Slugger
by Kittery
The zoo exploded.
	The maintenance workers that were supposed to be watching the water systems and mixing some chlorine had been distracted by a couple dark beers and an albino macaw which fluttered down onto their lunch table to tell them about her flying lessons next week.
	For too long they talked to the bird, Cherry, and asked her lewd questions about her owner. They knew Cherry had been adopted from this zoo just a while ago, and none of them had forgotten the rich, lavish woman who had come in to sign the paperwork. They thought of her like a hyperbole of Amelia Earhart, a woman in a romantic relationship with the concept of flight, a bird-collector or the madame of a secret aviary. They interrogated Cherry for more information. She was cagey, and had a habit of repeating herself, which drove the boys wild with curiosity.
	While they were distracted, a pack of monkeys escaped the enclosure and stole their identities. They put on their hard-hats and took brooms from the janitor's closet. They loped into the concrete maintenance room and improperly mimicked the way the workers mixed the chlorine. It was the happiest they had ever been since they were captured. They chittered, bantered like the boys did, and churned the white chlorine froth with the handles of their brooms while the maintenance workers were still fascinated with Cherry.
	A field trip of first and second graders passed by, laughed, and pointed at the monkeys, saying “Monkey workers!” The teacher shushed the kids and told them they were being culturally insensitive. The supervisors made whispered comments about the hygiene of the maintenance workers at this zoo. The parents narrowed their eyes and spoke openly to each other about their back hair.
	Allen, a fat kid with RSI wrist guards, he even threw one of the monkeys a snide comment based on something he had learned from his dad last weekend: “Don't they send you home from work if you haven't shaved?”
—
In the days after the explosion, the headlines optimistically ran as “NO CASUALTIES, STUDENTS SHAKEN BUT UNHURT” without counting any of the dead or injured animals.
	Fifty thousand different species of endangered eel were made extinct in one moment, forty-two giraffes suffered whiplash, four monkeys were obliterated, and eighty-two thousand new species of parasitic insect carved out their broods among the rainbow of diverse animal corpses.
	By the time the town council agreed on which cleanup crew to bring in and how much of the budget they would receive, five years had passed. There was no longer any way to tell the difference between the zoo and the town around it. The cleanup crew sprayed some chemicals on the zoo ruins. All it did was turn the beetles orange. Then they went back to the council and reported that they had done a wonderful job, and almost within the budget limit, too. The council paid extra and thanked them.
	Then they got to work deciding whether or not the zoo should be torn down and rebuilt, now that it was clean.
—
“I want to stomp babies,” Slugger sang to himself. He liked to sing to himself when he rode his bike. “It's fun with her, fun with her, when we go up to the mountain, in her truck, in her truck, stomping babies.”
	Slugger caught a fat little eel under his front bike tire for percussion. It popped and died with a spark on the sidewalk. Electric, probably. While he pedalled, he thought about it.
	Eels were bugs. He lazily related them to beetles and worms and all the other wriggling things he'd killed in his life so far. He had felt nothing for any of them, but he did wonder what they had been trying to accomplish, wiggling across the sidewalk or the road or his driveway all the time. It did not cross his mind that they were looking for food and water. Food and water were for humans, not animals.
	Slugger imagined all the gross little things he had yet to kill. They were wiggling in a neat line which curved and pre-empted his front tire wherever he rode. He could not miss them, even if he swerved. Their wet pops were as constant as cards in his spokes. His guilt thickened. He promised himself that if he saw another little creature in the path of his bike, even if it was gross, he would spare it. And he wouldn't go up the mountain stomping baby trees with Shel anymore, either.
	He slowed down when he reached his neighborhood. It had been a quiet place before the explosion, but now it was a jungle: Slugger listened to the sound of bird calls, insect chatter, the rustling of rodents, clacking hoof beats on pavement, the excited growl of scavengers that associated the sound of bikes with roadkill, and the soft padding of the local lion pack, who liked to follow Slugger either out of hunger or out of admiration for his unnatural speed and stamina.
	Slugger listened to all of it and only heard the wet pops of the imaginary bugs.
—
	He passed by Allen's house. Allen was on his porch, snapping and un-snapped the velcro on his wrist guards. Model planes were scattered at his feet. His belly bulged out when he sat down, and Slugger could never look away from it.
	“Slugger?” Allen asked, sitting up straight. He said it like kids say “Ice cream?”
	“I'm just on my way home,” Slugger told his friend's belly. He never put any emotion into his voice when he talked to Allen, and he never made eye contact.
	“You're going to bed? It's only seven.”
	“I know. My parents are going away for a long time. I have to get up early tomorrow. Shel and I are going up the mountain. She's waiting for me at home.”
	Allen frowned and tightened his wrist guards too much. “Are you two going to do that thing again? Tomorrow, on the mountain?”
