Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Do you know what that is?” she said. “It’s a ghost.”

“It is?” he said.

“That leaf is haunted.”

“A leaf can be haunted?”

“Anything can be haunted. A ghost can live in a leaf as well as anywhere else.”

He watched the leaf spin around as if it were attached to a kite.

“Why is it doing that?” he said.

“That’s the spirit of a person,” she said. “My father told me about this. One of his old stories. From Norway, from when he was a kid. It’s someone not good enough to go to heaven but not bad enough to go to hell. He’s in between.”

Samuel had not considered this a possibility.

“He’s restless,” she said. “He wants to move on. Maybe he was a good person who did one really bad thing. Or maybe he did lots of bad things but felt very sorry about them. Maybe he didn’t want to do bad things, but he couldn’t stop himself.”

And at this, once again, Samuel cried. He felt his face crumple. The tears came so unstoppably quickly. Because he knew he did bad things over and over and over. Faye noticed and closed her eyes and rubbed her fingers hard at her temples and covered her face with her hand. He could tell this was about as much as she could tolerate today, how she’d met the limits of her patience, how the crying about bad things was itself another bad thing.

“Sweetheart,” she said, “why are you crying?”

He still wanted to tell her that what he desired more than anything else in the world was to stop crying. But he couldn’t say it. All he managed to do was to spit out something incoherent through the tears and mucus: “I don’t want to be a leaf!”

“Why on earth would you think that?” she said.

She took his hand and pulled him home and the only sound on the whole block was the clacking of the wagon wheels and his whimpering. She took him to his room and told him to put his toys away.

“And I told you to bring nine toys,” she said. “You brought eight. Next time try to pay more attention.” And the disappointment in her voice made him cry even harder, so hard that he couldn’t talk, and thus he couldn’t tell her that he put eight toys in the wagon because the ninth toy was the wagon itself.

SAMUEL’S FATHER INSISTED that Sunday evenings be devoted to “family time,” and they’d have a mandatory dinner together, all of them sitting around the table while Henry tried valiantly to make conversation. They’d eat some of the packaged meals from his special office freezer, where the experimental and test-market foods were kept. These were usually more daring, more exotic — mango instead of baked apples, sweet potatoes instead of regular potatoes, sweet-and-sour pork instead of pork chops, or things that would not at first glance seem ideal for freezing: lobster rolls, say, or grilled cheese, or tuna melts.

“You know the interesting thing about frozen meals,” Henry said, “is that they weren’t popular until Swanson decided to call them ‘TV dinners.’ Frozen meals had been around for a decade when they changed the name to TV dinner and boom, sales exploded.”

“Mm-hm,” Faye said as she stared straight down into her chicken cordon bleu.

“It’s like people needed permission to eat in front of the television, you know? It’s like everyone wanted to eat in front of the TV already, but they were waiting for someone to endorse it.”

“That’s super fascinating,” Faye said in a tone that made him shut right up.

Then more silence before Henry asked what the family wanted to do tonight, and Faye suggesting he just go watch TV, and Henry asking if she wanted to join him, and Faye saying no, she had dishes to put away and cleaning to do and “you should go on ahead,” and Henry asking if she needed his help with the cleaning, and Faye saying no, he’d just get in the way, and Henry suggesting that maybe she should relax and he’d do the cleanup tonight, and Faye getting frustrated and standing up and saying “You don’t even know where anything goes,” and Henry looking at her hard and seeming like he was on the verge of saying something but then ultimately not saying it.

Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.

“May I be excused?” Samuel said.

Henry looked at him, wounded. “It’s family night,” he said.

“You’re excused,” Faye said, and Samuel leaped off the chair and scurried outside. He felt that familiar desire to go hide. He felt this way whenever the tension in the house seemed to gather up inside him. He hid in the woods, a tiny patch of woods that grew along a sad creek that ran behind their subdivision. A few short trees sprouting out of the mud. A pond that was at best waist-deep. A creek that collected all the subdivision’s runoff so the water had this colorful oily film after it rained. It was really pathetic, these woods, as far as nature goes. But the trees were thick enough to conceal him. When he was down here, he was invisible.

If anyone asked him what he was doing, he’d say “Playing,” which didn’t quite capture it. Could it really be called playing when he only sat there in the grass and mud, and hid in the leaves, and threw helicopter seeds into the air and watched them spin to the ground?

It was Samuel’s intention to come down to the creek and hide for a couple of hours, at least until bedtime. And he was searching for a spot, a convenient depression in the ground that would give him maximum coverage. A spot where, if he put a few dead branches over him, a few leaves, he would be hidden. And he was collecting the twigs and branches he’d use to cover himself, and he was beneath this one particular oak tree digging among the dead leaves and acorns on the ground, when something cracked above him. A snapping of branches, a creaking of the tree, and he looked up in time to see someone jump down from the tree and land hard on the ground behind him. A boy, no older than Samuel, who stood up and stared fiercely at him with eyes sharp and green and almost feline. He was not larger than Samuel, nor taller, nor in any way physically special except in the certain intangible way he filled up space. His body had a presence. He stepped closer. His face was thin and angular and smeared, on his cheeks and forehead, with blood.

Samuel dropped his twigs. He wanted to run. He told himself to run. The boy moved closer, and from behind his back he now produced a knife, a heavy silver butcher’s knife, the kind Samuel had seen his mother use when chopping things with bones.

Samuel began to cry.

Just stood there crying, rooted to the ground, waiting for whatever his fate was, succumbing to it. He vaulted right into a Category 3 slobbering wet helpless mess. He could feel his face constrict and his eyes bug out as if his skin were being stretched from behind. And the other boy stood directly before him now and Samuel could see the blood from close up, could see how it was still wet and shining in the sunlight and one drop dribbled down the boy’s cheek and under his chin and down his neck and under his shirt and Samuel didn’t even wonder where the blood came from so much as simply wail at the horrible fact of its presence. The boy had short reddish hair, eyes that seemed impenetrable and dead, freckles, something like an athlete’s sense of bodily control and self-possession and fluidity of movement as he slowly brought the knife over his head in the universal language for psychopathic murderous stabbing.

“This is what we call a successful ambush,” the kid said. “If we were at war, you’d be dead right now.”

And the cry Samuel let out summoned all his misery and channeled it in one wail, a great sad scream for help.