Beyond the Laughing Sky (2 page)

T
he birdhouse hanging in the pecan tree was shaped like any other. It had a slanted roof, a hole for an opening, and a peg of wood that served as a front porch. The one difference was the size of this birdhouse—it was big enough for two children, and inside, instead of a nest and eggs, were books, crayons, and one small record player.

The birdhouse hung from a giant rope in the midst of leaves and was only accessible by climbing up through the branches of the pecan tree. No one was brave enough to do this—no one but Nashville and Junebug, that is, for this was their fort.

The fort.

Sometimes, it was just a tree house. But most times it was a ship-like flying contraption with newspaper sails and oars dripping in ink. Junebug would sit in the crow's nest, binoculars to her eyes, looking out for monsters in need of a good slaying. Nashville would, of course, man the wheel. His duties also included waving to pirate kings and throwing the occasional coin to a troll when they'd cross a bridge.

The fort.

Where the pair stored their painted scenes and books of made-up languages, their two-man band, and the tiny matchbox bed plus accessories that they made in case, someday, their experiments in the world of shrinking finally panned out.

The fort.

Where once, on a most heroic adventure, Nashville and Junebug finally traveled all the way to the edge of the map, where the paper was faded yellow and thin.

“What now?” asked Junebug.

So Nashville turned over the page, and there he drew them a new map. They were travelers. They were adventurers. They were treading real dust and pebbles on the surface of an imaginary moon.

J
unebug and Nashville weren't allowed to start having adventures first thing in the morning. First things first, the pair had to do their chores. And the start of the day meant taking any trash down the hill and bringing the mail back up.

Most houses in Goosepimple had a trash can on the curb and a mailbox at the end of the drive. This would have also been the case with the house in the pecan tree, except the road that wound up the hill was steep and twisted, and both the mail truck and trash truck couldn't make the trip.

“Truck's too big,” explained the trash man.

“Truck's too small,” explained the mailman.

“Well then, why don't you walk?” asked Junebug.

To this, neither answered, only laughed loudly.

On the trash and mail mornings, Nashville and Junebug would decide their mission on the way down the hill.

“Okay,” said Junebug. “This trash is just a cover. We're picking up a top-secret encoded message in that mailbox. The mailman . . .”

“Is a
spy
,” finished Nashville.

“Dum, dum, DUM!”
sang Junebug.

They dumped a trash bag in the can, then crept up to the mailbox, looking around to make sure nobody was watching.

“Coast is clear,” whispered Nashville.

And so they opened the mailbox. Inside were three envelopes and a coupon flyer for the Goosepimple Grocery. One of the letters was addressed to their parents from Goosepimple Middle School. Nashville suspected he knew the contents, so that one he put back inside the box.

“Come on,” he said to Junebug. “I know the secret mission.”

The missions were always changing—sometimes collecting jars of rain, paper bags of hiccups, adopting lost moonbeams and folding them into cake batter. Or perhaps investigating glittering slug trails left in the moonlight, finding the owners of abandoned buttons, or playing the sousaphone for caterpillars still in their cocoons.

Today, however, the mission was all about honey.

The honey was trapped inside the honeysuckle flowers, and the honeysuckle flowers were trapped on the other side of their neighbor's wooden fence. The neighbor—who had obviously built a high fence to keep out secret agents—was clearly planning a Goosepimple takeover.

“The honey,” said Nashville, “can give you powers. Like invisibility. Or X-ray vision. Or . . .”

“Or it can make you fly,” said Junebug, giving her brother a knowing look. Every time they went on a mission, it always seemed to end in Nashville finding, gaining, or otherwise procuring the ability to fly.

Nashville, Junebug thought, didn't seem to need the honeysuckle though. He seemed to be changing all on his own. And she would know. They spent so much time together, and she was so used to their two-headed shadow, that when she saw her own shadow it looked rather strange. But lately, Nashville had been spending time alone. Lately he'd been going for long walks, coming back with his pockets full of feathers he'd collected. Lately she'd find him standing in the yard, looking up, up, up at the sky. He seemed to be stuck in that mysterious morning place—half asleep, half awake, still able to recall a dream.

“Come on,” said Nashville, interrupting Junebug's thoughts. “The honeysuckle is through the secret door.”

The pair wiggled a board in the fence, loose like Junebug's front tooth, and slipped inside their neighbor's unruly garden. There were bushes growing wild, piles of leaves, and rusty, overturned lawn furniture in the yard. But there, at the far end, almost hidden, was the honeysuckle bush. Its yellow-orange blossoms drew Junebug and Nashville like bees to the flower.

“Remember how I showed you,” said Nashville. He plucked a flower, held the whole blossom in his hands, and turned it upside down.

“First pull off the bottom.” He did this, and a silken string emerged from where he separated this piece from the flower. A drop of nectar appeared at the bottom.

“And then . . .” But before he could finish, Junebug swooped in and licked away the honey-tasting treat.

“Then you steal it!” said Junebug.

“Thief,” laughed Nashville, and they began collecting more blossoms until they heard a screen door slam behind them and the sound of boy's voice.

“Hey!” he shouted. “My mama said to use my BB gun if I caught you in our yard again!”

Nashville and Junebug looked at each another, then started to run. They made it to the fence, and turned back as they crept through. The boy stood on his porch, arms crossed, no BB gun in sight.