	“What thing?”
	“The thing you do with her in the back of her truck.”
	“I don't know.” Slugger pretended not to care whether they did the thing or not.
	Allen got upset for him. “You can't let her do that. You should say no next time.”
	“I always do.”
	“And she does it anyway?”
	“Yeah.”
	Allen's pasty, fat face went red with frustration. “Tell someone!”
	Slugger smiled. He kicked the higher pedal down with the sole of his sneaker and switched gears with a nasty little clack. “I told you, didn't I?”
	“I'm a kid! Tell an adult! Are you leaving?”
	Slugger ripped his eyes off his friend's belly. The light was on in Allen's room, and his macaw was silhouetted against the window. Cherry pecked at his blinds. She heard their voices and she wanted to come out and tell Slugger about her flight lessons on Monday.
	Allen ignored her. He got up with a puff of breath and grabbed one of Slugger's bike handles. “Are you leaving? Don't leave. Come inside. Let's play planes.”
	Slugger considered playing planes with Allen.
	Allen hurried to sweeten the deal. Silence always made him speak up: “And we can talk about Shel more, too, if you need to.”
	Slugger peeled Allen's fat fingers off his handlebars and started to pedal.
	“I have to get up early tomorrow.”
—
Slugger didn't go straight home. He circled back to check on the eel.
	Yes, it was dead. It had already been half-eaten by a swarm of orange beetles he had never seen before. He turned around and went home.
	As he passed by Allen's bedroom window a second time, he heard Cherry's screaming. It looked warm inside; Allen was playing with expensive model planes and crashing them into her while she screamed and RA-TA-TA-T'd in retaliation, throwing her wings out like she was a fighter jet and striking each toy to the floor with her talons. Allen would freak out and radio air control and put on a whole performance while she babbled about treats or something else, not understanding.
	Allen's mother came in to say goodnight with a whirl of her thick, beautiful hair. She pointed at the macaw, rings and bracelets jangling, and reminded him that he couldn't bring Cherry with him to his flight lessons on Monday. Allen said he knew that already, mom, jeez.
	It was night now. Cherry pecked at the window until Allen let her out and, first thing, as always, she flew as high as she could. Allen's eyes and ears had been screwy from birth, so he lost the sound of her wings among the white noise of crickets and frogs and he lost sight of her pure white feathers among the stars before Cherry was even fifty feet up.
—
Slugger pulled into his driveway.
	Shel was alone in Slugger's room. She hated being there but liked the scent too much to leave. Desperate for distraction, she caught a peripheral swing of white feathers out his bedroom window. She ran to it and watched Cherry fly. She made it up a good four-hundred feet that time, which was fifty more than last week. In the days after the explosion, the clouds of birds and insects had been so thick that Cherry had barely been able to make it twenty feet up. She had fallen out of practice, but now it was slowly coming back. Shel was ecstatic for her.
	She carried that energy downstairs and opened the door with a huge smile. She hugged Slugger and apologized for her skimpy pajamas, but Slugger didn't mind, and they both sat down on the couch and watched a documentary about turtles.
	They were not touching, but she still felt his heat against her.
	“Can I sleep in your room if I need to?” Shel asked him, talking over the narrator.
	“If you need to, sure.”
—
Way after the bedtime Slugger's parents had prescribed for him, Shel fell asleep for a moment and woke to find him snoring on her thighs, face-down. She could tell by the compunction in her gut and by the rush of dread that a seizure would bear-hug her soon unless she did something— so she thumbed the T.V. off, tucked a cushion beneath Slugger's head, and walked with forced calm to his bedroom.
	She put her forehead to a Playboy poster. She breathed shallow, through her mouth, until the desperate feeling went through her and came out on the other side.
	She closed the door as soft as she could. Slugger woke at the slam.
	He waited a safe thirty minutes, staring at the ceiling, and then he switched the T.V. to the adult channel on low volume.
—
	Saturday morning, Slugger had a plate of bacon and eggs on his lap and he was already eating them before his eyes were open. He asked Shel what was wrong through a full mouth. Nothing was wrong and she was sorry.
	Shel sat down on the couch. “It's Saturday. The loggers won't be up there. Do you still want to stomp babies on the mountain today?”
	“I wish I could bike up there,” he said. “But the ruts are bad.”
	She smiled and stole a piece of his bacon. “You avoided the question!”
	“You'd have to drive me.”
	“Still avoiding it.”
	“Yes,” he said finally. “I do want to go.”
	Shel dug a cigarette out of her purse. “Give me five minutes. And change your clothes, kid. You've got eel blood all over your jeans.”
	Slugger looked at her. “Should I change in my room?”
	“Yes, in your room,” she said, embarrassed. “Or the bathroom. I don't know. Somewhere normal.”
