Wonders of the Invisible World by Christopher Barzak Page A

known how to. Most people don’t know that trick anymore.” She looked over at me standing in the corner, and it seemed as if a breath she’d been holding was suddenly released, filling the room with the scent of peppermint and coffee. “Now you know,” she said, “and you can use that trick one day if you want to. But the thing is, you have to tell your story true, and not everyone can do that.”
    “Why not?” I asked.
    “Because telling the truth is the hardest thing a person can do.”
    The next day, she let me stay home from school, as if I were truly sick. It was a day spent watching her clean the house from top to bottom, dusting, washing clothes and dishes, vacuuming carpets, feeding cows, filling their trough—an old claw-footed bathtub—with water from a red rubber hose.
    In the afternoon we went to the small grocery store off the town circle, where I watched her pick out things we needed. Cereal, oranges, flour and spices, cleaning products. She spoke to everyone we came across: the checkout woman, Margie Wallace; the bank manager, Mr. Keating; several women in the Temperance library, a one-room building with high, dusty shelves that surrounded an open area that held round tables where old ladies gossiped in whispers. They wore white gloves, as if they lived in a different era, as if it were still the forties and fifties of their youth and they were at a wedding party. They stroked my head, complimented my curls and green eyes as if I were a celebrity. But I shrank from their touch. They made me shiver.
    “This one’s yours, Sophia,” one old lady said, holding my chin with the tips of her fingers so that I’d look straight up at her line-mapped face. “The eyes will tell it.”
    Another clucked her agreement, nodding her cloud of cottony hair. “Those eyes are yours,” she said, “if I ever did see them.” The women wore pearls and pastel dresses. They smelled of lavender and citrus, of medicine and dusty Bibles. When I pulled away from the old woman holding my chin, she looked at my mom and said, “Why, Sophia, he’s sensitive, too. Isn’t he?”
    My mother nodded. She smiled proudly, brushing hair away from my forehead, and in the next moment she looked down at the floor, as if she was also somehow embarrassed.
    My mom selected two books: one for herself, a mystery novel—her favorite vice—and one about dinosaurs for me. I’d gone through a dinosaur phase several months before, but I was now on to ancient Egypt.
    “Ancient Egypt?” she said when she found me paging through a book of myths at the end of our visit. I nodded curtly. I was very serious about Egypt right then. Several nights before, I’d dreamed of a mummy climbing out of its tomb to chase me, and I’d concluded that I’d better get myself heavily informed about mummies in case the dream ever happened in real life.
    Which it seemed my dreams could sometimes do. Sometimes, it seemed, my dreams could come to life right in front of me.
    So we went to the nonfiction section and found a book about the gods of Egypt, Ra and Osiris and Isis and Nut. They had the best names of any gods I’d ever heard of. I liked the story of Osiris, how he was dismembered, how his body was cast to the corners of the earth, how his wife, Isis, journeyed through the world’s darkness to retrieve his various parts to put him back together. I imagined her on that journey, alone, finding an ear, an eye, a leg or a finger, placing it in her pocket for safekeeping. One day she would have all of the pieces and she’d put him back together. He’d no longer be lost to her. It was all, in my mind, a ridiculously awesome thing to do.
    I loved it.
    We drove home that afternoon in silence, me already reading the book, my mother’s attention on the road. From the spacey gaze in her eyes, though, I could tell that she was really elsewhere, in some other place and time beyond the car she drove.
    When Toby came home from school later, he complained that I