The Little Spragger

Photo by Minnie Zhou on Unsplash

After the second month of drought, the sky broke under the heaviness of the water in its carriage and pilloried the earth. The robins stood vigilant, crowns cocked. Through the earth, thrumming up their spindly legs, came the symphonic slurs and suspensions of the worms that tunneled just below the surface. Improvising paths through time.

The damp air grew hooks, set them, reeled. The surface suddenly scored with the reared heads of earthworms. It was the worst kind of trick that posed itself as a choice—to drown or to live? The will to live gifting instant, bilious death.

Earthworms seeped out of the soil like a plague and collected in twisty piles like none had ever seen before. Robins speared the earth with augers. The sleek bulges of their cadmium orange breasts stirred as they fed upon the carnage in the new grass.

It rained for days without rest. The vision of everyone inside that corridor of cloud faltered. Everything was impressionistic—a mere suggestion of its true form. The hickory trunk pulped, the car furred over with lichen, everything dirty-dishwater complected. Water wizened boundaries.

It made the old man more sluggardly, more forgetful. He went about rubbing his eyes, trying to massage out the gray. In the other room, his wife did her jigsaw puzzle, murmuring to herself a hymn in alto, the rain a salvo of castanets on the asphalt roof.

The doorbell rang, something it never did so early in the day. The old man hoisted himself out of the recliner and limped heavily to the door. His torso bent in the eternal bow of an arthritis that looked much like it sounded—ankylosing spondylitis. An angle of deference at odds with the spite that soured within him. Upon opening the door, his whole body perked, he felt lighter, his joint pain receded.

“Grandpa, there was a bomb threat at my school!”

Grinning back at him was salvation—his grandson Jack. A ray of light pierced the haze and the leaves shone a virgin green through pastilles of water. Suddenly there was color again, definition, meaning.

“Bombs? That sounds scary.”

“Did they have bomb threats when you were a teacher?”

“No, no. Our worst fears were projectile sloppy joes.”

He tousled the boy’s damp hair and waved him inside.

“Who’s there? Who do I hear?” his wife called, turning the corner from the other room, her smile a fresh start. Jack ran to her, and they embraced.

“Oh, you’re soaked!” she squealed. “Come, let’s get you a towel.”

“Sorry, I tried calling first.” The boy’s father stood at the door, looking abashed. “Can you watch him for the day?”

“Of course, anytime.”

Of all thirty grandchildren, Jack was the only one who still visited. The old man wanted to convey gratitude to his son somehow. For a moment, they were looking in each other’s eyes. The son rubbing a fist over the dust of a memory. He looked away first. He held a waterlogged grocery bag in each hand, dripping.

“What’s all this?”

“Your trunk was open.”

“What?” the old man said, his voice breaking. “No, it wasn’t.”

His son opened one of the bags to eggs, milk, a soggy box of granulated—disintegrated—sugar. “I took out the carpeting and opened the drain plugs.” He gestured at the floor of the porch where he’d laid the sopping trunk interior. “But you’re going to need to get some fans on it soon.”

The old man must have forgotten to finish bringing the groceries in last night and to close the trunk. He must have. But then again. He frowned and backed away as his son held the groceries out to him.

“Those aren’t mine.”

There was a stiff pause. “Oh.” An argument aborted. “My mistake.”

A patch of gauzy blue sky appeared between parting clouds, just over the crown of his son’s head, as he ducked into his car and drove off. But the old man had heard it first—the abrupt sound of the rain stopping, branches shaking off droplets.

His ears were ringing. He believed he could hear the worms, their pinprick screams. The soul wrenched from the soil. The third act of an everyday horror.

Jack had become obsessed with what was going on beneath his feet—in the soil, the clay, the aquifers, Earth’s mantle and core. The backyard was pocked with archeological digs, and he was often dirty. Much of the bedrock in the area was composed of porous sedimentary rock, prone to erosion. Who knew when the ground would continue doing what humans trusted it to do, or when it was a fragile flap of skin, a wafer over maw and cavern? Jack wanted all the books, and he got them, even if he couldn’t understand them. The boy would have everything he wanted.

They lived on the outskirts of an abandoned coal mine that had been reclaimed and repurposed for tourism, and one day the old man took Jack down an earthen vein in the coal trolley. Orange helmets and headlamps on, they watched the square of daylight at the mouth of the shaft fade to a button, then a speck. It was darker than shut-eye. The air spiked with cold, even in August.

