The New Black by Richard Thomas Page B

pulls him to safety. She bundles him into her arms and totes him down the attic stair, soothing and scolding and breathless, while he cranes his neck to peer behind him at the lights scattering across the dark like startled starlings.
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    The boy and his friend play in the garden, under the sun. They play in the garden, which is on the edge of the wood, and the trees shade it, many games. They play pick-up sticks, checkers, hide-and-go-seek, and things, and the sun enacts changes in their skin and hair and eyes. They play in the garden, and smile. They smile and smile and smile and smile and smile.
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    The boy’s mother puts an extra cookie on the plate for the friend, but the boy says the friend doesn’t eat. She brings an extra pillow for the bed, but the boy says the friend doesn’t sleep. What does it do all night then, she asks the boy, doesn’t it get bored? Plays in my dreams, the boy tells her.
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    The boy and his friend make shadow puppets in the afternoon. The boy curtains the windows and holds his hands in front of the lamp and does a bird, a rabbit, a hunchback, a spider. The friend opens the curtains and crouches on the windowsill, a black silhouette against the sun. The sun pulses and shivers in the sky and the outline of the friend flickers and wavers at the edges. Its body makes an ocean wave, a spouting volcano, a hurricane, a shape-changing cloud: giraffe, dragon, whale. The boy crows and claps his hands. The friend grows huge in the window and blots out the light, making the night sky. It spreads its limbs so no sliver of sunlight peeks through and it makes the bottomless well.
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    The boy’s mother sits on the edge of the tub and the steam clings to her; she is composed of droplets. At bath time the friend disappears, the boy says; it hates water. The mother runs the hot when the boy complains that the bath is cooling. She shampoos the boy’s golden hair with the tips of her fingers. She rubs the puffs and cracks of deep pruning on his hands. When he announces that the bath is over, she starts a splashing war to make him forget.
    The boy has a duck for the bath, and to play with the duck, an inflatable bear, and to amuse the bear, little pills that pop open into sponges, and to collect the sponges, a net with butterfly shapes sewn into the webbing, and to transport the net, a battleship that sprays water through its nose, and to fight the battleship, a tin rocket that rusts in the water, and the mother cuts her hand on the crumbling metal and the blood makes a blossom in the bath. The boy leaps up and shouts out that his friend is calling and he runs shivering and half drowned out of the bathroom.
    The mother stays behind and bandages her hand into an enormous white paw. When she tucks the boy in that night, she brandishes the paw and growls and tickles his stomach. But he says the friend can smell the rusty blood and he insists that she leave, and she does and wonders if the boy is weary of her or protecting her from his imaginary friend, and she sits for an hour in the window seat in her bedroom, watching trees and clouds move across the reflection of her face in the pane.
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    The boy and his friend camp out in the tree house. They make believe there’s a siege and they’re starving to death. They make believe there’s a war and they’re hidden in a priest’s hole. They make believe it’s a nuclear winter and they’re trapped in a fallout shelter. They make believe they’re princes locked in a dungeon by the king’s wicked councilor. They make believe they’re hermits fasting in a mountain cave. They make believe they’re stowaways in the hold of a galleon. They make believe they’re magicians tied up in a chest. They make believe they’re scientists in a sunken bathysphere. They make believe they’ve been swallowed by a giant and explore the vast cavern of his stomach. They make believe they’re in a spaceship warping