Nothing in the World by Roy Kesey

Part 1

1.
    T he white stone walls of Joško’s house were tinged gold in the growing light, and the only sound was the sharp ring of his father’s
     pick glancing off rocks in the vineyard. Joško ran to join him as the sun slipped into the sky, and they worked together without speaking, his
     father freeing the rocks from the soil, Joško heaving them to his shoulder and staggering to the wall they were building to mark their property
     line to the east.
    The dust began to rise as the sun burned off the dew. By the time his mother called that breakfast was ready, the vineyard was flooded with light, and
     sweat slicked Joško’s neck and back. He walked to the shaded patio, turned on the faucet and took a drink from the hose.
    Water spilled from the sides of his mouth, and Joško went still as two small blue butterflies came over the wall and settled at the edge of the
     puddle. He stared at them, thinking of nothing, then crouched down and clapped his hands around them, felt the faint beat of wings against his palms,
     parted his thumbs and peered inside and saw that his hands were empty.
    * * *
    School went as usual: alone at lunch and during the breaks, invisible in the classroom. The teachers rarely called on Joško, and the few times he
     volunteered an answer, they looked at him as though they remembered having seen him before, but weren’t quite sure where. His classmates
     didn’t go out of their way to avoid him, but never sought him out or showed much interest in what he had to say. It was easier simply to be
     alone.
    The last bell rang and Joško hurried home, put on his swimming suit, took up his fishing spear and headed into the hot low hills west of Jezera.
     The hillsides were patched with wild olive and fig trees, sage and thorn. At the top of a rise he caught another trail that led to a stone lookout.
     From there he could see the whole island of Murter, a severed finger of earth and heat, the Croatian mainland to one side and to the other the quiet
     sea.
    Ten minutes later he arrived at the cliffs, and edged down through the striated rock. Boulders the size of tanks crowded the water that swirled over
     the tide pools and shifted away, and again he felt invisible, but here it was a source of strength. He worked back and forth along the shoreline,
     stopping short of every crevice, dropping down and crawling forward, careful to keep his shadow from falling across the water.
    No one else in his family was any good at spearfishing, but it had never seemed difficult to Joško. It was simply a question of knowing where to
     go and how to get there, and of not missing when the moment came. Though he would never have admitted it to anyone, at times he tossed dying fish back
     into the water, throwing his spear again and again for the pleasure of hitting what he aimed at.
    Three fat sea bass now hung from the stringer on his belt. He set his spear in a cleft in the rocks and hooked the stringer over its tip, drew a cloth
     from his waistband and wound it around his right hand. The periška that lived in the sand of the sea floor were by far his favorite food, but the
     edges of their long ochre shells left wounds that took weeks to heal.
    He watched the sun settle into a thin bank of clouds on the horizon, then stepped out onto a ledge and dove into the water. The deeper currents
     thrashed and curled. He kept at it, dive after dive, until his shell-bag was so heavy that he could barely make it back to the surface.
    He checked the tide pools for abalone shells for his sister, and found only one. It was almost four inches across, too big for the earrings and
     brooches that Klara made, and the inner surface was already weathered and dull. He tucked it into his bag all the same, climbed up the cliff, and now
     the wind strengthened. The Adriatic whorled into the coastline, small waves spiking and guttering below. Shade by shade the sky turned his favorite
     color, a ridged blue-gray as solid as stone.
    He