The old man explained to Jack that anthracite coal ran in their own veins. His father had been a miner, and his wife’s father too. The lowliest work always fell to immigrants. They rose with the morn dark, descended into the bowels of the earth, and rose again—coal-dusted effigies dissolving into night. To earn their keep and provide for their families, they conquered their phobias of tight spaces, darkness, and depths.

“Maybe that explains why I’m only scared of heights,” Jack wondered aloud.

Because of their small stature, children as young as Jack were recruited to spend all their waking hours thousands of feet underground. For ten hours a day and sixty-five cents, with a tiny orb of lamplight to guide them, little nippers would listen, heads cocked, for coal cars rumbling down the sloped tracks of the tunnel. At exactly the right moment, they would open the door of the shaft and shut it behind the car once it was through. Many were crushed, having surrendered to the soporific spell of the dark.

The fastest boys were spraggers. They would run about the tracks with strips of wood and jam them into the spokes of the fast-moving wheels of the coal cars to make them stop. Losing a finger—or limb—was common.

Then Jack had become obsessed with being a spragger. He’d send an old red wagon down the drive, then tear after it with a stick in hand, throwing it like a fish spear into the spokes. His grandpa would whoop and applaud at the wisp of a boy, depositing a dollar bill into his cap with every successful sprag.

One of those times, Jack tripped and broke his wrist. The old man felt the ghost of old habits rattling in his chest. The burning urge to scold the boy—why was he crying?—as he had his own children. He had worked two and a half jobs and given all he had. What reason did they ever have to cry, unless he’d given one? A black eye knows how to cry.

The old man made a great show of displacing his rage. Leaning on his walker, he scolded the ground where Jack had fallen. He wagged his finger, the one he’d broken decades before, the one that was permanently curved up like a ramp. Jack thought this was hilarious.

“You know you can retire from this line of work anytime.”

“I could try being a nipper instead.”

But what ignited Jack’s zeal for the underworld most of all was a class field trip deep into the limestone caverns in the valley. The children tiptoed around spikes of stalagmite and cradled their heads under barbed baffles of stalactite—the caverns’ incisors—formed by the chemistry of the rain.

In awe, Jack stood shivering on the slick banks of the subterranean Lost River, lost because its terminus was unknown. The guide explained that when the river was first discovered back in the early 1900s, scientists had placed small flotational objects—ping-pong balls, essentially—into the water. After the balls disappeared beneath the stony overpass and traveled their undulating course, they should have ultimately emptied into a body of water in contact with the surface. Perhaps in the Philadelphia Harbor, or the Chesapeake Bay. Someone would have found them.

“But, Grandpa,” Jack recounted, wide-eyed, “the floaties were never found.”

So the Lost River stayed lost.

Now people were telling the old man that Jack had gone missing.

That, as with his twenty-nine other grandchildren, it was likely he wouldn’t see the boy again. Every morning before dawn the old man woke in the recliner to the tremors of his wife sobbing beside him. He would snap: “What are you crying for?” Then he would apologize.

Loss bristled in every follicle, every sensation filmed with yellow nausea. There was Jack in every blue jay’s battle cry. In every streak of rain trifurcating on a windowpane. Under every pregnant sky to which he opened his mouth for a raindrop that contained the world.

He chalked it all up to a dream, or a lie. He called his son, every morning, to get a read on things, his ears on alert for innuendo, for variations in the story.

“What did Jack have for breakfast? Does the boy have a ball game this weekend? What day is it?”

And every morning, if luck had his phone call answered, there came the same response: “No, Dad, no. We’ve discussed this. Nothing’s changed.” A pause. A quavering, subdued sentence. “Jack is gone.”

His skinny-boy arms and legs, his toothy grin, here one moment, visible, touchable; the next moment—gone. Air. Did he become air? A boy-shaped parcel of air? Did a door open in the ether, timed just right, swallowing a whole little boy in its draft, and was it closed again?

“Did you at least put the dog down?”

“Jesus, Dad. The dog didn’t do anything.”

“Please, tell me again how it happened. Please.” The old man didn’t believe the story.

“I can’t today. I don’t have it in me. I’m sorry.”

The old man tried to remember the events of his last day with Jack. He replayed them compulsively, mouthing their dialogues like a recitation. And always, always, he arrived at a point that mystified him, like an oft-used word he couldn’t recall.