	Slugger licked the bacon grease off his plate. “Okay.”
—
Slugger biked everywhere, but his bike tires stuck in the ruts of the dirt logging road, and it made him nervous to try and pedal through them when the road went almost vertical, so, that morning, Shel drove him up in her truck.
	They liked going out into the mountains on the weekend, because the lumber boys wouldn't come around to whistle or yell or show their abs. They had a lot of abs.
	Slugger took his bike out of the back of the truck and walked it to the clear-cut part they always went to. Shel called it the amputee’s band-aid: a patch of saplings the lumber company planted two summers ago. They covered about a tenth of the clear-cut. Half of them were dripping with parasitic orange beetles, now, and they were much easier to snap.
	Shel stayed in the driver's seat. There were no loggers around, so the forest was silent. Warmth dappled over her through the canopy. She played with the silver cross on her necklace while Slugger caught air on the jumps they'd built out of dirt last summer. She watched him weave around the saplings.
	“Aren't you going to stomp any?” she asked him out the window.
	Slugger looked up, distracted. He hit a ramp topsy and then flew turvy into a sapling and snapped its spine.
	“There you go,” she said, laughing. She got out and helped him up with one hand, cigarette in the other. She brushed the dirt off his chest and his legs.
	“You're crying.” She was shocked.
	Slugger denied it, sniffling, and got back on his bike. Even a little death was just too much after the eel.
—
	On the way back down, Shel took the slope carefully, five miles an hour. Slugger's exhausted breath filled the truck. His shorts had bunched up around his thighs. Arousal scalded Shel's innards. She told Slugger to wait in the car, it would only be a minute, and pulled up to her church on the way home.
	She hurried into the confession box.
	The pastor was patient with her for the first ten minutes of strained silence, her half-words and half-sentences, but then there were others behind her waiting to confess, and they were just as agitated by their problems. They all rubbed their silver cross necklaces compulsively.
	The pastor pressed her for details. What was she upset about? Why was she here? Shel could not specify more than "bad thoughts." With gentle impatience, he quoted that no temptation could overtake her that was not common to man, and that God would not let her be tempted beyond her ability, because alongside that temptation He would also provide a way of escape, so that she may endure.
	He cited Corinthians and gently implied she should escape the church before the line behind her started getting huffy.
	—
A week later it turned out the lumber company had started working the boys on Saturdays, too.
	“What are they doing here?” she said under her breath.
	“Let's talk to them,” Slugger said.
	“No,” Shel told him. “You don't know men like I do.”
	As soon as they drove up to the jumps, the boys lifted their shirts and flaunted at Shel.
	Without a single flicker of warning, she slipped into a waking seizure and hurtled immediately off the deep end. She threw her cigarette under an expensive rip-teeth machine and it caught the orange weeds on fire before she gassed it downhill and screamed PERVERTS! out the window.
	 Slugger watched the cross glitter and jostle against her chest, half-screaming and half-laughing, clinging to the holy-shit handle on the passenger side with both hands.
	A round, orange animal was nestled into one of the ruts. It watched with peaceful curiosity as Shel's truck flew down the mountain road and crushed it.
—
Next Saturday, Shel pulled a full weekend shift. She and Slugger went to Allen's house, because his parents had to go eat dinner with their friends and finalize the private jet rental for the flight lessons that had been scheduled and re-scheduled for next Monday going on two years now. They told Allen that this Monday it would go through for sure. This time it was really going to happen. He was going to be right in the pilot seat, flying the plane. He could go as high as he liked, even higher than the mountains.
	Allen would never be able to fly a plane, because his eyes and ears were screwy; his parents were going to arrange it so all the controls on his side of the cockpit were disabled. The flight instructor would be in complete control. It was the same trick Slugger used when his little cousins wanted to play games with him: he'd give them an unplugged controller and let them mash buttons.
	Allen had a big pool. Shel skimmed out the scraggly mat of bugs floating on the top of the water while Allen and Slugger coaxed a family of beavers out of the filtration system. Impalas wandered by and sniffed at the grass. Shel shooed them away into the neighbor's yard. She knew if Allen's parents found one single thing out of order, she'd never be allowed to see him again.
	The boys stripped down to their trunks. While Shel put the skimmer away, the carpet of bugs she had just cleaned started to coagulate again. Allen strapped on his water-wings and went for a dip with Cherry, who tittered and splashed in a sea of food, thrilled.
	“Usually macaws don't like to swim, you know,” Allen informed Shel. She was lounging and reading, fully clothed. Allen's fat chin poked out above the water. He was eagerly waiting for her reaction.
	“They don't like to swim?”
	“Yeah, they don't. But Cherry's special. She loves it.”
	Cherry squawked and splashed him. He reeled back like he was punched. Slugger laughed.
