Free Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr Page A

reaches a single strand of barbed wire sagging between posts. Behind him is the sliding door, the kitchen, Pawpaw’s microwave; ahead are three thousand acres of forest owned by a family in Texas no one in Lakeport has ever met.
    Wock wock-a-wock , calls the magpie.
    It’s easy to duck under the wire.
    Beneath the trees, the light changes entirely: another world. Pennants of lichen sway from branches; snippets of sky glow overhead. Here’s an ant mound half as tall as he is; here’s a granite rib the size of a minivan; here’s a sheet of bark that fits around his midsection like the chest plate of Starboy’s armor.
    Halfway up the hill behind the house, Seymour comes to a clearing ringed by Douglas firs with a big dead ponderosa in the center like the many-fingered arm of a skeleton-giant thrust up from the underworld. Parachuting through the air around him, blown out of the firs, are hundreds of pine needles bundled in twos. He catches one, imagines it as a little man with a truncated torso and long slender legs. The NeedleMan ventures across the clearing on his pointy feet.
    At the foot of the dead tree, Seymour constructs a house for the NeedleMan from bark and twigs. He is installing a lichen mattress inside when a ghost shrieks ten feet above his head.
    Ee-ee? Ee-ee-eet?
    Every hair on Seymour’s arms stands up straight. The owl is so well camouflaged that it vocalizes three more times before the boy sets eyes on it, and when he does he gasps.
    It blinks three times, four. In the shadow against the bark, with its eyelids closed, the owl vanishes. Then the eyes open again and the creature rematerializes.
    It is the size of Tony Molinari. Its eyes are the color of tennis balls. It is looking right at him.
    From his spot at the base of the big dead tree, Seymour gazes up and the owl gazes down and the forest breathes and something happens: the unease mumbling at the margins of his every waking moment—the roar—falls quiet.
    There is magic in this place , the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you.
    He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.
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    When Bunny finds him there’s bark in her hair and snot on her Wagon Wheel polo and she yanks him to his feet and Seymour could not say if a minute or a month or a decade has passed. The owl vanishes like smoke. He twists to see where it might have gone, but it’s nowhere, sucked deeper into the woods, and Bunny is touching his hair, she’s sobbing, “—about to call the cops, why didn’t you stay put?—” she’s swearing, pulling him home through the trees, ripping her jeans on the barbed wire; the microwave timer in the kitchen is going boopboopboopboop , Bunny is talking on her phone, she’s getting fired by Manager Steve, she’s throwing her phone at the love seat, she’s squeezing Seymour’s shoulders so he can’t squirm away, she’s saying, “I thought we were doing this together,” she’s saying, “I thought we were a team.”
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    After bedtime he crawls to his window, slides it open, thrusts his head into the dark. The night exudes a wild, oniony smell. Something barks, something goes chee chee chee . The forest is right there, just past the barbed wire.
    â€œTrustyfriend,” he says. “I name you Trustyfriend.”

Zeno
    D ownstairs adults clomp through Mrs. Boydstun’s living room in their heavy shoes. Five Playwood Plastic soldiers climb out of their tin box. Soldier 401 creeps toward the headboard with his rifle; 410 drags his anti-tank gun over a furrow of quilt; 413 gets too close to the radiator and his face melts.
    Pastor White labors up the stairs with a plate of ham and crackers and sits on the little brass bed breathing hard. He picks up Soldier 404, the one with the rifle held over his head, and