It had rained torrents after a dry spell. Salvation had arrived in the form of the only grandchild that visited him, and Jack had brought the sun with him too. The old man was on the porch watching the robins feed. The sky’s spigot had closed, and the bleach and singed-wire smells of ozone spiced the air. He was thinking about worms and how no one ever thought about them, except anglers, vermiculturists, and his grandson, for whom earthworms were the latest obsession.

The screen door blew open. One shoelace untied, romping out onto the squish of the lawn with an exaggerated pumping of the arms—Jack. The sun was shining and he craved an expedition.
“The radar map says we’ve got thirty minutes before it starts up again,” the old man warned.

“10-4!” Jack bounded. “Onward!”

The old man entrusted his heavy frame to his walker and its worn handholds. Jack would not be denied. Every “yes” to this boy was a balm on the psychic wounds that so scathed his offspring. The man’s balance sheet would be reconciled through him.

The damp stuck like nettles. But the reprieve from the rain was glorious. Fresh voltage fizzed round every blade of grass. Everything was lambent, haloed, like a good run through the carwash.
The boy challenged himself to collect as many worms as he could for a future visit to the fishing hole. The robins flushed at his raucous progression. He crouched along the road to lift whole handfuls of writhing worms from the grass, grimacing, and dropped them with a plunk into the empty coffee can his grandma had given him. What did the worms leave behind, in the ground, unseen? Soul-sized funerary spaces, shaped like bucatini.

The field that was their unspoken destination was scalped of grass, awash with mud. A vacant lot that, like a bowl, sloped down a few feet in elevation from the surrounding land. A place of runoff. There were no robins here. No worms. It was strangely still, but for a drainage point a few yards away regurgitating overflow.

Jack’s face brightened at a ball in the middle of the field. It called to him. He lowered his can to the pavement. A ball that was a deep teal with reflective grains in it that held a bit of the sunlight inside before glinting it back out into the world. When Jack reached the ball, he took it up in his arms, which were too short to hug its circumference, and asked if he could keep it.

The old man halted at the edge of the field, where the ground stayed smooth and firm. He didn’t mind that Jack ran through the mud, though forty years ago he would have felt very differently. He scanned the surroundings. It was like looking through gauze, so much moisture clung in the air. Dogs barked in the distance. He felt he had a lot to make up for in his life. He would do things differently with this boy, who might be the last of his lineage, the one who would remember him longer than the rest of them. Of course he could keep the ball.

Off Jack ran, through the field thick with mire, joyously kicking the ball ahead of him. Every footfall a squelch. With each rotation, the ball lifted more brown from the earth and was caked in it.

“Be careful!” It would be reckless not to say it.

Both were so engrossed in this simple shared delight that neither noticed him at first—the other little boy—in the shadows at the far edge of the field, where it abutted a forested acre. He sat on a stump, in the borderland, watching Jack. The other boy would have completely blended with the shadows if it weren’t for the bright eyes that lent an outline to his presence.

“You left him alone?”

That was the first question his wife asked, back at the house, once he was safely inside.

“What was I supposed to do?”

“Did he say anything?”

“He wouldn’t answer.”

“His face was dirty, Grandma.” Jack cut in, didn’t he?

“Like a little nipper in a mine shaft.”

When the other little boy noticed he’d been discovered, he rose to his feet on the stump. So achingly slow that the old man imagined every skeletal hinge issuing its own special crackle in protest. How could such a little thing take so long to unfold? The old man tried to summon Jack over to him, waving a hand, snapping. But Jack was transfixed. The little nipper continued to stare at Jack; the whites of his eyes shone like bulbs plugged into the dirt on his face.

The old man felt that to utter a word—or Jack’s name—would be to introduce a flaw into the delicate joinery that held everything peaceably together. He felt terrified at the prospect of his own voice sounding. It would curdle his insides; fling the moon off into space; make the oceans crawl up over the land, suffusing every hollow body.

The boy raised his arm and extended his sooty fingers into the air at Jack, both stock-still and staring like figurines. There was possession in the gesture. A transference of energy. It was as if this little nipper had heard the shining of Jack hurtling down his icy corridor, yanked on the door to let him pass, and sealed it behind him. Trapping him.

The old man squeezed the holds of his walker, his long disused muscles rousing. He was agitated. He could sense the worms at his feet, their abduction furling and unfurling in the tin can. He wanted to shout, to snap Jack out of it.

