Free The Stone War by Madeleine E. Robins

too dirty, and took the sleeve from a discarded shirt to wrap around the heated can.
    Then he took his meal with him and clambered agilely to the upper level of the tunnel where the cold sunlight of afternoon filtered down from a grating thirty feet overhead. He settled himself against one of the stone walls, pulled his bony knees up tight to his chest, and spooned hot soup into his mouth.
    He missed the people stuff. He had never tried to imagine what it could be like without the thoughts canceling each other out until what Jit heard was an undistinguishable roar of emotion, most of it the loudest things: anger or fear. This quiet should be peaceful. But the silence was not so nice. It was lonely.
    Jit had lived alone as long as he could remember, making contact with one of them only rarely; like the kid who had given Jit a name. Jit had watched that kid play handball against the stone of the boathouse face, watching first from the bushes, drawn there by the rhythmic thud of the small pink ball; later he began to edge out behind the stone columns. The kid had seen him, talked to him, laughing. Up close, Jit had been able to hear him individually, decide to trust him. The kid had seemed amused by the audience, called him jitters or jitterboy or, finally, Jit. And Jit had liked the sound and the boy enough to keep the name. He had a friend. He made sure to be there every day in case his friend was there, watching from the bushes until he was certain that no one else was around, ducking back behind if a passerby interrupted the older boy’s monologues.
    “Jitters, why you so cra-zee?” the boy asked sometimes. Jit had no answer, but he liked the sounds of the words. Sometimes, sitting alone behind a grating watching people move warily through the Park, Jit would repeat the words to himself: Jitters, why you so crazy?
    Some of the soup was burned on the bottom of the can. Jit scraped doggedly until he had it all, burned or no. He glanced up again, out at the deserted walkway and gray lace of the leafless bushes. It had been light for a long time, he thought.
    When he had finished eating and the soup was a warm liquid ball in his stomach, Jit decided to scout the Park. Going out in daylight meant taking one of the crawl tunnels to the old skating-rink house, and working himself through the boards that covered the windows so that he could appear magically on the hillside behind the building. Jit rarely left his home the quickest way; it was too dangerous. It would be too easy for someone to follow him, find the warren he had made for himself from old Park furnishings, scavenged bits and scraps, stolen things. He had a dozen routes from the tunnel and could come up half-anywhere in the Park. Now Jit grabbed an old jacket, sloppy on his stick frame, and climbed down the ladder into the tunnel, making his way toward the skating rink by memory in the dank, moist air.
    Even out in the daylight the loudest voice Jit heard was that of the squirrels. There was a sense of wrongness that confused him; it took him several minutes to understand that something was wrong with the Park itself, something was sick. The unkept mass of trees and shrubs around the skating rink was dead, not just winter barren and gray but dead; the earth looked as if it had been scorched. Jit wrinkled his nose. There was a taste of fire in the air, something was wrong but he could not tell what it was. He wondered again: where were all the voices?
    He didn’t like the deadness. Jit picked up a stick that lay at his feet and switched it at the trees. Grow, he thought idly, angry at the deadness. Grow. In his hand the stick felt warm. As he watched, the rusty gray bark began to move, forming like clay into a tiny shoot. A leaf unfurled, and another. Jit stared at the stick in his hand, puzzled.
    Grow, he thought again. Another shoot pushed from the stick, two more tiny leaves.
    He turned his gaze on one of the dead trees, a bleached white skeleton of a maple. Grow.