the door was the only thing keeping it out. He felt very sure that if he opened the door even a crack, it would blow right off its hinges and suck him out onto the prairie and off the edge of the word.

He leaned on the desk next to the television, tried to get air into his lungs. He couldn’t feel his feet.  Or his hands, he was pretty sure.  He held them out in front of him.  They looked pale and floppy.  He touched the left one to his face, checked to see if he could feel anything.  His face and his hand both felt like rubber. Maybe there was some tingling. His cheeks wouldn’t move at all.

Heart attack.  This was definitely a heart attack. Or maybe a stroke.

Don’t look it up. But he was doing it already. Too easy, the laptop right there charging on the desk. 

Heart attack symptoms (oh fuck oh fuck)

Elevated pulse. 

Tingling in extremities. 

Sense of foreboding.

Shortness of breath that does not improve with rest. (fuck fuck fuck)

Okay, try resting.  He lay down on the bed.  Did his shortness of breath improve?  He sucked in a long breath through his nose.  Not just one; try ten. He counted them out, trying to gauge. Were they getting easier? Eight, nine, ten. Still hard.  Eleven, twelve, thirteen.  Getting worse.  

So he was having a heart attack. Now he needed a plan. He looked at the clock: three fifty-two. If he called 911, if they came and got him in an ambulance, maybe a helicopter, airlifted him to the nearest all-night emergency room which was probably a gazillion miles away, there was no way he’d be back here by seven.  Jomo and Lee and Paula would find out he was one of those assholes who thought he was having a heart attack when it turned out just to be a nervous breakdown. Or maybe gas. Didn’t it always turn out to be gas?

There was no way he was gonna call 911. He would rather have Jomo find his dead body in the morning. 

So that decided the plan: lie down in bed and prepare to die, if that’s where this night was going to end up.  He was about fifty percent sure he wouldn’t die, but that left fifty percent that he would.  And if he was going to die, he could at least do it with some dignity.

He turned the television off, got back into bed, picked up his copy of Time Slide from next to the clock. They would be discussing the ending in class tomorrow afternoon—if he was alive—and even though he could recite the play forwards and backwards, it was always good to review beforehand.

He felt a little less dizzy just holding it in his hands, the embossed paper cover, the rips along its edges. He brought it up to his face, took a deep breath.  It smelled like a library, like someplace filled with wisdom and peace.

Breathing getting a little better. Still not great. But if he was dying it would be getting worse, right? 

He opened to the last act of Time Slide and propped it on his knees.  It took a while to get his brain settled on the page, no surprise, always that way trying to read when you were messed up. He just needed to give his brain time to sort through the wall of words, all those TMGs and italicized stage directions.

Okay.  Thomas McGrew III and IV on the slide.  TMG IV’s growing obsession with the inevitability of death,  his rejection of wordly trappings and pleasures, his father’s increasingly frantic attempts to distract him.  The torn-out hair. The bloody scalp. The way he let the toy train just slide past him, shredding his father’s last hopeful expression of desperate love.

When did this play get so fucking sad? 

He’d read it a million times, spent hours dissecting each twist of the allegory, each sparse line like a tiny jewel. Each perfect, creeping silence. When his students complained about it, when Talbot Kessel called Liam Stump so depressing, Gavin had taken it as evidence of their stupidity.  They were completely missing the point. You couldn’t get all wrapped up in the characters and what happened to them. Stump’s plays weren’t about people; they were about philosophical concepts.

Maybe it was just the exhaustion, the Kansas stress, the lonely hotel room, but suddenly Time Slide was making him want to shoot himself.  

Or maybe—his heart caught for a moment at the thought of it—maybe this was the sense of foreboding.  

That had to be it, because he’d never gotten depressed from reading Time Slide before, not even a little, never felt anything but infatuated, elated, love-struck. This sinking reaction, the cold horror filling his chest, had to be a symptom of his impending heart attack and subsequent untimely death.

Stop thinking about it.  Lie still and accept your own death.

