Brian's Return Read Free Page B

staring at the sky until the sun, the star and the light were gone, wanting it all to mean more.
    He tried to tell Caleb everything about the sunset every color, every shade, the small sounds of the ice crack-singing on the lake, the hiss of the cold sky, the rustle of powder snow settling.
    Told it all and when he was done he looked across the desk and saw that Caleb was crying.

Chapter Five
    “Did I say something wrong?”
    Caleb wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. “No. I was just . . . moved . . . by how it must have looked. It sounds so incredibly beautiful . . .”
    “It is. It’s . . . It’s everything. Just everything.”
    “And you miss it.”
    There it was, out in the open. The thought had been in Brian’s mind ever since the police had brought him home, and before that without his knowing it. Small at first, then bigger and bigger. And Caleb had seen it.
    “Yes. More than anything. I miss . . . being there. I feel I should go back . . .”
    “Is it running away or running to?”
    Brian frowned, thinking. “It’s neither. It’s what I am now—for better or worse. It’s more that I just can’t be with people anymore.”
    “You hate people?”
    “No—not like that. I don’t hate them. I have friends and love some people. My mother and father. And I’ve tried to do things with people and go to school and be . . . normal. But I can’t—it just doesn’t work. I have been, I have seen too much. They talk about things that don’t interest me and when I talk about what I think about, what I see, they just glaze over.”
    “Like the sunset . . .”
    Brian nodded, then remembered again that Caleb couldn’t see. But he’d “seen” more of Brian than anybody else. “That and other things, many other things . . .”
    “Can you tell me some of the other things?”
    “Like the sunset?”
    Caleb nodded. “If you wish. Whatever you want to tell me.”
    Again Brian paused, thinking.
    “If it’s too private . . .”
    “No. It’s not that. It’s more that what I’ve seen is different from how people think things really are. Television makes them see things that aren’t real, that don’t exist. If I tell you how it
really
is you won’t believe it.”
    “Try me.”
    Brian sighed. “All right. Mice have houses and make towns under the snow in the winter.”
    “Make towns?”
    “See? You don’t believe it, do you?”
    Caleb shook his head. “I meant that I wanted to know more. Please tell me about it.”
    And so Brian did. He had been moving around a clearing one day on snowshoes, hunting. It was cold but not the crippling cold that came sometimes and he had an arrow on the bowstring of his war bow just in case, when he looked out in the clearing and saw a fox make a high, bounding jump and bury its head in the snow, its tail sticking up like a bottle brush.
    The fox came up with snow all over its face, looked around—Brian froze and the fox didn’t see him— then looked down at the snow again. It cocked its head, listening, then made another leap, fully four feet in the air, and dove headfirst into the snow again.
    This time it came up with a mouse wriggling in its front teeth. The fox bit down once, killed it, swallowed it and then listened again, bounced in the air again and came up with another.
    The fox did it eight more times and got three more mice before trotting out of the clearing and away. Brian watched the whole thing, wondered briefly about eating mice and thought better of it. Not that he was squeamish but he had a deer by this time and plenty of meat and besides, it would take probably thirty or forty mice to make a meal and cleaning them—gutting each mouse and skinning it—would take a lot of work and time.
    Still, he was curious. He hadn’t thought much about mice but now that he did he supposed they would be hibernating. But the ones that came up in the fox’s mouth were wriggling. Clearly they hadn’t been sleeping.
    Brian moved into the clearing and stared