Free Boundaries by T.M. Wright Page A

the fat man’s head—which was covered with thin black hair—"Do you mind ?"
    The man did not respond.
    Karen said, confused and embarrassed, "Christian?"
    The fat man shifted in his seat, making room for his hefty wife. The wife said, "I don’t have no room, Earl."
    The two kids were pushing at each other now, not because they had no room but because they often pushed at each other. They smiled chubbily as they pushed; it was a game.
    The fat man leaned forward to stop them then, and, when the kids quieted down for the moment, he leaned back with a whump .
    Christian said again, "Do you mind ?"
    The fat man craned his small round head around and smiled at Christian. "Sorry?"
    Christian hissed, "You’re moving my seat, dammit!"
    The fat man stopped smiling. His wife glanced critically at Christian, frowned, then looked at her children, who were again pushing at each other. As her husband had done, she reached across to separate them.
    The fat man looked at his wife. "Let’s move, Alice," he said. Alice nodded, and in a moment the family had seated themselves at a booth on the opposite side of the small room.
    Karen said to Christian, "That was rude, Christian."
    Christian said, "They were people to be rude to. Unnatural people."
    ~ * ~
    Jackson found the window through which he had come into Anne’s house and he stared confusedly at it from the floor. Finally, he leaped to the sill. He paused there, his four feet balancing him on the narrow sill, his big orange head bobbing, tail twitching. His tail twitched when he was in thought. For him, thought consisted of a series of almost random memories (pictures) that flitted through his brain. The memories were weighted plus and minus (though he did not consciously will this). One of the minus pictures which flashed through his head and vanished was of the night and the outdoors, and for Jackson that was blackness and noise and the touch of a thousand small creatures. The noise consisted of grunts, hoots, feet crunching the earth nearby. He had been outside at night only a few times, mostly as a kitten, and those times had formed for him a pulse of terror in the back of his cat brain, because although the hoots and the touch of a myriad of small creatures were disconcerting, the crunch of earth nearby told him that something very heavy was walking about, something his poor eyes could not see. And his only recourse was to run from the sound; run into blackness—into walls and trees, the tires of parked cars. So there really was no escape.
    Except inside, into the light.
    Which formed a plus memory. Being inside at night, his nightlight guiding him safely into sleep.
    There were other pluses and other minuses, all having to do with danger, safety, hunger, contentment; and they were mixed together in his cat brain so that outside did not necessarily translate as danger , and inside did not necessarily translate as safety and contentment.
    So he balanced on the sill in Anne Case’s house until, at last, some random pulse, like a spark, sent him leaping to the ground three feet below.
    Above him, the window—its casing dried—slammed shut from the movement.
    Jackson looked up. He meowed, mouth opening wide in confusion, his poor eyes fixed on the closed window, tail twitching, cat brain racing.
    He was out. The way in was shut. He had to be in.
    He meowed pleadingly for a very long time at the closed window.
    ~ * ~
    The body in the bed lay nearly as still as earth, shallow inhales and exhales marking slow time, and Death, waiting nearby, wanted so much to climb into the body, to still the breathing and make the body as cold and as motionless as stone. It was what reigned in the universe, cold and stillness. But Death couldn’t climb into the body on the bed—its spirit was gone, was on an odyssey.
    So Death stood by—and to all the eyes that watched, it looked much like the shadowed juncture of two walls, the straight line of Death.

THIRTEEN

    B atavia was a small upstate