	Shel kept her eyes on her book. Slugger asked if she was coming in the pool. She looked at the bugs floating around, obscuring their bodies, and she said she would wait until they were done first. She didn't want to risk a seizure underwater. Slugger got out and touched her arm, about to yank her in for fun, but she panicked disproportionately and scrabbled at his hand and told him not to touch her again.
	Slugger slipped back into the pool, hurt. He dropped low, so that only his nose was above the water. Shel read her book as hard as she could, minimalist life-guarding, not looking at him or Allen if their bodies were visible. Her arms prickled up with goosebumps as the wet mark Slugger left on her wrist slowly disappeared. It took twenty painful minutes to evaporate.
	Cherry pecked a hole in one of Allen's water-wings because it looked like a big juicy bug.
	It balloon farted into nothing, capsizing him. “Cherry!” he screamed. “'I'm not a plane!”
	The water slipped over his head. Slugger laughed.
	As if freed of a crushing weight, Shel threw her book to the immaculate lawn, dove in fully clothed, pulled Allen out, and laid him on the pool's edge; she was about to do mouth-to-mouth when she realized Allen was fine and both of them were staring at her.
	He really was fine. He was unconcerned about the popped water-wing. His mother had forced him to wear it, even though he knew how to swim already. Slugger was still in the water, and he was worried more for Shel than Allen. His expression demanded an explanation she could not give.
	“Are you okay?” Allen asked her.
	Cherry splashed around, oblivious.
	Shel was fine, sorry. She bit down and suppressed the feeling of dread in her stomach. She worked to take care of them for hours. She closed the pool, made supper, got their pajamas, cleaned up. She kept both boys safe and entertained until they were both tucked into bed, and then she finally dropped to the black tile floor of the master bathroom Allen's parents had so graciously left unlocked and gave in to the seizure that had been building ever since Slugger touched her arm and tried to pull her into the pool.
	She woke up after twenty minutes and wiped the froth from her mouth. When she opened the door Slugger was right there, staring at her.
	He asked her what was wrong.
	Nothing was wrong and she was sorry.	
—
A week and one day later, Shel skipped church to bring Slugger up the mountain on Sunday, and they saw the remains of the orange animal they had run over: a hundred-year-old tortoise infected with parasites. Slugger told her to stop the truck and hurried out to see if it was okay.
	The fragments of its shell were mossy and well-colonized; the beetles had chewed the shell's neat grid into neurotic corridors. A whole family of beetles poured from his beak when Slugger opened it to check if he was breathing. It was a stupid hope anyway, he knew.
	“It's dead,” he told her.
	“I'm sorry. I just wanted to get away from them.”
	Slugger shrugged. “It's not your fault. He should have moved when he saw you coming.”
	“Maybe it was just too slow.”
	“No,” Slugger said. “The documentary said that was a myth. Turtles can move fast when they want to. I saw him through the windshield. He could have moved if he wanted to.”
	Together they obscured the corpse with a little stack of rocks, which was their best attempt at a gravestone. Shel picked two dandelions and laid them on top in a cross.
	—
	Cherry hit six hundred feet that night. She wanted to see the zoo again after all these days, all the blurry unnumbered days of a bird's life, so she curved over to it and landed on the concrete rim of the gaping tank where the eels had been kept. She picked at the McDonald's bag on the ground and picked at the dried eels on the puddled tank floor and picked at a sheet of red numbers dislodged from a professional-looking folder.
 	She waddled around, down the smooth pathways where the tourists used to walk when the town used to attract tourists. She found a couple peanuts in a plastic baggie and a mouse that skittered off at the sight of her.
	Compared to Allen's pool, this place was boring. She went everywhere until she came to the aviary and found her old cage, which had toppled and rolled far from where it used to be. She hopped on top and went RA-TA-TA-T. After that, she felt rejuvenated enough to take a long detour over the logging road on her way back.
	As she perched on a broken sapling, a little orange beetle crawled right up to her, unafraid, almost begging to be eaten. It was fat and juicy, too. Tiny blades of some orange plant sprouted from the folds of its carapace.
	Cherry gobbled it and went home.
	—
	It was Monday.
	Just like every Monday for the past two years, Allen woke up three hours before his parents and ironed his own clothes and did thirty Windex rubbings for each lens of his barely-effective glasses. Cherry slept on his windowsill, next to the model planes. She told him about the lessons in the voice of his mother, croaking:
	“Really going to happen! High as you want! High as you want!”
	“I know, Cherry.”
	She squawked and spazzed a little bit.
	Allen frowned and stroked her. “Are you okay?”
	Cherry's white feathers seemed creamy yellow in the dawn light. She bobbed her head a little and pecked at the window.
	“I know you want out, but I'm leaving. I won't be here to let you back in.” Allen went to the other side of the room and put his handle on the door.
