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“Ready, kid?” Sergeant Leonard asked. He was coming apart and blowing into the wind.
Jericho opened his mouth, laughing, and the light came pouring out.
ANOTHER WAY
Under the moonless sky, Isaiah stirred in his mother’s winged arms. “Mama, did you hear that?”
Viola hadn’t heard anything but the constant murmurations of the dead. The night-song of the desiccated cicadas still chirped in the tall, brittle reeds sheltering Viola and her son.
“What did you hear, baby?”
“I heard somebody calling my name, Mama. I heard Memphis calling me.” Isaiah pulled away and lifted his head, listening.
Viola tensed, listening, hearing nothing. What if it was some new trick cooked up by the King of Crows to hurt her baby all over again? With him here in her arms, maybe she had a chance to protect him. To ease him into this world of the dead with as little harm as possible. She would keep him hidden for as long as possible.
“Come here, baby. Rest,” she said.
“Okay,” Isaiah said, and lay back down in his mother’s soft arms, just like a baby bird in a nest.
He was getting sleepy lying here. And it was getting harder to remember things from before. One by one, the memories were being plucked from inside him and carried away. Isaiah didn’t like not remembering. He wanted to fight it. So he tried to fix just one memory hard in his head. He was thinking about the kittens under Sarah Beth’s porch. There had been… how many? Isaiah thought and thought. Seven. There had been seven. He had a favorite among them. Ma… Mo… Mopsy! All at once, he saw Mopsy’s sleepy little furred head. With that detail came the pain. Mr. Olson had drowned them. He had drowned them because he couldn’t see another way.
“But there’s always another way,” Isaiah murmured, an idea fighting to come alive inside him.
“Shhh, baby,” his mother soothed. “Rest.”
“There’s always another way,” Isaiah said, a little louder.
Something else was coming back to him now. It traveled along his nerve endings and made his eyes roll back in their sockets.
“Isaiah!” his mother whispered urgently. “You can’t use your power here. They’ll find you if you do. Isaiah, please!”
Isaiah barely heard his mother’s voice. The vision had also found another way. It had him now. For one brief moment, he could see his own future: Isaiah saw himself speaking from a great height, his voice echoing through a microphone to massive crowds. There was change in the air. And song. And the people lifted that song and carried it into the streets, arm in arm, and it was all possible. This future rippled through Isaiah’s body, warm and hopeful, like bright sun on the longest day of summer. It felt like a beginning, of what, he could not say. But he saw it. He saw it. He had a future, and it needed him.
“I have to go back. I want to go back. I’m not done yet, Mama.”
His mother looked sad. “Baby. There are some things you just can’t change. You can’t go back. Those are the rules, son.”
Isaiah looked down at his hand in his mother’s. How he’d missed her. How he’d missed that hand on his back, that arm around his shoulders. Missed her nightly tuck-ins and glasses of water and gentle scoldings to Get to sleep and I better not hear a peep from this room. He was not asleep but awake now. Truth was shining through the windows of his soul, keeping him up.
Isaiah let go of his mother’s hand. “Then I’m gonna change the rules, Mama. Watch me.”
Isaiah began by walking, but soon enough, he was running. When the dead saw him moving among them like some new hope they had not been able to imagine, they parted to let him pass.
“Thank you,” Isaiah said to them. Because he could feel them.
Some among them began to weep. When we go, will we go to nothing? Will we become nothing forever? they asked. And Isaiah knew that this frightened them. It had frightened him sometimes, too.
“My friend Ling says there’s no such thing as nothing,” Isaiah answered.
What will become of us, then?
“You’ll become stories we tell,” Isaiah said. He looked behind him, over his shoulder. At the end of the row was his mother, and for one moment, he faltered. More than anything, he wanted to run back to the safety and warmth of her arms. She was the story he did not want to leave.
“Go, Isaiah,” she said. “Change the future. I will be with you.”
The whisper became a noise and then a chant, echoing through the land of the dead: Isaiah. Isaiah. Isaiah.
He ran forward.
