The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant Read Free

out in order to hug the girl and quiet her crying.
    Food for the worms , I thought, and took that thought along with a brown paper bag of equipment through the hole in the chain-link fence, into the woods that lay behind the schoolyard. Those woods were deep, and you could travel through them for miles and miles, never coming out from under the trees or seeing a backyard. Richard Antonelli hunted squirrels with a BB gun in them, and Bobby Lenon and his gang went there at night, lit a little fire and drank beer. Once, while exploring, I discovered a rain-sogged Playboy; once, a dead fox. Kids said there was gold in the creek that wound among the trees and that there was a far-flung acre that sunk down into a deep valley where the deer went to die. For many years it was rumored that a monkey, escaped from a traveling carnival over in Brightwaters, lived in the treetops.
    It was midsummer and the dragonflies buzzed, the squirrels leaped from branch to branch, frightened sparrows darted away. The sun beamed in through gaps in the green above, leaving, here and there, shifting puddles of light on the pine-needle floor. Within one of those patches of light, I practiced creation. There was no clay, so I used an old log for the body. The arms were long, five-fingered branches that I positioned jutting out from the torso. The legs were two large birch saplings with plenty of spring for running and jumping. These I laid angled to the base of the log.
    A large hunk of bark that had peeled off an oak was the head. On this I laid red mushroom eyes, curved barnacles of fungus for ears, a dried seedpod for a nose. The mouth was merely a hole I punched through the bark with my penknife. Before affixing the fern hair to the top of the head, I slid beneath the curve of the sheet of bark those things I thought might help to confer life—a dandelion gone to ghostly seed, a cardinal’s wing feather, a see-through quartz pebble, a twenty-five-cent compass. The ferns made a striking hairdo, the weeds, with their burrlike ends, formed a venerable beard. I gave him a weapon to hunt with: a long, pointed stick that was my exact height.
    When I finished putting my man together, I stood and looked down upon him. He looked good. He looked ready to come to life. I went to the brown paper bag and took out my catechism book. Then kneeling near his right ear, I whispered to him all of the questions Mrs. Grimm would ever ask. When I got to the one, “What is Hell?” his left eye rolled off his face, and I had to put it back. I followed up the last question with a quick promise never to steal a rib.
    Putting the book back into the bag, I then retrieved a capped, cleaned-out baby-food jar. It had once held vanilla pudding, my little sister’s favorite, but now it was filled with breath. I had asked my father to blow into it. Without asking any questions, he never looked away from the racing form, but took a drag from his cigarette and blew a long, blue-gray stream of air into the jar. I capped it quickly and thanked him. “Don’t say I never gave you anything,” he mumbled as I ran to my room to look at it beneath a bare light bulb. The spirit swirled within and then slowly became invisible.
    I held the jar down to the mouth of my man, and when I couldn’t get it any closer, I unscrewed the lid and carefully poured out every atom of breath.
    There was nothing to see, so I held it there a long time and let him drink it in. As I pulled the jar away, I heard a breeze blowing through the leaves; felt it on the back of my neck. I stood up quickly and turned around with a keen sense that someone was watching me. I got scared. When the breeze came again, it chilled me, for wrapped in it was the quietest whisper ever. I dropped the jar and ran all the way home.
    That night as I lay in bed, the lights out, my mother sitting next to me, stroking my crewcut and softly singing, “Until the Real Thing Comes Along,” I remembered