	She always freaked out when he left, usually, but for now she just kept pecking at the window.
	“Is that all you care about, now? What if I got in a plane crash? You dumb bird, come say goodbye.”
	She ignored him.
	Allen felt like crying. “Fine. It shouldn't be long. I'll let you out when I come back— if I come back. You dumb bird.”
	He left. Cherry didn't even turn to watch him go.
—
	After breakfast, Allen's parents drove him to the airstrip out of town and paid twenty-thousand to the pilot who would be supervising him while he flew the jet. They thanked him for doing this special lesson even though Allen was already an expert on planes, and they hoped the pilot wouldn't feel too outclassed. They talked about the controls behind Allen's back and confirmed that they would be disabled.
	They introduced the flight instructor, but Allen didn't remember his name or how thick the hair on his arms was or how ripped he looked compared to a  pasty little fat kid like him. Allen barely paid attention to him. He was just a co-pilot.
	“Hey buddy,” the instructor said. “You ready to fly?”
	His mom answered for him: “Yes, he is!”
—
	After the send-off, Allen's parents went home and found a speckle of residual seizure foam on their master bathroom floor.
	Shel had left a note explaining what happened to the water-wing, but she hadn't said anything about the bathroom. They were so mad about this enormous disgusting mess that they called her parents and threw the words “property damage” into their rant. Shel's parents said okay, okay, okay, uh-huh, and apologized for her. After the phone was off, they broke down.
	They went into their daughter's room without knocking. Both of them were crying. Shel was laying on her bed with her eyes open. The doorbell rang. They asked her what she did to Allen's bathroom. She was going to make something up, but then she couldn't, and she knew admitting that she got seizures would lead to a doctor's appointment, and a doctor's appointment would lead to the question:
	Does anything seem to trigger them? Do you notice a pattern?
	Shel told her parents she was going to church and pushed past them. The doorbell rang again as she opened it, and Slugger was there with his bike between his legs.
	He asked her if she wanted to go up the mountain.
	She made an excuse: she didn't want to pass the tortoise corpse again. They didn't stomp the saplings anymore, like Slugger used to love, so what was the point anyway? Slugger said that wasn't why he liked going up there. He just liked spending time with her.
	Shel almost puked.
	She tried to leave. Slugger asked where was she going. She was going to church. Could he come? No. Did she want to go swim in Allen's pool? No, Allen was flying a jet right now and his parents didn't want to see her anyway.
	Could he come to church with her?
	“No! Stop! No, shut up,” Shel exploded. She dug her fingers into the doorframe.
	Slugger rolled backwards a foot or so on his bike, worried. His sneakers whispered against the driveway.
	His voice was low and lonely:
	“I wish you'd tell me why I bother you so much.”
	Shel grabbed her skull with both hands.
	No he could not come with her. No. It was because of him she was going to church. He was corrupting her. She didn't want to babysit him or Allen anymore. She wanted to go to church because it was Sunday. He had made her skip church last Sunday to go up to the mountain, and that was bad enough already in the eyes of God without taking anything else into account.
	… But could he please come anyway?
	No.
	She got in her truck and left.
	Slugger biked after her truck for a while until she lost him. He took a right and a left through the suburbs, through backyards and around a herd of impala grazing on Allen's perfect lawn, and finally he ended up at the bottom of the lumber road.
	On the way up, Slugger passed eight semi-trucks with their tires hanging halfway off the edge of the cliff, spilling over with pine from the new selective cut section, which was about as patchy as the fuzz on Slugger's face. He gassed it uphill, panting, pounding his pedals. He tore near-vertically up through the ruts and leaned parallel to the slope when it curved. He balanced on his back wheel and yanked the handles into shape when they started to drift clockwise. He passed the dead tortoise. Someone had kicked over his gravestone, so Slugger never even knew he passed it, and he never stopped to find out where that sudden whiff of rot came from.
	—
	Shel stopped in the church parking lot for thirty minutes and thought about confessing everything once and for all. She changed her mind and drove out again, heading for the mountain.
	She cranked the truck down four gears at a time and slowed as she passed Allen's house. Cherry was jack-hammering the window, almost breaking her beak. She was frantic to get out. Allen's parents were busy in the back, shooing the impala off their lawn with big flabby swings of their arms. It wasn't working.
	Shel parked, hopped out, and swung Allen's window open. Cherry spread her wings, showering newborn orange beetles and dandelion dust everywhere. Her eyes were rimmed red and greased over with pollen. Her feathers weren't white anymore; they were translucent and peachy with some biological crust.
	First thing, as always, she flew as high as she could. Some feathers dislodged. Their follicles had been hijacked by long, curling orange weeds that caught the wind at bad angles. Her stomach grew heavy with the gestation of a new brood, and her wings were tired, but as the first beetle wiggled under her skull and sat on her brain, she found flying perfectly easy, natural, the only thing to do really, and headed contentedly toward the massive bird of prey that hung in the distant clouds.
