Free Strange is the Night by Justine Sebastian Page A

water dripping off his chin as he spluttered and gasped and scrubbed at his face. He only managed to get mud in his mouth but even the red clay soil did not taste as bad as the puddled water did. When he’d spit until his mouth was dry, his tongue like a piece of cotton padded copper, only then did Robert look in the puddle again.
    His grubby, moon-pale face stared back at him.
    The sun that he had temporarily forgotten beat his shoulders like a merciless disciplinarian, but Robert barely noticed because his face was not what he had expected to see in the puddle. The city—his city—was supposed to be there and he wanted it back because he had found the most extraordinary place in the whole wide world. He was between the age when it was deemed okay for boys to cry and when boys needed to start “manning up” and when Robert felt his bottom lip quiver there was a touch of shame met with a child’s fierce insistence that a great wrong had been done. Robert squared his pudgy shoulders and blinked back the tears anyway. He’d been sent up to the end of the drive to check the mail, but he didn’t care one whit about that; he wanted his city back. He was certain if he only had another chance then he’d do it right.
    Robert slipped his hands beneath the surface of the water, over the wet slime of the muddy bottom of the puddle and deep into it until his hands were lost in mucky mire. He hoped that if he reached down into the puddle he would grab at least a blade of the long, strangulation colored grass or prick his finger on the needle-sharp spire of one of the buildings. All he got was filthier hands and as his search became more frenzied, the entire front of his shirt got soaked and clung to his skin. His knees ached from being ground into the filth and the rocks beneath it and his head hurt from all the sunshine beating down on it. He knew if he touched the back of his head it would feel like his hair was on burning from the inside.
    At last, Robert gave up with a frustrated little cry and shoved himself to his feet. He started to turn away and trudge back home, but he remembered that he was supposed to get the mail and whirled around with an angry huff. All he wanted to do was storm home in a fit of grade schooler histrionics and sit in his room for the rest of the day quietly hating everything that had ever wronged him. He snatched the mail from the box, though he left the flap open, then he was finally able to begin his stomp back down the drive, his mother’s ladies magazines smeared with clay mud that was sure to get the seat of his jean shorts swatted.
    By the time he made it back to the house most of his childish anger had sweated right out of him and his head was well and truly pounding. He tried to clean the magazine that had caught the worst of it and felt he did a job satisfactory enough that his life would at least be spared.
    Sure enough, when he handed his mama the mail, she looked at him with one eyebrow raised and dusted the seat of his shorts lightly before she shook her head and told him to go wash up. It didn’t even hurt, but as he walked away, he rubbed his bottom for show and pretended he didn’t hear her disbelieving snort. When he came back, she gave him a glass of iced tea and made him sit in front of the fan while she wiped him down with a nice, cool rag until he didn’t feel headachy or sick to his stomach anymore.
     
    That night Robert woke to the sound of rain pounding down on the tin roof with such ferocity he almost expected the drops of water to punch right through it. His curtains snapped and twisted in the wind; bewitched girls dancing with tornados, sure to be torn apart but helpless to stop it. Rain spattered his bedroom floor and the whole world smelled of cleanness and ozone. The air had been cooled by the rain and was fresh against Robert’s skin as he got out of bed to close his windows.
    When he was done, he went down the hall to the bathroom to dry off. He did so by the