He closed the book, held it in front of him, stared at Liam Stump’s face on the back.  It was comforting and familiar in the way he had hoped the play itself would be. Stern, high-cheeked, brow crisscrossed with deep wrinkles as though he wore his brain on the outside of his head. He watched it for a while, held eye contact with Liam Stump, got kind of hypnotized by him.  The face seemed aloof, arrogant, but the eyes, if you focused just on them, were sad. They seemed sadder and sadder as Gavin looked at them, until he was sure Stump had been crying when the photo was taken, that he was crying even now.

He was studying to be a botanist.

Gavin tried to time-travel the face back to college.  To fill out the cheeks, smooth the trademark wrinkles. It was hard, like pretty much impossible.  College-student-Liam-Stump. Doesn’t-know-what-to-do-with-his-life-Liam-Stump. Silly. No such thing. Liam Stump was always fifty years old, always looked sixty. Was always wiser than wise, a genius, someone who could size you up no problem, see right through you into your soul’s darkest, hiddenest caves of shame and weakness and horror.

Am I falling asleep?

Yeah, he was. He knew he was, because his eyes were closed, and then the book fell out of his hands, hit his knees with a whack.  But then he also wasn’t, because he was checking the time every fifteen minutes, five-thirty, five forty-five, six, and each time he asked himself, Am I asleep yet? And answered himself, No, of course not, sleeping people don’t read clocks.

In between the clock-checks, his mind swirled and dipped around the room, which had grown to unlimited size, big and dark and cold as a midnight prairie. The carpeted floor was beginning to crack below him, and when he looked into the cracks, he could see the blackness underneath, the infinite blackness, going down and down and down and something horrible was at the bottom.  He tried to make himself fly, to get his feet off the ground, at least a few inches, higher would be better. His toe clipped the carpet, opening a giant gash that almost sucked him down, but he willed himself up out of it, just barely.  Next time he might not be strong enough to escape.  And if he was, for how long? The thought of having to be strong enough to stay above the ground for the rest of his life was so tiring he almost wanted to give up and sink.

A voice boomed at him.

GAVIN.

It was Liam Stump.  His glowing, bodiless face floated in the air like a cartoon god, furious, glowering, with sad eyes and wrinkled brow.   

DO NOT FALL, Liam Stump said, angry, severe.  DO NOT FALL OFF THE EDGE.

But Gavin was falling, like the words themselves were blasting him through the carpet, down into the free-fall below, down, down, to the place where—

Nothing.

There was nothing.

That’s when he woke up.  Looked at the ceiling.  Yes, he was awake.  Right? He’d never seen the ceiling in a dream.  

He checked the clock.  Six twenty-nine.  Time to get up.  His t-shirt was soaked with sweat, his skin still felt like rubber, but he was alive so far, awake and ready to go home. 

Epilogue: Tree Politics

Lights come up on Girl, in a brown, torn dress, her body equally brown from sun and forest dirt.  She is lying on the freshly-sheered surface of a broad tree stump.  It is the remains of her mentor, Old Laurel. The trees around her are shifting projections of green, orange and gold. They speak in music, a chorus of voices and chimes that are solid like earth and light like pollen.

Trees: Soon is the time when you move.

Girl (a long, slow groan): No.

Trees: Yes, soon. It’s almost time.

Girl:  I can’t. I’m too sad.

Trees: You are a person.  You move.  Soon.

Girl:  I was supposed to become a tree. Like Old Laurel.

Trees: You will become a tree.

Girl: Not now. He was the only one who would teach me.  Now he’s dead and I’ll never become a tree.

Trees: No one is dead.

Girl (rises up on one elbow): Dead. You know what dead is.  Not with us anymore. Gone.

Trees: He is not gone. He is with us.

Girl (angry, sitting all the way up): No, look. (Pounds her fist on Old Laurel. A dull knocking sound). Gone. He was the only one who would help me, and now he’s cut down.

Trees: He’s below you.  Look down.

Girl (turns her head downward, trying to look through Old Laurel, through the dirt): I can’t.

Trees: He’s there.  He’s deep in the earth.

Girl (reaches to the ground, picks up a handful of sawdust, holds it against her chest): His roots. But they chopped down his body.  They took it somewhere.

Trees: There is no body. Some parts of us stay, but most parts of us go. Either way, they always become something new. You are something new, too. And you will be something new.

Girl (sighs, stares into the leaves and branches above her): You don’t understand. You don’t understand what it’s like to be a person. 

