Free Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson

ring again.
    We all sat there, breathing hard, staring at one another, not sure how to proceed. A solid minute passed.
    “Dammit all to hell!” Stevie yelled. He kicked backward at the wall again. “This is bullshit.” He looked at us, from one to another, like he was looking for backup. “Bullshit, right?”
    “They’ll call,” Thor said.
    Another minute, maybe two. It felt like ten.
    “Naw,” Stevie said. “I have to do something. I have to show them that I am some serious business. You know?” Now he was talking to himself, not Thor, like he was gearing himself up. I wanted to tell him that shooting the cop would have clued them in. The cops knew he was some serious business. We all knew. But I didn’t want to call his attention to us, so instead I looked at Thor. We all were looking at him, even Stevie.
    “Someone has to do something,” Stevie said. His voice was shaking. His hands were shaking.
    Thor nodded. “Soon. But not yet. They will call.” He sounded like he was soothing a collicky baby. But Stevie was munching at his own mouth and blinking too much, gearing himself up. He was going to do something awful, unless someone else did something first.
    I think Thor knew it, too. Because Thor did something.
    He started moving. Very slowly. So slowly. He twisted at the waist toward the desk, one long arm moving across his body, reaching for the shelves next to him. It was so slow, it was almost hypnotizing. Stevie stopped munching at himself and watched.
    Thor took hold of one piece of white printer paper, delicately, in a two-finger pinch. Then he tugged on it, sliding it out from under the heavy glass paperweight.
    It was the only thing happening in the room. Natty leaned forward to see, hands wrapping his knees in a hug. Stevie watched, too, his gun hand lowering slightly, until it was pointing mostly at the floor.
    Thor set the paper flat on the floor between his jeans-clad legs. He started folding it. He had big hands, both long and wide, with square-tipped fingers that looked too large to be as deft as they were. They folded the paper precisely, one short nail running down a crease he’d made. He tore a strip off at the crease, and then he had a perfect paper square.
    He folded and refolded, crimping and shifting, making the paper square bloom into three dimensions. I could already see it was too complicated for an airplane.
    Natty watched with big, interested eyes, and I saw Stevie was watching with that same expression on his face. Mouth slack, all else forgotten. I realized then that he was younger than me. Seventeen or maybe eighteen, tops.
    The paper folded up even smaller and became more complicated in Thor’s deft hands. When he stopped, he was holding a paper bird. He set it in his palm. He showed Natty, turning it this way and that, and Stevie looked, too.
    Natty reached for it, but Thor lifted one finger in a wait-and-see gesture. He turned the bird in his fingers and gently grasped the tail. He pulled it, and the bird’s head dipped down, like it was bending to eat a seed.
    Natty smiled outright, and reached again. Thor surrendered the bird to him. People don’t really notice eye color, but we were so close, I noticed his as he looked at my son. A pale, plain blue, like chambray denim. Stevie was watching Natty, too, with envy, as my child pulled the bird’s tail and the head dipped up and down.
    I opened my mouth to thank Thor for the bird, for the slight calmness that had come into the room with it, but what came out was a piece of a Dickinson poem, one that Walcott had said for us in the car earlier.
    I said, “The thing with feathers.”
    Thor’s gaze flew back to my face, and what happened then was only between us. I can’t explain it. It didn’t happen to Stevie, still bird-watching, or anyone else, even Natty. It happened in the air over Natty’s head.
    His pupils went wide, spiraling open into dense black holes, pulling me inexorably to him. He stared at me like he was