From the shadow of the tree line, a mastiff charged. As it angled toward Jack, its hind legs pounded the earth and mud sprayed around it. The old man finally let out a piercing yell and gripped his walker, preparing himself. Jack shivered out of his trance, picked up the ball, and ran toward his grandfather, who would protect him. For the boy carried the future.

The man could feel the earth throttling in response to the brawn of the dog’s legs. He could sense how unstable it all was, couldn’t he? He looked away for a moment to brush sweat from his brow, pressing saltburn from his eyes. And when he looked again, it was just a blank expanse. There was nothing, nothing in the field.

They turned back. They were rushing. The boy, breathless from his romp, kept in line with his grandfather. Hear that? The timpani in the head, the blood rushing t0 the neck. The surge of adrenaline that bonds souls, and solders memories. They’d had an adventure. Hadn’t they?

A great wind whipped up from behind. Here the robins flushed as they drew near—their orange blazes ripped across the cindery arcade of clouds in the distance. An abandoned worm flailed on the macadam.

“Grandpa.” The old man felt a tapping on his arm. “He’s following us.”

He craned his neck to see and, sure enough, the other boy was there. The look of exhaustion was outsized for his meager build. His filth was remarkable, as if he had been burrowing for protection, sustenance. Beneath the filth hid the calcium dullness of eternities spent in the marrow of the earth. Opening doors, closing them.

“Hey, you!” the old man called. “Where are your parents?”

The boy went on staring at them in silence, the wind passing over him without ruffling so much as a hair on his head.

“Are you lost?”

Nothing.

The old man swatted the air. “To hell with you, then.”

Hurrying, they covered another stretch of pavement, and the little nipper was still with them. Up on the front porch, when they looked again, they saw only the diorama of the neighborhood, harassed by the wind.

In the dining room, Jack laid out napkins and silverware on the dinner table, as he had countless times before. This was just one of many times he’d done it, blending together with all the others, the dutiful boy. The old man hunched there, watching him, his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. His heart still hammered in his chest. On the stove, tomato sauce frothed and bubbled. Time had collided, ricocheted, stopped, and swirled around him, blended.

The vertical blinds had been semi-pulled over the sliding glass doors that led to the backyard. Dusk was gathering deeply, drenching gray the oaks beyond the fence. What day was it even? Everything was mixed up now. The old man felt his consciousness seeping away from him, a dark tunnel enveloping him, then startled at the clatter of a fork falling against the table.
“Do you see him, Grandpa?”

He squinted out through the blinds that made a striped sense of it all, his fingers wiping absently at a puddle on the table that must have come from him. Were his eyes failing? There was the little nipper boy at the fence. The old man stood up fast and went to the door for a better look.

The clouds faltered under their burdens and burst, wrung themselves out. Chinch bugs and crickets darted for shelter in bivvies under blades of grass. Rain came down in wavering sheets, fed the craters Jack had dug in the backyard, and flecked the glass with pebbly coalescence and racing stripes.

The rain washed over the little nipper’s face, rinsing the dirt away. He was the image of Jack. The old man rubbed his fists into his eyes. When he opened them again, the chain-link fence quivered as the child’s bony little hands released it. He backed into the shadows beyond the fence, where the gloom flourished, reaching with gray fingers that infected all they touched.

“There, there. I don’t see anything.”

The tomato sauce on the stove spilled over the pot. A hiss from the flame of the gas burner.

“I’m scared, Grandpa.”

The old man felt himself softening.

“Of what—a little nipper? He won’t hurt you.” But he felt scared himself, confused. Water rushed the banks of his mind, flushing away the sediments of memory. Eroding them into bits of muddled tones, frequencies that hissed and crackled, the red swell and blue fade of sirens whooshing by.

The old man rested his hand on the boy’s head, didn’t he? He told him without telling him, I will always, always protect you.

But he had failed, or his son had. Every morning he called. He had never been so faithful to anything in the world.

“Tell me how it happened again. Tell me, please,” he begged. And after hearing version after version retold by his son, and spinning it endlessly through the tumbler of his obsession, the story that crystallized in his mind was incredible.

When Jack and his father had arrived home that day, the three pit bulls greeted the boy with glee. A leak in the kitchen warranted immediate attention—the alleged reason the boy’s father wasn’t there when it happened. The dogs were bulky and uncoordinated, bouldering about and crushing feet with all their bluster. They knocked Jack onto the ground. They licked his face. They loved him.

“How could you know something like that if you weren’t there?” This question punctuated every retelling.

