Free When Sparrows Fall by Meg Moseley

archangels woke, evidenced by bumps, thumps, and all manner of shrillness upstairs. Timothy’s voice joined theirs, in a lower register. Every time the boys’ footsteps thudded on the ceiling, the noise jarred Jack.
    Rebekah and Jonah emerged from the bathroom. She installed him in the highchair, conned him out of the feather, and gave him a banana. With Jonah settled, she started heating a pot of water on the electric stove.
    The kids would need room to eat breakfast. Jack gathered his papers into a neat pile. He could always think better when he had room to spread out his work, as if that made room for bigger thoughts. That was another habit he needed to lay down for a while.
    The other children showed up as Rebekah was doling out oatmeal. She offered it to Jack too, but he would have preferred to eat mud.
    “Thanks, but I’m not ready to eat yet,” he said to soften his refusal. “Maybe I’ll fix something later in the …” He saw a toaster, a food processor, a huge slow cooker, and his coffee paraphernalia but no microwave. “Y’all don’t have a microwave?”
    “No,” Rebekah said. “Mother won’t have one in the house.”
    “Why is that?”
    “Father said … it’s something about the way the microwaves heat the food. They make the molecules vibrate, and it might be harmful.”
    Jack swallowed a comment about Carl’s grasp of basic science. “When you heat food in a pot on the stove, the molecules vibrate too.”
    Rebekah studied him with light, luminous eyes. “Oh! I guess they do.”
    He reminded himself that she was only ten.
    And that her mother might forbid her to go to college.
    By nine o’clock, the kids had finished chores and hauled out their schoolbooks. Jack soon concluded that their education was adequate in most ways, stellar in others, and sorely lacking in some respects. When Rebekah ran across a reference to Ebenezer Scrooge in an essay, she couldn’t grasp the gist of the paragraph because she’d never been exposed to Dickens.
    At least Miranda didn’t require the busywork that public schools used as a means of crowd control. One point for her, but quiet, all-absorbing busywork would have come in handy. He couldn’t send the kids out to play in a rainstorm.
    By ten, they had cabin fever. The rain came down without stopping, and so did Jonah’s tears. Sitting amid his blocks, he screamed in useless rage. Rebekah, usually so good at soothing toddler angst, teetered on the verge of a meltdown herself. The archangels bickered. Even Martha, the sunny one, found reasons to whine.
    Only Timothy kept his mouth shut. Hunched over a grammar lesson, he clicked his pen, over and over. Click. Click. Click .
    “Hush up, y’all,” Jack said quietly. Nobody paid him any mind.
    Click. Click. Click .
    Martha abandoned her phonics workbook and opened the fridge. “Somebody drank all the orange juice,” she wailed. “I didn’t get any. Not any. ” She segued into broken-hearted weeping that sent Jack into auditory overload.
    Click. Click. Click-click-click-click-click .
    Jack slapped his own pen down on the table. “That settles it. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m taking y’all to Walmart.”
    Martha silenced herself, midsob. Jonah stopped shrieking and wiped his wet cheeks with gooey fingers. All the kids gawked at Jack as if he’d announced a trip to France. And a guillotine.
    “It’s Thursday,” Timothy said. Click . “A school day.” Click .

    “Indeed, every day’s a school day. The world is our classroom. We’ll take a field trip.”
    “There’s no Walmart in Slades Creek,” Rebekah pointed out, sensible as always.
    Jack smiled at his astonished charges. “There’s one in Clayton.” And it carried clothing. Normal clothing. There was a thought.
    Martha closed the fridge and sniffled. “Uncle Jack? Can we buy Frosted Flakes? Please?”
    “Yes. And orange juice.” He turned to Rebekah. “And something easy for supper, because you do too much cooking for a girl your