Trees: We will be a person.

Girl: I mean now.

Trees: Being a person is like being hurt and thinking the pain is your life.

Girl: We get attached.

Trees: You aren’t attached. You move.

Girl: I don’t know where to go.

Trees: You move.

Girl: Old Laurel was my teacher. He saved me when I was lost in the woods, and he showed me how to be a tree.

Trees: You will be a tree.

Girl: Not until I’m dead.

Trees: You can feel him.  You can smell his sap. He is still with you. 

Girl:  Only if stay here.

Trees: You are mingled together. You move and breathe him.  His life is in you.

Girl: I don’t want his life in me.  I want him to have his own life.

Trees: There is no own life.  There is only life. We are all part of the same thing.

Girl: I don’t want him to be dead.

Trees: There is no death.  Everything is life. You will move.

Girl (a long silence): Okay. In a while.

Trees: You are a person.  You move.

Girl: Just a few more minutes here.

The projections around her grow faster, brighter, their voices rising into a chorus.  Dancers surround the girl on the stump, jumping and swaying. Their movements form patterns, break up, regroup into new patterns.  The only still thing is Girl, lying in the middle of the dance. The song is slow, but the music pulsates like the quick heartbeat of birds.

Tree Song 

No one is lost

No one is alone

Even when your trunk has cracked

Your bark is stripped

Your branches dry and broken on the ground

You are in the earth

You are in the air

You are life.

You are dirt and air

Water and light

Nothing can destroy you

You are wise, old, safe

You cannot be gone

You grow where you are

You are in everything
You are here.

The stage is frantic with movement.  The projections beat in time with the music, flash green and orange and red. The dancers whirl in circles around the spot where Girl was.  But Girl and the stump are gone. The music changes, grows calm, comforting.  The dancers crouch close to the ground. Girl’s voice can be heard as they dance.

Girl Song

When I was stuck

Under a rock so heavy and dark

I thought I’d never lift it

I dreamed of green leaves

And branches stretching up to the light

A tree grew from under me

Lifted me from the dirt

Stood beside me as I stretched up to the sky

Now I have to be my own tree

Find my way to the sun alone

It will be scary

But I’ll remember the lesson of trees
I am never lost

I am never alone

I am in everything
I am here.

The music grows louder again, quickens.  The dance is orderly, in rows, circles, spirals. The order disintegrates, scatters, reforms. Girl and Old Laurel have joined in, dancing in joyous patterns, wearing the clothing of trees.

Trees: No one is lost

Girl:     When I was stuck

Trees: No one is alone

Girl:     Under a rock so heavy and dark

Trees: Even when your trunk has cracked

Girl:     I thought I’d never lift it

Trees: Your bark is stripped

Girl:     I dreamed of green leaves

Trees: Your branches dry and broken on the ground

Girl:     And branches stretching up to the light

Trees: You are in the earth

Girl:     A tree grew from under me

Trees: You are in the air

Girl:     Lifted me from the dirt

Trees: You are life.

Girl:     Stood beside me as I stretched up to the sky

Trees: You are dirt and air

Girl:     Now I have to be my own tree

Trees: Water and light

Girl:     Find my way to the sun alone

Trees: Nothing can destroy you

Girl:     It will be scary

Trees: You are wise, old, safe

Girl:     But I’ll remember the lesson of trees

Trees: You cannot be gone

Girl:     I am never lost

Trees: You grow where you are

Girl:     I am never alone

Trees: You are in everything

Girl:     I am in everything

Trees: You are here.

Girl:     I am here.

The patterns grown higher as the dancers lift each other, throw one another into the air, rise like birds up towards the ceiling. The lights become bright, brighter, until the greens become reds and the reds become orange and the colors become whiteness, and the dancers and stage and audience disappear into an explosion of light. 

            

<Chapter 47a

Note>

Note

Well, it's over.  Again.  I will now be starting a rewrite from the beginning.  Hopefully that shouldn't take too long, though I do know there's one new chapter I need to write in the middle.  When that's done, I'll be putting out a paper copy for friends and family.  After that, I'll be working on getting it formally published.

Thanks so much for reading this novel and for all your support.  I love you!

