Free Agnes Mallory by Andrew Klavan

rolled my pebbles in my palm. I watched her work the clay.
    â€˜She came and met me in a ghost place – a big, kind of – I don’t know – a big, kind of brown place where everything was broken. There were all these broken, old things lying around in the mud and some of them had arms and heads reaching out of the mud like monsters trying to crawl out, you know? And there were all these …’ She straightened a second to describe them in the sunlit air with her hand. ‘… scary trees, like, all around, that looked like monsters with giant fingers and scary faces staring down at us. And the sky was scary too with, like, clouds. And it was all cold.’ She returned to her figure, the little girl figure she had formed, Lena’s figure. ‘And Lena came there – wearing a white dress – she came there and met me and she said, “This isn’t where I really live. This is just where I have to come so I can meet you. Where I live it’s like a big garden with beautiful flowers all over everywhere like a carpet, and all the mothers are with their children and all the fathers are playing with them and everyone’s laughing.” And she said I could come there with her.’ She looked up, caught me gaping at her hands. ‘She said I could come with her to the garden where she lived.’ She took her figure from the rock and sat back in the dirt with it, bracing it against her scraped knee, shaping the details. ‘I wanted to go, too. I was going to. Only I didn’t know if she was telling the truth or not. Once you went to the garden, see, you couldn’t come back and what if it was all like this place, I mean the scary place we were in, you know, with the trees and things and I could never get back – never.’
    She stopped and I figured she was finished with her story and I couldn’t help saying something about this incredible figure she’d made and I blurted out, ‘God, Agnes! God, that is so neat! How do you do that?’
    She hiked one shoulder, made a grimace of disdain. ‘I just make what I see,’ she said.
    â€˜Yeah, but, I mean, could you, like, make … like a monster or something, like a Frankenstein, something really cool like that?’
    She rolled up off her backside back onto her knees, back to the edge of the burbling stream. She held Lena’s figure close to her in one hand. Braced with the other hand on the bank, she gazed down into a quiet pool sheltered from the current by stones.
    â€˜Oh, come on, Agnes,’ I said behind her, ‘don’t drown it. Make a Frankenstein or something, make something cool.’ She hesitated. ‘Come on, Agnes.’
    After another moment, she sat back. She was still gazing away sort of dreamily – or maybe sort of insanely, I don’t know – into the shadow-pocked slope on the far side. But she wagged her head. ‘I could make a Frankenstein.’
    â€˜Yeah!’ I dusted the last pebbles off my palms and went over to her on my knees. ‘Only not a Frankenstein.’ I already had the Aurora Frankenstein monster model on the shelf in my room. ‘Something else cool,’ I said. ‘Like a skeleton or something.’
    Dreamily, Agnes folded Lena in two between her palms. She mashed the figure back into the muddy ball whence it had come. ‘You can’t do a good skeleton with Play-Doh,’ she said, gazing off. ‘Because of the ribs. Play-Doh’s too soft to make good ribs. I could do a skull though.’
    â€˜Yeah! Great! Okay! Make a skull!’
    Slowly, reflectively, Agnes seemed to come back to herself. She heaved a deep sigh and set about the task. I knelt beside her on the sunlit bank, by the dribbling stream, under the trees heavy with leaves on the ridge above us. I watched her as she worked. I was mesmerized by those delicate little fingers in the clay.
    And she made a skull, all right, a great one. She