	—
The logging road flattened out. Slugger walked his bike up the rest of the way and realized the semi-trucks were here because the lumber company had started working the boys on Sundays, too. He knew from Shel that Sunday was supposed to be a day of rest, and he thought she definitely must have been wrong.
	One of the boys hopped off his blackened rip-teeth machine and called out to Slugger.
	“Kid! It's dangerous, get off site!”
	They wheeled his bike off the road while he was still sitting on it. “You’re the kid from last week. Where’s your psycho girlfriend?”
	Slugger laughed and went along with it. “She is weird, isn't she? She's at church.”
	“Church!” The guys laughed. That made sense.
	Slugger apologized for the fire she started. They said it was no problem, stomped it out with ease. That reminded Slugger of his old past-time, and he admitted that he used to come up here to stomp on their saplings until about a month ago. They laughed again and told him he was a little shit disturber.
	A couple other guys came over because break was starting. They threw some innuendos at him to see how old he really was. Slugger caught them all and kept his smirk on tight.
	“Wanna see me do a couple jumps?” he asked.
	The boys watched him rip around on the dirt ramps. One of them even borrowed Slugger’s bike and tried it himself. He crashed. The chain got mangled up in the teeth of the orange weeds. They tried to pull it out, three guys at once. They gave it about eight heave-ho’s before giving it up and letting the parasitic weeds pull Slugger's bike down into the earth.
	The guy who crashed it felt so bad he pulled his own bike from the back of his truck, a big fancy one, and gave it to Slugger so he could ride it home. They all waved goodbye and told him to bring his crazy girlfriend next time.
	The hairiest worker stopped him just before he left. “Hey, is she single? She isn't actually your girlfriend, is she?”
	Slugger thought about it.
	“I'm not sure what she is.”
	—
	Allen knew that he wasn't really flying the plane, but that didn't bother him at all. He was just happy that Monday had finally come.
	He wanted the full experience, though. He wanted to play along. He was powerful and important here, in the sky, and when he ordered his co-pilot around, he felt like he was the first creature in the history of a mute species that was brilliant enough to conceive the idea of speech.
	"I'll take us over the lake down there," he commanded. "I'll take us low, low, right over the water. Sound good?”
	That sounded great to the co-pilot. The lake was pretty in the morning.
	"I'll pull up before we hit the mountain, don't worry," Allen reassured him.
	Oh, he wasn't worried. The kid definitely knew what he was doing.
	"It's all the models I built, you know," Allen patronized. "I built so many that I really learned the ins and outs of planes. Yep— this button controls the altitude, doesn't it? I thought so. I wish I had Cherry here with me. She would love to be up this high. She would go crazy if she knew I learned how to fly. But my mom wouldn't let me bring her.”
	Wouldn’t let him? That contradicted his illusion of perfect control. He shook the thought out of his mind and pretended that Cherry was here with him after all, flying adjacent to the plane. He almost saw her, next to the cockpit window, trying to go higher and higher.
	Allen's co-pilot dipped near the lake for a moment, not nearly as low as Allen wanted to go, and then turned around and headed back to the airstrip. The twenty thousand bucks only paid for two hours.
	"I'll go over those mountains and circle back to the airstrip," Allen said, smiling with a glow of confidence. He jabbed a fat finger at a mountain range a dozen miles away.
	His co-pilot agreed and told him it was a wonderful idea.
	"Or I could go over the mountains and just keep going until I see them again. Loop the loop around the whole planet. Cherry would go crazy if she knew I was up here."
	The pilot awkwardly began to descend. They were nowhere near the mountains. He wasn't sure if this kid knew the lesson was over or not, but Allen smiled and kept quiet, so the pilot did too.  He held tight to his fake controls. Around seven-hundred feet, something soft and pink exploded on the cockpit window, and Allen had the immediate idea that he had hit an angel as it fell from the sky.
	“Caught a bird there, didn’t we?” the pilot laughed. “This town needs some serious pest control.”
	Allen did not want to be in control anymore. He let go of the controls and surrendered to reality. The pilot hadn't noticed; he was watching an instrument. Allen didn't know what it measured. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
	“Oh,” the pilot said. “You look tired. Here, let me take over for a while. Did you have fun?”
	Yes, thank you. It was great. He had lots of fun. He just wished he had been allowed to bring Cherry.
	—
	Shel parked at the bottom of the logging road for another thirty minutes, waiting for Slugger to come down. She did not want to go up and chase him because the logging boys were up there— she saw their semi-trucks and heard their catcalls from the passenger side windows.