Chapter 47a

 In an hour, he was checked out of his hotel, changed into a sweatshirt and jeans, circling the perimeter of New Buffalo in search of a launch point.  He cruised down Industrial Parkway, cut over to West University, headed north on Lincoln.  He was used to speeding down these streets, passing pokey grandmas doing the speed limit.  Now he was the one creeping along, wanting to get somewhere but not sure yet how to move forward.  It actually wasn’t dark at all yet; that sunset was all in his mind.  Hours of good driving time left in the day, but he was anxious to get on the road.  Wherever he ended up sleeping tonight, it should be as far away from New Buffalo as possible.

 So which way?

East would be obvious.  East was where all the stuff was, only a half-day’s drive, that tangle of Boston and New Jersey and Connecticut, places that ached in the guts of young academics, the longing, the hope, if only I could end up someplace like that.

And of course, New York. Right into the welcoming arms of Rona and Sinder. That would be nice, right?  They’d be thrilled to receive him, wouldn’t they, to let him sleep on their couch. If Sinder wasn’t sleeping on it already. So happy you finally made it out. We always knew you would.

Gavin slowed down at the yellow, made a last-second decision, pulled a quick u-turn. Some guy in a truck honked at him, yelled out the window. 

Not east, he decided. If he was going to run away, he needed to run away. West.  Into the great wild frontier, like so many pioneers before him, the uncharted prairie, Iowa, South Dakota, definitely Wyoming.  

Of course, the end point of west was California. And his parents, which was like Rona and Sinder but worse.

He was doing twenty down Lincoln.  He’d never seen all the edge-of-town fields and business parks creep past so slowly.  A couple old ladies passed him.  The radio played some song from the Eighties, I want you to know, ooh, ooh, want you to know.  He started singing along—he wasn’t usually too into singing, but everything was weird today. Ooh, ooh, where should I go?

Not south. Kansas was south.  So that left north. Perfect. He had no idea what the fuck was up there.

He turned around again, more honking (it seemed like he might have almost hit a guy on a motorcycle), and doubled his pace towards the entrance to 231. 

South—Bloomington.

North—Lafayette.

So, towards Lafayette. Weird.  It was like, maybe fifty miles away, but there was totally no reason to go there. He had to keep chanting to himself himself, north, north, just to make sure habit didn’t veer him onto the wrong ramp. Had he ever even gotten on 231 North before?   It was hard to tell.  It looked just like 231 South, fields, a little town with a few houses and a gas station, more fields.

Finally he saw a sign that said he could go left towards Chicago or go right, which didn’t say where it went. He’d been to Chicago a few times (he must have taken 231 North then), so he went right.  

By the time he hit Gary, that pack of factories at the base of Lake Michigan, the sky was starting to get dark.  He drove into Michigan, on a road that followed the east side of the lake, but you couldn’t see it from there. He cut over to the west on a barely-paved road through flat fields of grass, parked his car at a beach parking lot, watched the sunset through his windshield. The lake had movie-blue water stretching to the horizon, gentle waves, a lot more oceany than the cold grey-green of the Pacific from his childhood.  He thought about walking closer, joining the wholesome Michigan families and vacationing couples sitting on towels in the sand, staring up at the rose and gold of the sky.  But he wasn’t ready to get out of the car yet. As long as he was in the car, he was still driving, still going somewhere.

As soon as the sky was dark, he was back on the road, north, up the coast of Michigan, towards—what? He wasn’t sure what happened up there, exactly. The state came to a little point at the top, he knew that. And then what?  Canada, he supposed. Would he have to go through customs?  Because all he had was one suitcase with a dirty suit and a few clean t-shirts, definitely no passport. It didn’t matter.  He would keep driving, and whatever was going to happen, he would let it. 

He drove for hours in deep country darkness, using his high-beams whenever there weren’t other cars on the road, which was most of the time. It was late, and he should have been getting sleepy, but there was something pushing him forward.  Maybe it was Kansas. How he was supposed to be headed back there tomorrow, yet here he was, driving exactly the opposite way.  Far, far, too far to turn back.  Far enough to guarantee that on Monday at eleven, when his students took their seats for English 130, World Lit 1850-Present, he wouldn’t be there.  There were only two weeks left until summer.  And while nothing was certain—especially on this road surrounded by inky blackness—he felt about ninety percent sure he wouldn’t be back in Kansas to finish out those two weeks.  That he wouldn’t be back ever.

