Free Strange is the Night by Justine Sebastian

I
    The world had been there for as long as Robert Gwinnett could recall. One of his clearest memories of childhood was of standing at the end of his family’s driveway staring into a puddle. There was a deep rut where the pave met with the sandy red clay driveway. The asphalt was higher than the dirt and a rub-board washout ran the first one hundred feet or so of the drive. It was so long that had it been located anywhere less rural they might have stuck a sign at the end of it and called it a lane. The biggest dip was the first turn—the first step is a doozy—and anyone going too fast off the pave onto the driveway was bounced halfway to heaven if they weren’t careful. Robert always thought it was funny when his older brother would forget and brain himself on the roof of his rattletrap pickup truck.
    The sun was a white-hot ball that day, throwing back damp heat in simmering waves. Sweat dripped from the ends of Robert’s hair, it stung his eyes and crept into the corners of his mouth with a taste saltier than tears. Cool droplets of rainwater left over from a mid-afternoon soaking plummeted from the big old pecan trees overhanging the long driveway. He was wet from the top of his head to the shoulders of his old green shirt, his bare toes digging into the sticky clay, sweat tickle-dripping down the backs of his knees. It was uncomfortable, but that day all that mattered to him was the way the spires of the magnificent city rose up. It was in a mud puddle, the water rusty orange because of the clay, but the surface was still and calm. There was too much sunlight on half of the puddle and the city faded to nothing but a glare of dirty orange. Where it fell in shadows though, the city flourished and filled out the wavery shapes of the pecan leaves overhead.
    Robert’s blueberry-stained mouth formed the word wow as he knelt to get a closer look. He looked around, half-convinced that the city would be rising up all around him because there was no other way it could be in the puddle. Yet he knew better and sure enough, all he saw was the rusted barbed wire fence and pecan trees; the slick red clay of the rain-washed drive and the stinking blacktop road in front of him. The city was there, but it was so far away that even the closest buildings were hazy and distant.
    He was close enough to the puddle that his breath made the surface of the water ripple and disturbed his view of the city. Robert lit upon a plan though: he held his breath so he could move even closer. Even as his head swam with the need for breath he leaned closer still. At the new angle he could see a cobbled lane paved with stones that gleamed a deep black-green, as though they had been polished, and they seemed to faintly undulate. The road’s beginning was cut off by the edge of the puddle and in Robert’s view it climbed its way up a steep hill that disappeared around a sharp bend. It seemed to glow in the light of a setting sun that left everything covered with spilled paint colors of red, orange and salmon; deep, rosy pink and the most delicate kiss of lavender, leaving the grass along the high road looking as though it had been asphyxiated.
    Water squelched up around his already dirty little boy fingers as he dug them into the gritty mud. The nail of his index finger scraped against a rock in such a way he felt it like a shiver in his teeth. Robert’s lip twitched and his chest had started to heave and jerk as he fought to keep his breath held so he could get a better look. Then he overbalanced, his lips touched the glassy surface, and with one kiss, he broke the spell he had cast on himself. A feeling like cold electricity ran into his mouth and across his tongue. Robert gasped, sucking in water that was sweet and clean as the rain that had left it there, but when the second layer of flavor registered there was a metallic, mineral tang to it like Robert had bitten into a piece of the old barbed wire fence.
    Robert reared back from the puddle then,