“Will you just listen?”

Jack dropped the prized teal ball, which rolled, glittering, into the corner. One of the dogs barked at it, bared its teeth, growled. Jack ran to the ball and the dogs charged, knocking him over just as he was lifting it off the ground.

Back, Koda, back! Could those really have been his last words?

The one they called Koda sank her teeth into the ball, punctured it. The ball hissed. That was when the boy’s father entered the room. It was all deflation. The ball, the dogs reduced to whining cowards on the ground. No Jack by the fireplace. No Jack in the hallway, or in the bedroom. No Jack anywhere. A door had opened at just the right moment and sucked the boy through it, into another frequency.

It couldn’t be! It couldn’t be corroborated.

“That doesn’t happen. It can’t happen. No, no, no. I don’t believe you.”

“Dad, you have to let it go. Understand? I can’t mourn my son with your constant interrogation.”

His son was hiding Jack from him, poisoning his mind against him; he was sure of it. His son wanted his assessment of the old man to be the one that lived on forever.

Odd hours the old man would haunt his son’s home. The dogs would hurl themselves against the front door in a wild rage at his snooping presence. At the elementary school, he waited surreptitiously in his car for the boy to exit after the dismissal bell rang. He never did.

One afternoon, when he felt the chafing of exhausted options, he grilled a steak. He broke into and entered his son’s house, armed with his rifle. With the meat, he lured the dogs into the garage and locked them in. He launched a full-scale operation, searching all the closets and drawers, any pocket big enough to hide a whole boy.

Jack’s bedroom was chaos, as if a child, mid-play, had been called to dinner and, with the pang of the abandoner, left all his toys in suspended animation. The old man maneuvered around bits and bobs of a robot on the floor. An ant farm stood on the dresser beside animal bones—artifacts—Jack had unearthed from his excavations. A stuffed canary from the coal mine gift shop rested against his bed pillow. There was no sign of the ball, which supposedly had popped and was sitting in a landfill somewhere.

Back out in the living room where it had allegedly happened, the old man lowered himself to the carpet, keenly aware he might be stuck down there until someone came to his aid. He floated his hand in the air, waiting for a sensation he madly craved but couldn’t explain the fanciful contours of, even to himself.

If something stayed lost, the possibility of discovery prevailed.

He wanted the air, the earth, to move him, to transmit a message. Anything. How could a happy boy who liked to spend time with old people just disappear? Where could Jack be?

“Take me there,” he said aloud, closing his eyes and pressing his hand into the carpet. “Open up the door.”

The ground felt like a good place to be. He felt closer to Jack down there, and he was sitting on the ground still, against the loveseat with his rifle, when his son came home. The bundle of moving boxes he carried slipped from his fingers when he saw his father.

“Going somewhere?”

“Jesus, Dad. What are you doing?”

“Where’s Jack? Where is he really? Did he transfer schools?”

“Does Mom know you’re here?” his son asked, his eyes wild and bloodshot. It looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks.

“What’s changed? What did I do wrong? I can fix it.”

“Why do you have a gun?”

“Your dogs, that’s why. And how can a man know who to trust anymore? Can I even trust you?”

“You’re completely mad!” He laughed cynically, despairingly, ran a quivering hand through a forelock of hair. Then he pointed at the door. “Get out! Get out now!”

The old man shifted the rifle onto the sofa and turned over, pressing one palm into the carpet and pulling on the arm of the sofa with the other, trying to lift himself up. The nerves in his back fretted, and he cursed.

His son paced back and forth, rubbing his hands together absently. When he finally came to help his father, the old man slapped his hands away, seething.

“You’re the reason that boy is gone,” the old man said. He wriggled himself up against the sofa and finally was able to stand.

“Maybe that’s true. Because I trusted you with him.”

“That’s a crock of shit.” He held his hand to his heart, panting.

“I loved him in a way that you could never begin to fathom.”

“Sure, sure. You took your eyes off him! Or you’re a liar and you’re keeping him from me. Out of, what, jealousy? Are you jealous?” The old man looked past his son, whose tears were repellant to him. It was a black eye that knew how to cry. “None of you asked questions the way that boy did! None of you—”

“I’m tired of lying to you. I won’t anymore. You’re the reason Jack is gone.”

The old man’s head hammered. “What did you say?” He grabbed on to the wall, fearing his knees might buckle.

“You, Dad! I won’t lie anymore to protect you. I’m sorry—you don’t deserve it.”

