Lydia Netzer - Shine Shine Shine

“Who are you, a boy?” said this child.

“Maxon,” said the boy. He stood fully erect, one knee touching the other, heels planted firmly together on that mossy and rectangular stone block.

“I’m Sunny,” said the child. “I’m a girl. Do you want a turn on this?”

The farmhouse had been empty ever since Maxon could remember. He had found it very early in his life, when he was exploring the woods. Now he had been all over the county. It was one of the places where he slept. There were others, an A-frame cabin 168 trees down the electric line past the old farm, a hunting blind in a tree next to the railroad. There were people who fed him, including his family, but also others. There was one woman in a trailer who thought he was a mute. He never talked to her. The houses with white paint and ninety-degree angles he stayed away from. During the school year, he went to school as much as he could, on the bus. He was seven years, four months, and eighteen days old. Or, he was 2,693 rotations of the Earth old.

At this time, Maxon climbed into the tire swing and Sunny pushed him on it, and he played with her. When they were laughing, another person came out of the front door. Maxon had never seen any of the doors of the house open; he thought of the old farmhouse as impenetrable except by squirrels and him. The woman was tall, wearing a long skirt. She had long blond hair in pigtails as if she were a child.

“Sunny, what’s this?” said the woman.

“It’s Maxon,” said Sunny. She talked around the piece of peppermint that was in her mouth. “He’s staying for dinner. Maxon, this is my mother.”

Another woman came out behind the mother, and this one was brown. Maxon had never seen a person this brown color. She was short, and she had a hammer in her hand. Her arms were covered in dust.

“Nu, please set another place at the table,” said the mother. “Sunny has a friend.”

At the dinner table, Maxon sat diagonal to the mother and the brown woman, and across from Sunny. Sunny ordered him to eat a lot of vegetables that she didn’t appear to want. Maxon ate zucchini in handfuls, and said, “I like zucchini. We have it wild. It grows in the yard. The seeds in the zucchini I grow in the yard are from four generations of zucchini in the same yard. I can also eat it raw. I eat it just like a banana, but without peeling it.” When he said this, Sunny put her hands over her ears like cups facing backward. The brown women squinted at him and the mother nodded.

He refused to take a bath when the mother put the question out there, but he allowed her to brush his hair and wrap him in a blanket. She kept leaving the room and coming back, pressing her hands onto her long skirt. Her eyebrows wrinkled down. They had put yard furniture in the living room; Maxon saw that it was rainproof. Before, in the living room, there had been a chair with mice living in it, and a lounge covered in red corduroy. The two children sat on a swinging sofa, curled metal rods holding the sofa to the frame. It would swing back and forth or side to side. Maxon’s feet touched the floor, but Sunny had her feet folded under her.

“He starving!” the brown woman called in from the kitchen, where she was knocking dishes around in the sink. “Look at him! Like a damn toothpick!”

“Where do you live?” said Sunny’s mother.

Maxon pointed out the window.

“Come on,” said Sunny. “Let’s go play.”

Maxon took her hand when she offered it. They went out under the apple tree and began to pick up apples. Only halfway through the summer and already some were starting to fall, crabbed and hopeless little fruit, gnawed by deer, pink only on one scant face. Maxon had the understanding that Sunny would never eat these apples, like Maxon sometimes did.

Sometimes as they were playing with the apples, Sunny’s hand would fall onto Maxon’s hand or arm, as if she was trying to feel if he was hot.

“Where do you live?” Sunny asked. “Will you take me there?”

Maxon shook his head. He chucked an apple through a window in the old barn with perfect aim. The pane broke and shattered inward. He put another apple through the exact same hole. Sunny watched him. When she threw an apple, she threw it short.

At the sound of breaking glass, the mother came out the screen door again and it shut with a crack you could hear hit the mountain on the other side of the valley, under the fog.

“Maxon, I am going to take you home,” she said. “Can you show me where that is?”

Maxon thought about running away, but the tall woman with the braided hair compelled him inside. She had all the books, and all the candles. There was a tight smoothness to her face, and her teeth, so white in rows, made him stare. They got into the station wagon. Sunny stood beside the car door, sadly waving. Maxon looked down at her feet, not bare, not pressing toe prints into the ground, but wearing leather shoes held tightly on her feet with a wide strap. The station wagon pulled down the drive, and the new gravel crunched under the tires.

WHAT HAPPENED THEN DID not have any significance. Maxon did not remember it, because it was not in his memory.

THEN THE STATION WAGON came back up the driveway, crunching on the gravel. The mother led him by the hand, back into the kitchen, and gave him a banana. She told him to sit on the bench behind a table, built into the wall. It was red and the mice had chewed it open, showing its foam stuffing. He peeled the banana and began to eat it.

The mother said to the brown woman, “Well, there was no one there. But I can tell you. There were sheep living in rusty cars. I mean living. And pigs.”

“You lie,” said the brown woman.

“Nu, the place is falling down and no one is at home. I called, I yelled, I rang the bell, and do you want to know what this child said to me? That seven-, eight-year-old child?”

“What he say,” said Nu, working on putting dinner away.

“He said, ‘They went to town.’ Can you believe it? He’s barely bigger than Sunny. They left him out in the rain in those—” Here she began to cough. “—shorts. And went to town. Nu, if you had seen the place. I think there was a mule in the parlor.”

An hour later they had all gone to see the fireworks. Maxon wore a blanket, and was running in tight, concentric circles around Sunny and her mother, as they sat in a pasture on an old crocheted afghan, waiting for the explosions. The field they sat in had been newly mowed and the hay harvested. It was prickly, as a father’s beard might be, even through the blanket. Sunny sat on her mother and wrapped her legs around her mother’s waist.

“There’s a bat,” Sunny said. “And there’s Maxon.”

The mother laughed, hugged her child, and Maxon watched them. He could hear their talking. Sunny said she didn’t want to see the fireworks, kept letting her eye be distracted by the boy, and the bats flying around. “That’s Maxon, and that’s a bat,” she repeated.

When the fireworks started, Maxon was startled by the noise. The show was all around them, but he didn’t look up. It was dark, and then there would be a flash, and all the cars illuminated, and the mother’s face showing, and then black again, and a sharp whine. The smell of the hay clung around him, and he could smell that there were cows nearby.

“We have to take him home, after this,” said Emma.

“No, I want to keep him,” said Sunny. And Maxon continued to trot around.

The booms of the fireworks echoed down the valley, amplified by the river, ricocheting off the mountains on both sides.

“No,” said Emma. “He has to go home.”

“But I like him. I want him,” said Sunny.

When the fireworks were over, the two children sat in the backseat while Emma drove, muttering to herself and shaking her head. Maybe she was practicing what she would say. Maxon felt pretty good sitting there in the dark with the girl, the hiss of a sudden rain in the wheel wells, the flashing, weird mosaic of lights on the ceiling in the car, the back of the mother’s head. The girl reached out for his hand and he took it. He was taller. She was fatter. His toes were turned inward from being shoved into shoes that were too small. When they stopped at a stop sign and he knew they were close to home, he slipped out the car door and into the rain. No one gave chase. It was too dark and he was already gone, sliding over wet fallen wood, under the clutch of dripping leaves.