	Slugger never came down. Shel thought he must be really busy with the boys. Maybe they had let him help out and chop down a few trees. Maybe he was sweating with the effort.
	She yanked out a U-turn and raced back to church.
—
Slugger splayed his fingers, palms on the handlebars. He didn't touch the brakes. His new bike flew down the logging road, way too fast to control. The lions ran downhill with him, racing through the trees. The ruts kept him going straight and balanced. He thought about his promise not to kill anything with his bike anymore. He thought about all the saplings he had stomped.
	He kept his eyes on the road in case another tortoise appeared. The ruts slid by hypnotically beneath him, merging and splitting like train tracks.
	But there was a glint in the sky. He peeled his eyes up.
	It was a private jet, curving away from the lake. There was a burst of orange feathers like confetti on its nose. Slugger was mesmerized for a moment.
	A lion lunged through the trees. One paw raked his side. That was all it took.
	The front wheel caught in a rut and snapped perpendicular to the rest of his new bike in an instant. The back wheel flew up behind him and smashed into the base of his skull. He tried to break his fall with his hands and both wrists snapped at once. The handlebars dug into his shoulder blades.
	He untangled himself from the bike in mid-air and landed on his face and chest, hands clasped on his head. He slid ten more feet through the dirt without losing any momentum. Gashes opened up on both arms. He kicked out wildly, trying to find something to brace himself against so that he wouldn't fall off the cliff on the side of the road. He bounced on his tailbone and gasped as low pine branches whipped past his face with a shower of beetles. The world flipped upside down and back again, then upside down and back again. He fixed his eyes on the feathers in the sky. They spun with the rest of his body, but at least he could focus on them.
—
Shel parked her truck sideways over the lines and hurried to her church's double doors. God's welcoming arms whirred open before her. Even just stepping into the air conditioning felt like a substitute for actual cosmic knowledge. The cool air reassured her that the world was controllable, and whoever made it must have known what they were doing; in here, the universe was a safety-tested minivan rolling smoothly down maintained pavement, with streetlights at regular intervals and straight lines down the middle to separate all traffic. Behind her, outside the double doors, the universe was a truck gassed downhill on loose dirt.
	Shel took a pew in the back and prayed. She told God that she loved him. She told him how much she had suffered waiting for His escape from temptation to present itself. She told God that she knew she would find her escape, if only he could give her a hint.
	God sent her thoughts of Slugger naked.
	Those thoughts could not have been God’s. She touched the silver cross necklace and noticed now that none of the other churchgoers wore it anymore. Their crosses were all golden.
	She asked God: Why are their necklaces golden?
	And God shook His head and revealed the ultimate truth through the mouth of her pastor at the pulpit:
	"If you weren't here for the announcement last week, the newest necklace is on for 89.99 after the sermon." 
	Shel looked up to the where Heaven should've been and cried and thanked God. She had made just over a hundred in babysitting fees and still needed to pick up gas for her truck, so the change worked out perfectly.
—
The first dawn stars started to hide when Slugger was halfway done falling. Cherry's orange feathers fluttered into nothingness. The jet had landed a long time ago. He had lost his landmark in the sky. Now, nothing around him was fixed. In-between concussions, he began to wonder how much longer it would be before he hit the bottom.
	At some point he fell asleep.
—
When he woke up, Shel was with him. It was still a bright, blue dawn.
	He was halfway down the mountain, sprawled in the soil. Her truck was idling off the side of the road. She knelt next to him, picking thin steel spokes from his hair, unwrapping the shredded rubber from his arms. His clothes were tattered and half-stuck in his wounds, and she picked those out, too. Slugger watched the golden cross dangle and glimmer around her throat.
	“Are you an angel?” he asked her.
	“No, you just have brain damage. Stay still.”
	He was naked in the dirt, now. She brought the first-aid kit from her truck and started to clean the mud and beetles from his wounds with real love. She pinched the butt of a beetle embedded in his skull and plucked it out with a grimace.
	“How did this happen, kid?”
	“Went too fast.”
	“This road is okay for a truck, you know, but not for a bike. There's ruts.”
	“I know.”
	“Are you okay? Tell me your name. What's your name?”
	He blinked and looked down at himself. It was all red. He couldn't recognize any of it. It wasn't his body, it was something else.
	“I think so,” he said.
	“You're definitely not okay.”
	Shel splinted his wrists and stuffed gauze in the gashes on his skull. Beetles rushed out of him, panicked, and she had to shake them off her fingers.
	“Oh, god. You're infested. Are you in pain?”
	“I feel good,” he said, and smiled a broken smile to try and prove it for her. “Really, it's okay. I've never felt so good.”
	“It must be the adrenaline.”
	“I met the loggers,” He was surprised at how easily and coherently he could speak.
	She looked hurt. “You hung out with them?”
	“Yeah.”