It was two in the morning when he saw the sign.

Mackinac Bridge Entrance 6 Miles.

His mind would never have been able to produce this name, but when he saw it, he recognized it right away: the bridge that extended off the north tip of Michigan.  Into a place that he couldn’t visualize, somewhere off the edge of his mental map.

That name, Mackinac Bridge, the image of driving off the tip, it hit him hard. Suddenly he was desperate for sleep. Okay, yes, good time to get some rest. The bridge would sound a whole lot better in the morning. 

He turned off the road at Mackinaw City, whose sign promised food and gas and hotels.  But the town was almost as dark as the state road.  There were hotels, dozens of them, small ones with parking spaces in front of the rooms, giant ones with fancy signs.  None of the signs were lit up, and all the front offices were dark.  He circled for a while, past family restaurants with fish on their signs, empty parking lots, little stores, more hotels.  Everywhere, lights off, blinds down. 

Finally he found a place with a light inside, Lakefront Palace Motel.  They guy at the desk was sleepy and unshaven, with a puffy vest and a large-size Styrofoam coffee. He squinted at Gavin, rubbed at his floppy walrus mustache.   

“Need some help?”

“A room.” 

Gavin’s voice was a dehydrated croak. He hadn’t eaten or drank anything since New Buffalo, just stopped for gas once, where he peed but forgot to get a snack. Totally unlike him.  Now the smell of cheap coffee made his stomach growl loud enough for the desk guy to hear it.

“All full up.”  The guy’s voice was creaky, too.  “Sorry buddy, whole town’s full. Vacation season.  A few weeks ago we mighta had something, but starting May you got to book ahead, maybe a few weeks.”   

So that was it.  He was going to have to keep driving.  Across the Mackinac Bridge, and wherever he ended up after that. He could find a hotel in the morning, or maybe he’d sleep in his car if it ran out of gas before then.

“Do you guys have a vending machine or anything?”

The guy shook his head.  

“Hang on.”  He went into a back part of the office where Gavin could only half see him, came back with another cup of coffee and a granola bar in a wrapper.  “Try these.”

By the time he was back in his car, Gavin had gobbled down the whole granola bar—chocolate chip dipped in some kind of white coating—and burned his tongue trying to drink the coffee.  He poured a third of it out onto the concrete parking lot so it wouldn’t spill in his cup holder.

The bridge was long and flat, suspended over a still blackness that made him feel like he was in outer space.  He braced himself for a border crossing at the other side, but there was just a sign saying Welcome to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  Ah, right: Michigan was that weird state that was split in two parts.  He’d just left the bottom part, and this was the top.

He kept driving, through a forest now, the road bumpy with rocks that grated under his tires. He wouldn’t have thought roads could get any darker than the ones he was on a couple hours ago, but no, this was much, much darker. He crept forward with the high-beams on, waiting for a deer to jump out in front of him, or maybe something worse.  He only had about a quarter tank of gas left, and there was no fucking way he was sleeping in the woods.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket, checked it—no signal.  Kept going, because what else could he do.  But he was starting to entertain the possibility that he had massively fucked up.  Made one of those dumb, impulsive decisions that he prided himself on never making, and predictably enough, now he was completely fucked.  Lost somewhere on the very edge of America, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep, nothing to do but keep driving north and hope for civilization to emerge somewhere up ahead.

After a while—hours? No, actually only forty-five minutes—the trees ended.  The road was normal again, a regular flat road with signs lane markers and even a few lights. 

And then a big sign across the entire road.

Canadian Border Crossing Ten Miles, it said.  Prepare to stop.

He pulled out his phone again.  It was working now, and there was a text from a few hours ago. 

Rona. What did she want?

He couldn’t read it now—something about Time Slide, but the road was too dark and scary to take his eyes off it for more than a second. Anyway, he needed to get his thoughts together for this border thing. They were going to ask him where he was going, right?  What his business was?  And what would he say? Should he make something up, or just tell them the truth: I’m driving north. Was that an okay reason to enter Canada?  And if he needed a passport, would they just tell him to turn back, or could they arrest you?