“What do you mean?”

His son breathed, and his shoulders rose and fell in fast defeat. He wiped his face. “You really don’t remember—the field? The ball? The dog?”

“The weird little nipper kid. Of course I remember those things. I’m not a fucking imbecile. And how dare you blame me when you were the one who took your eyes off him. Did you even give him the time of day? Not like I did. Not like me.”

“Don’t come back here. Don’t call me again.” He shuddered. “I’m done.”

The old man jabbed that menacing ever-broken finger into his son’s chest. “You don’t get to say that to me.” His teeth were brittle to breaking from grinding them together. “I’m the one who’s done with you.”

For the better part of a month, all he did was sleep and scorn the sun for shining. He lay in the recliner as long as he could, bladder on the verge of rupture. He refused to attend the ceremony they had for Jack. A funeral for a child? With an empty casket? It was preposterous, a charade.

He told himself he would sleep it off before making his next move. Jack was out there somewhere. He just wasn’t thinking about it correctly.

He woke from a deep nap one afternoon to what he thought at first were strange incantations, but which he soon realized was the voice of his wife talking to herself in the dining room.

“What’s going on in there?”

She kept babbling under her breath in her frazzled singsong way. The acrid smell of burnt coffee in the moka pot seeped through the rooms.

“Well?”

“What?!” she called back.

“Come in here.”

He didn’t recognize the woman who appeared. Her face was chapped, her hair in oily disarray.

“I hate when this happens. Five thousand pieces. A beautiful garden. And I’m missing the last piece. It’s this empty space where a frond goes.” The woman went on, hemming and hawing, and came around in front of his recliner. She stopped talking abruptly. A secret smile turned up her lips.

“I see you have my puzzle piece.”

He frowned.

She peeled something from the sole of his foot, shaking her head, and puttered to the other room.

That’s when he rose, relieved his aching bladder in the bathroom, and went out with his walker to the car. He didn’t tell the woman where he was going or his motives. He wasn’t sure himself, and he hardly recognized her. She might try to stop him.

The car, reeking of riotous mold and mildew, seemed to have a volition all its own. It drove him to the store, where he bought the biggest, most colorful blow-up ball on the shelf. It drove him on familiar streets into the development where his son lived. He slung the rifle over his shoulder and left the car idling in the driveway with the emergency brake on. He broke the window in the side door of the garage and let himself in.

Upon opening the door that connected the garage to the house, he was knocked to the ground by the first pit bull, a seventy-pound mottled bouncer whose wagging could set off seismographs. He licked the old man’s face. Two more pit bulls gamboled in—the white one and the gray one, which was also the only girl and the smallest. This was Koda.

They attacked him with licking and love. This was the man who brought the meat. All right, all right. He grumbled and pushed the dogs off him. He struggled to get to his feet, with the dogs circling him happily. He wrangled the two bigger dogs into the house, shut the door with all his weight, and turned around to face Koda. She panted and licked her lips, her sharp teeth a flash in the dark.

Was she smiling at him?

She skittered off behind the tool bench and then returned, wondering what game this was. She lowered herself to the ground at his feet, her chin on her paws, gazing up at him. Her tail gave a little wag.

How could she be happy?

He gave her a good, hard kick. She cried out and retreated. He lifted the rifle and fitted his mangled finger into the trigger guard.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Koda cowered in the corner. Her whimpering set the other dogs off, snarling, their claws raking the door. There were no guardrails emblazoning the path to Jack. There was an order to things, a correct assemblage of elements. But he knew, with a sudden overwhelming potency, that this was not the way.

He loosened one of the dog leashes that hung from a nail on the wall and tethered Koda to it, then dragged her to the car, trying to cajole her with soothing sounds. It was up to him to make things right.

After he got her into the back seat and folded his walker into the trunk and sat behind the wheel, he realized his face was wet. He’d been crying.

Koda whined and paced from one window to the other the whole way, a pendulum in the rearview mirror. The old man sped past his house to the field where they’d found the ball. The nipper boy was heavy on his mind. He had something to do with this.

The field was cordoned off with yellow tape that hadn’t been there before. He saw a rusty coffee can on the ground and kicked it away. There wasn’t a bird or a person. Not among the copse of trees that harbored the nipper boy. Nothing but an emptiness that broadcasted the business of every pill bug and damselfly.

