Free Beyond the Laughing Sky by Michelle Cuevas Page A

colored white and brown and gold. “I . . . I just can’t believe these are the same wings you built. They are, aren’t they?”
    Nashville just smiled, and looked to the corner of the room. Junebug followed his gaze into the shadows where something lay against the wall—large and slumped over, shrouded in darkness. Junebug crept closer, closer. Suddenly the truth swept in like the most wonderful breeze.
    Junebug smiled.
    And she cried.
    There in the corner, broken apart and sad, were the remnants of the wings Nashville had built.

“T hey’re real,” whispered junebug. “But how?”
    â€œI think . . .” Nashville said with a smile. “I think I had them all along.”
    Then he took his sister’s hand, and led her to the top floor of the house, to the edge of the dazzling, oversized window.
    And there, like Peter and Wendy, they stepped out of the window, and up into the never-never land of the air. Junebug clung to her brother at first, but after a few moments she was so entranced by what she saw, she forgot to be afraid at all.
    Nashville and Junebug looked below them, and felt the power of seeing a world so familiar from a new, more distant perspective. They flew over the fields where they had run together, and the streams where they had fished and caught frogs. They flew over games they had played, and songs they had sung, marshmallows they had roasted, and sand castles they had built and destroyed. They flew over stacks of books they had read together, and lightning bugs they had caught together; over piles of leaves, and piles of pancakes. They flew over memories of all the years, all the days that seemed so different, but so perfect, when seen from a distance.
    Now, here they were flying through chimney smoke and rain-heavy clouds. They flew lower, skimming the tops of houses, and from this place, Nashville and Junebug were able to hear the singing of the trees.
    The trees sang of all the things they protected from the cold—of the bluebirds bundled inside together for warmth, and of the hollow nooks where squirrels slept, dreaming, their minds a map of nuts hidden like buried treasure.
    They sang songs that tasted of apple pie, of plums and peaches and lemonade grown on the trees. They sang of their grand outfits of moss and mushrooms growing wild. They sang of the rich, dark dirt where the worms and the moles tickled their roots.
    They sang of all the trees to go before them and be made into homes and boats, their wood used to make chapels, and doors, and cradles.
    But mostly, they sang of a fort in a tree where a boy and a girl would go on grand adventures; they sang of the children swinging, climbing, playing, and building crowns from their leaves. The trees sang softly and sweetly about their branches always being open to little birds. Nashville and Junebug knew the only way was to sing along, and so they joined in with the trees, floating all together for just a little while above the whole, dazzling world.
    And what about that world? For Nashville and Junebug were not the only ones awake in Goosepimple.
    â€œMama. Mama, wake up!” It was a boy standing by his mother’s bed.
    His mother rubbed the sleep from her eyes, put on a robe, and followed her son. She looked out the window. She rubbed her eyes again.
    â€œWell I never . . .” She ran to the hall, picked up the phone, and called across the street to Mrs. Craw, and Mrs. Craw looked out the window as well.
    â€œImpossible!” cried Mrs. Craw. She picked up the phone and called Dr. Larkin. Dr. Larkin called Miss Starling. And so on and so on, until every woman in curlers and man in slippers were looking up at the sky to get a glimpse of Nashville and Junebug; to hear the faintest, distant, sweet sound of laughter in the sky.
    â€œImpossible,” they all said, though the word didn’t have quite the huff and puff that it used to.

T he morning was the