He braced himself, tried to strengthen his insides, quiet the thumping of his heart.

Off to the right, he saw lights.  Was that the border?  No, a small building, surrounded by a parking lot, a few cars.

White Pine Diner.

Open 24 hours.

He blinked a couple times, made sure he had read it right.  Yes, definitely.  Twenty-four hours. It was like some kind of insane beautiful dream.  He pulled into the lot, stumbled out of the car on legs that kept bending under him in funny ways.  The most amazing smells hit him as he opened the door: breakfast smells, frying potatoes, steam.

“Eggs with bacon, juice, coffee.  And, um, pie,” he told the waitress.  He wasn’t even the only customer.  There were a few bearded guys in ski jackets, one really skinny guy in a baseball cap.  This was like a straight-up party.

Once the coffee and toast came out and he’d had a few bites, Gavin remembered the text  message. He set his phone on the sticky table and turned on the screen.

Just saw time slide. Off off off broadway. U were right, his best one.

And then, an afterthought:

Where’s my movie.

“Here’s your eggs. Pie’ll be warm in a minute.”  The waitress set them down carefully, like she could tell Gavin was fragile.  She seemed really young, like one of his students, with makeup covering bad skin and a huge red-blonde halo of hair around her face. She gave him a curious look, like it was weird for him to be here, which of course it totally, totally was.

“You heading across the border?”

He nodded.

“What’re you doing up there?”

Gavin took a sip of his coffee to make sure his voice would work. 

“I’m not sure.”  He wondered if it would be rude to ask what she was doing up here, surrounded by miles and miles of what seemed like nothing at all. Did she live with her family?  What did they do?  They weren’t farmers like his Kansas students, right?  Maybe they needed people to clear the roads, or maybe logging in that forest. Or hunting—was that a job?

He looked down at his phone, its screen dark again, but Rona’s text was in his mind. He took another sip of coffee for bravery, cleared his throat, took one more sip.

“Actually, I’m making a movie.  Could I maybe, I mean if you wouldn’t mind, could I ask you a few questions?”

She raised her orange eyebrows, a little skeptical, but she sat down on the vinyl-covered seat across from him.  A good sign. “What do you mean, you’re making a movie?  You don’t have a camera or anything.”  Close up, she looked even younger, maybe high school.  Did they have high schools up here?  How could you have a high school in a place full of just forest and no buildings? Was she the only student?

“It’s with my phone,” he said.  “Actually, I don’t know how to make a movie.  I’m trying to learn.  That’s weird, right?”

“It’s not that weird.”  She wrinkled her forehead like she had to think about it. “You have to start somewhere. Yeah, I could be in it.”

He looked down at his phone, pressed the camera button.  That’s what he would use, the camera, right?  He hardly ever took pictures, and he’d never made a video.  He tapped a button and a bunch of options popped up, black-and-white, comic, vignette.  He tapped it again to make them go away.

“Here.”  She grabbed the phone, frowned at the screen for a second, pressed something.  Handed it back to him and pointed at a button at the bottom that hadn’t been there before.  “It’s this one.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Wow, you seriously don’t know how to make a movie.” He was watching her through the phone screen now, giggling, rolling her eyes.  Definitely in high school. A friendly, helpful high-school kid; he didn’t remember any of those from his own high school.  He tried to imagine the snotty kids from Silicon Valley helping some confused old dude who didn’t even know how to use his own phone.

Maybe it was different to go to school on the very edge of America. Maybe her friends were chipmunks, and instead of going to the mall, they had tea parties in a mossy grove in the woods. Her parents might be the border agents he’d be talking to in a few hours. Or they could be CIA operatives looking for terrorists.  Or Canadian lumberjacks, or Mounties, or, um, hockey players.  Maybe he’d meet them tomorrow, on the other side.

He had not idea what would happen tomorrow, where he’d be, who he’d meet. The options were infinite.  All he knew for sure was that he was traveling north, and anything was possible.

His hands were shaking really bad, but he tried to get the phone steady. Steady was good for filmmaking. With his elbows braced on the table like a tripod, he centered the girl’s freckly face on the screen and pressed record. 

<Chapter 46a

Epilogue>