The old man tucked the deflated ball into the front of his pants, deciding, for efficiency’s sake, to blow it up in the field, and retrieved Koda from the car. No matter which direction he pulled her in, she pulled the other way. It was tiresome work, and her whining was constant and grating.

He dragged Koda under the yellow tape. Heaviness seized him as he backed into the field, towing the dog, to the right place. It was sad work, but it had to be done. Koda panicked and leapt into the air away from him, and he fell to the ground, cursing. He yanked her hard toward him, pulled in the slack of her leash, and held her there. Now you calm down. He petted her, his liver-spotted hand firm against the soft gray fur of her nape. She trembled as he hugged her to him, and he felt her little heart, a million chambers firing at once.

A few yards ahead, the smooth plane of the field fell away. He propped himself up to see better. What disaster was this? There was a gaping hole in the ground, as wide as a common pergola. Whatever caused the collapse had carved a neat circular rim into the earth. His thoughts turned skyward, to heavenly bodies, asteroids, and meteors.

The section of wall inside the hole that he could see was brittle, granulating, like a healing wound. Streaks of deep carob-colored earth cut across rutted bands of ashen sediment, and here and there were the delicate ends of tendrilous root systems and jutting rocks—last-ditch lifelines.

The day Jack disappeared, it had rained enough to inspire arks. Now, though the day was dry, the spiced smell of ozone and damp soil overwhelmed the old man. He saw Jack’s light-footed leaping over the thin skin of the earth, in this field that faked tranquility. There was the little nipper, opening a door. The dog lumbering through it. The salt stinging his eyes. The fragrance from another time.

The old man’s mouth hung open. No, no. His eyes searched the edge of the forest for movement. For the whites of the little nipper’s eyes. No. He clutched Koda nearer. He tried to make himself taller to see how deep the hole went, how far a fall. No, it can’t be. His pulse pounded in his ears. Koda whined. His throat tightened. The ground beneath him shifted, sheared, and they were falling.

The old man was uncertain if his eyes were open or closed. His fingers searched his face, his head, came away wet. His mouth, plugged with sand and dirt. He looked in the direction of what seemed to be up and saw a floating light. A pinprick of the world above. The light was shrinking, waning from half-moon to crescent. Then, like a manhole cover sliding into place, the light was gone.

He heard the sound of water trickling and, again, wasn’t certain he was awake. One night, when he was a boy, his father had dreamt about running water and, being very superstitious, called in sick to the coal mine boss the next morning. An explosion killed nearly all the miners on his shift, except for the ones he’d warned.

Maybe the old man was paying for his father’s sins. Maybe that’s all that children were put on this earth to do.

He drifted off. When he woke, it was still completely dark. There was the familiar suede of his recliner, which his hands told him later was Koda’s body, pressed against him. That beautiful, damned dog.

The smell that engulfed him was of raw earth, a sebaceous musk. Of petrichor, from “petros” (stone) and “ichor” (fluid in the veins of the gods). It was beery and aromatic.

He felt the smother. He was not only hearing water now, in his dark blister of earth, but feeling it too. Ice cold on his skin. Soaking his bottom, trickling around his fingers. He felt it in his hair, thrilling his scalp, and rising into his ears. He sat up fast before the water formed a seal over his sense of sound. A vertebral pain made him cry out.

A pale sickle of light formed above him. The sun blushing its salute to a new longitude. The old man cycled through untold phases of consciousness. The grittiness tightened around his eyes. He blinked through the scratch, eyes tearing. Daylight shone in a brightening cone all around him. The water pooled, hungrily rising, lifting up four, five, six ping-pong balls, buoys on the surface.
He heard a dog barking. A boy laughing. A boy sailing, among orbs scattered across the universe, remembering only the good things.

The water established a current. The force opened a tunnel in front of the old man. The ping-pong balls floated away from him, downstream. One was stuck in an eddy, whirling. The water washed over this rogue ball, cleaning the muck from it.

The ball was spinning fast, resisting being pulled under, as if something from downstream were refusing it. A stake thrown in the wheels of the water turning. Something from the future, or from another frequency. Love, maybe, running athwart the gears of time.

The old man lifted the ball from its eddy and brought it close to his face. The marking was faint, but he tilted it to the sun: LR-5.

This should have meant something. He could feel it, familiarity swirling along some corridor and knocking, first politely, then more urgently, almost forcibly. That it might enter and set his body humming with epiphany.

But no. The ball continued to puzzle the old man—the water lapping now at his belly, welling up to his chest—until he let the water take it away.