Bright Shards of Someplace Else by Monica McFawn

from him and spotted the bits of Styrofoam, creating small red eyes that watched him as he lurched forward again, dragging a sheet of bubble wrap with his toe. He reached the door and with a strong kick tumbled out in a wave of debris. The grass felt so good that he lay for a moment in the healing dirt.
    â€œRight elbow,” he told himself, and put it down. “Left foot,” and he tried to push off of it, though it slipped back in the dirt. “Left hand,” and he reached forward and closed his fist around a clump of grass. “Right leg,” and he dug his knee in. He chanted these commands to himself, even when he lay flat, unable to organize himself for a moment.He was afraid; he tried to think of the proof. The proof! He had discovered it. He tried to remember his first attempt. When was it? He put his elbow down. It had been after he had started at Final Release; he had been sitting on the floor in his childhood bedroom, rifling through the bottom drawer of his dresser. He found his high-school math textbook, the one with the picture of thousands of crayons moving down the assembly line on the cover. It contained a very basic description of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture in a purple sidebar titled “Math Mysteries!” He wrote a few things in margins. The act of writing in a book from his past felt strange. When he looked up his dad was standing in the doorway. “Watch,” he’d said, and fired up a turkey carving knife made to look like a tiny chainsaw, complete with a pull.
    He slid into unconsciousness like a butterfly sidesteps under a leaf in the rain. Later that week he had begun working on the problem. He thought of how confident he was at first—it looked so simple!—but it had taken all of his concentration. His mother and father were arguing over how to revive a dying shrub outside his window, and their voices kept cutting in. He picked up his notebook and all the loose sheets he had been working on and walked away from the sound. He was looking down, calculating in his head, and before he realized it, he had walked straight into his brother’s room, where it was always quiet. It was of course the same—the plaid comforter, the basketball trophies on the shelf, the tennis shoes under the dust ruffle, poking out like two deeply bonneted faces. The room had been vacuumed (how long ago?) and the carpeting groomed in perfect diagonal strokes with curves around the dresser feet.
    More time passed. He was again laying down, his forehead rooted in an ant mine. His right hand was knuckle deep in the earth. He blinked, and his eyelashes raked dirt. He raised his head and saw the office door and the ball of pulsing light above it. There was a sound of crickets, a sound that seemed to travel not through the air but through the earth. The sound was like the windup truck that inexplicablybegan running, deep in his brother’s desk drawer, the moment he sat down and put his pen to the problem. The thing had jerked to life among the pens, erasers, and leaves his brother had preserved between bits of paper. The weak grind of the mechanism moving through this detritus had seemed like the room itself waking. He pulled the drawer open and ran his hands among the things; reaching into that dark drawer without seeing what he was touching felt illicit—touching anything in the room did.
    The white back door of the office, no more than twenty feet away, rose above the grass like the keystone of some spectral ruin. He breathed in-out-in, counting, as he often did involuntarily whenever he was stressed, but this time the sound of the building numbers in his mind seemed the sole evidence that any time was passing, that any moment trailed a thread from the moment before. His brother’s room had been a spacer between two times—the time he was there and the time he was not—and his parents left it untouched as if he might come back and occupy,