	“Did you... talk about me? With the loggers?”
	“Yeah.”
	“Did they think I was crazy?”
	He nodded carefully to test his neck. Yes, it was painless. He stretched his fingers and his toes. Everything seemed to work, and it felt even better than it had before.
	“Yeah. I got along with them fine. They're nice. And they're funny. One of them took a jump and crashed my bike. Then he gave me a new one. You should give them another chance.”
	Shel shook her head. “No, I won't be able to. I'm going to a convent.”
	“Huh?”
	“A convent. A religious place with only girls. I told my parents and my pastor something secret, and they were really upset. They think it's best that I leave for now. I can't babysit you anymore.”
	Slugger laughed. “Ah, that's okay. I'll miss you. But that's okay. I feel great. How do you feel?”
	“Awful. I quit smoking this morning. And—”
	Shel wanted to say she would miss him too, but it never came out. She wanted to show it rather than say it: “And I'd better drive you to the hospital. Let me check for any more broken bones, first. Let me haul you into the back of my truck for a second, okay?”
	“No.”
	“What?”
	Slugger scanned the trees for lions and saw a few beginning to circle and close in. He wanted to run up to them and expose his throat.
	“I said no, Shel.”
	Shel stood up and looked at him incredulously, naked and bandaged and helpless in the dirt.
	“If you don't get in my truck, then how are you going to get to the hospital?”
	“I'm not going to the hospital.”
	“You're—?“
	His wrecked bike rattled down the slope above him, hours late. Slugger braced himself with one hand on his knee and wrangled into a standing position. His legs wobbled and looked like they were going to snap. Shel tried to support him. Her hands slipped under his armpits. “Don't move— your spine could be—“
	Slugger shoved her away easily. She reeled back, shocked, and tripped on a rut. Orange weeds grabbed her wrist. She wrestled with them. The lions started to close in.
	Slugger strutted over to the bike in his mind and hobbled over in reality. He swung a leg up over the ripped seat and turned one crooked wheel back towards the bottom of the mountain, towards the town and the shifting herds of animals that ran through its streets. He set a square course for Allen’s pool. He felt the heat and dirt coating him.
	“I feel great,” he said. Something in him wanted him to turn around, but he didn't yet. The urge got stronger as his bike rolled faster and faster. Now he wanted to turn around desperately, but the momentum was too much.
	Shel screamed and ran after him. “Don't! Please! You're hurt!”
	His fractures slowly widened into broken bones. His breath was heavy and his throat rasped with sacs of beetle eggs. The bike only barely managed to stay upright, swaying around on bent wheels, chain grinding, tires flat, gears shifting at random. He couldn't stop it until he was down on the street again.
	Shel hopped in her truck and tried to follow him. Her engine puttered and gasped. The gas was low. She rolled down the logging road, back onto the reassuring pavement, and followed the trail of blood and beetles to Allen's house, where his parents had finally resorted to spraying the impalas with a special caustic chemical that sent their herd scattering from imaginary predators. Their pupils shot open. They ran without seeing anything. Their antlers smashed into the windows and fences of other suburban houses. Eight pairs of neighbors came out yelling.
	Allen’s dad couldn’t answer their complaints. He had just got a call from his boss on the town council: “You’re firing me because I came into work unshaved five years ago?”
	The lions followed Shel's truck. She ran out of gas and rolled to a stop in the middle of the street. She grabbed her steering wheel and breathed deeply, trying to stay calm. The lions flowed around her car. Half of them went for the impalas, and the other half went for Slugger.
	Slugger heard their paws pattering on the concrete and made a U-turn on his bike. It was a wide, lazy turn that followed the curve of his bent wheels and took him directly down the middle of the street, between the double line.
	His wrists clenched and his splints fell off. His snapped fingers locked around the handlebars. He leaned forward with that old, hungry urge to run something over. He aimed for the lions and started singing.
	Slugger's parents were back. They slowed their car and gawked at him.
	“What did you do to him?” his mother screamed at Shel.
	Allen ran outside, pudgy hands clutching his heart, wrist guards falling off. His glasses were foggy and his eyelids were red from crying.
 	Slugger flew past him, naked and broken, smiling red with half his teeth. “Fun with her, fun with her…”
	Allen scanned the road for the nearest authority figure and found her sitting motionless with shock in her truck.
	“What are you doing?” He banged on Shel's window. She turned to face him blankly. “Help! Stop him! Aren't you supposed to be his babysitter?”
	She just sat there, eyes transfixed to her rear-view mirror.
	Just before he reached the forerunners of the pack, something important popped loose on Slugger's bike. The whole thing clattered into mangled pieces between his legs. He toppled to the pavement and came to rest on his scabby knees, still smiling, arms out to either side, offering himself up to be eaten.
	The neighborhood watched a lioness descend on him.