“The honey worked!” cried Junebug, laughing as they ran. “I have X-ray vision! I saw his underpants!”

They collapsed, laughing, their backs against the old, tall fence. They held their hands open, and pulled the flowers apart to get to the honey-like drops hidden inside. Maybe, thought Junebug. Maybe the honey has another power
.
Yes, she felt sure it could transport her back here any time she had it—to a place that tasted like summer, to a place where two little shadows blended into one.

M
ost evenings Nashville and junebug baked a cake.

“What's the occasion?” their mother would ask. And of course, they always had an answer; they baked cakes to welcome the first firefly of the season, and cakes to commiserate incurable hiccups. Cakes for well-shaped clouds, cakes for bad hair days, and cakes only to be eaten barefoot in the grass.

“And of course,” Nashville explained, “when all else fails, there are three hundred and sixty-four days of non-birthdays to celebrate each year.”

And why was Nashville so interested in cakes? Well, a cake had played an instrumental role in his fate. It's where his life story started. Well, sort of, for it most likely started when the eggs fell to the ground. Or when they were laid. Or, for that matter, when the nest was built in the first place.

Ten years earlier Nashville's mother and father had just been married, and moved into a house with a dazzling, oversized window in a small village called Goosepimple.

It was agreed by all who lived there that Goosepimple was quite simple and quite perfect. The old men sat on the porches drinking sweet tea, the dewy glasses dripping polka dots onto their trousers. Roosters perched on the fence with the red sails on their heads waving in the wind, their eyes dreaming of the sea-blue sky. Pollen-drunk bees hovered around the honeysuckle bushes. The small town held few surprises, and nothing ever changed; time circled like a bug on a glass rim, always returning to where it began.

Then one morning, surprisingly, something
did
change.

A bird—a Nashville warbler to be exact—had started to build a nest in the tree outside Nashville's parents' window. Every few minutes it flew away and returned with a new building block: moss, grass, a twist tie off a bread bag, a long strand of hair. Nashville's mother secretly hoped the hair was hers.

When the bird laid her two eggs, Nashville's mother used paint samples to identify their colors. “Pale cornflower blue,” she said, holding up the paint swatch, “with a hint of mint and moss green. And the blotchy spots were a mix of rust and mahogany.” She sang to the eggs as well. Nashville's mother had a voice like footsteps in new winter snow. Some say the birds in Goosepimple sang differently after they heard her. Some say they were never the same.

The Goosepimple Library had four books about Nashville warblers, and Nashville's mother checked them all out. She learned that the eggs would hatch two weeks after being laid. When two weeks passed and there were no chicks, she decided to throw them a welcome party. Perhaps it would coax them out.

“Excuse me?” her husband asked. “You're throwing a party for
whom
?”

“The birds,” his wife clucked, wiping flour onto her apron. “The birds will be born any day now.”

She worked extra hard on the cake. When the two large sheets of chocolate were ready, she gently removed them from the pans and used a sharp knife to cut them into the shape of a bird's profile. Her fingers turned blue mashing berries to color the whipped cream. She spent over thirty minutes drawing the feathers, eyes, and beak with the frosting bag. The cake was perfect.

“Warblers aren't blue, dear,” said her husband.

“I know that,” said his wife. “But I don't know how to make gray frosting.”

Nashville's mother smiled. She smiled the smile of someone who believes a cake can change your fate. She smiled that smile until the morning the eggs disappeared.

“Oh my, oh no!” she cried. She stuck her head out the window and looked at the branches. The eggs and bird were gone. “The eggs,” she wept. “What happened to the eggs?”

Her husband did not know. The only thing left in the tree was the nest, surrounded by small white flowers. This made his wife unbearably sad. She went into the kitchen and slid the giant bird-shaped cake into the garbage pail.

A cake. What else has the magic to turn eggs, flour, and sugar into a wish? And a cake never shows up on a bad day; never rings on a humdrum Tuesday to say, “Tough luck. You didn't make the team.” No, a cake is there when things are super, when they're better-than-great—always the guest of honor at a birthday or a wedding, always dressed in frosting and wearing its boogie shoes.

Which is why it made her husband heartsick to see the cake his wife had worked so hard to make smeared down the trash bag. Is there anything sadder than untouched joy in the garbage? Her husband did not think so, which is why he immediately took the trash out to the curb.

And there, on the sidewalk in front of the house, was a broken egg.

The egg was open with chipped, white edges. Was there anything sadder than an unhatched egg? Her husband did not think so.

But where was the other egg?

“There you are,” said the husband. The egg had rolled off the sidewalk and under the honeysuckle bush. This egg, much like the other, was cracked open. However, what spilled out was not a bird and it was not dead. The man lifted the creature into his hands and pulled the chips of white and blue shell from its face and eyelids. He smoothed the yellow fluid from its hair and across the crease of its mouth.

“Dear,” said her husband when he re-entered the house. “I found the eggs. They were cracked on the sidewalk.”

“Oh no, no, no,” the wife cried. “Are they dead?”

“Not this one,” said the man, handing her the creature.

“Why,” she whispered. “This is a baby.”

And it was. Inside the cracked egg the man had found a perfect human baby. It was small—as small as a baby chick—but healthy and peach-colored and perfect.

“We'll name him Nashville,” said the new mother, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to find a baby in a cornflower blue egg on the sidewalk. “I just wish,” she sighed, “that I hadn't thrown out his welcome cake.”