Free Dust of Eden by Thomas Sullivan Page B

cupola. Not get there from the ground where she was standing now, looking up at the house where everyone was asleep, but from the window. She could climb out the window upstairs and push off the lightning rod with her foot while she pulled herself over the gutter, and then it was just a couple of steps along the edge before she could grab that funny-looking pipe sticking up through the roof, and then a couple more to reach the chimney, and then, with the chimney to block her slide if she fell, she could go straight up. The roof was steep, but she could keep trying until she made it. Shingles were like sandpaper. Your tennis shoes could grip. So she could make it to the ridge, and then it was a piece of cake to reach the cupola.
    She liked the night. The world seemed bigger at night. Not just an old folks' home and a farm with no kids—and no animals anymore either—but a half-painted world where the shadows could become anything you wanted. She wasn't allowed to go to school, or to shows, or shopping when her mother made her weekly runs to a strip mall, so there were lots of things she wanted. At first she had liked the idea of staying home from school ("No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks"), but she had zilch friends ("zilch"—kids didn't say that anymore). Her mother said her friends were all grown up, that they were in their forties. She supposed that was true, but it was hard to believe, and if they were truly grown up, then she really didn't care about them anymore anyway. She wanted to meet new people. So she liked the night, because she could explore and pretend there were lots of people around.
    They really might be around too. Hadn't her father told her about the ghosts? That was before he was in the wheelchair, and he would show her the cellars or wave at the fields and say that the red corn they grew down by the woods was red from blood and corpses.   Her mother called it Indian corn, or sometimes Winnebago, but her father said it was because gangsters had been murdered in the cellars and that they sometimes walked the fields at night gushing blood. They were still in the house too. In the tunnels or maybe the walls. Amber had looked for them many times, even though her old friends used to tell her she was freaked out. Now she wandered all over the house after everyone was asleep, and sometimes—like tonight—she climbed out a window and went through the fields to the woods or hung around the yard in the moonlight. There was a rope swing still on the basswood, except that the rope was yellow plastic now, because the Lutheran school that had built the new wing had changed it, and she sat on the tire and swung and pretended there were hands reaching for her as she gyrated to avoid them. She liked to scare herself. Liked to take risks. That hadn't changed. Because even if she was scared, she was lonely too, and she didn't think she'd mind meeting a ghost or two.
    Now she looked up at the cupola and thought, Maybe that's where they are.
    She had never looked there before, so it might be. Another series of flashes winked on the horizon, almost as if someone who couldn't speak was signaling to her. Yes, yes, yes! . . . The cupola. That's where they are. Climb up and see . So she jumped off the tire swing, and snuck back into the house, and tiptoed up the stairs, being careful not to step in the center of the squeaky treads—which didn't matter, because you could beat pots and pans and not wake the living dead in the house, who were mostly about a hundred years old—and Amber went to the sewing room where the window was that she had chosen from the ground.
    She checked to make sure her new Skechers were on tight, and then she tugged open the window and stared down three stories to the ground. Scary, for sure. But she had things to hang on to, and except for that couple of steps near the edge above her, there wasn't any risk. The trick was to pretend you were on the