Walking Home
an excerpt

He perches, leafy hide-out masking him from view but allowing his own gaze passage. The damp summer lifts for a moment in the stirring of a breeze, almost cool, and he feels that he could be in a green-clad crow’s nest. He closes his eyes, hears wooden planks groaning, feels the rocking of the ship far below, the swing of the mast that seems small from deck is vast and pendulous in the lift. That’s what he calls it in his mind, the lift. He leans into the branches, likes the hard knobs jutting into his back, the folded spiral notebook an uncomfortable comfort sandwich between bough and buttock, and he can believe that the limbs are lifting him higher into the summer blue.
He thinks of his mother and wonders if she’s watching him, gazing down from the beyond above. But then he realizes, a tiny smile curling about his lips, that she is, her eyes guarding him a solid fact. He could be so stupid sometimes.
A whirr-click-churn rises from below that is not a tree sound, not a earth sound, not a sound of Monday morning peace and death and rest. Reverie lifts. He opens his eyes.
A figure at the foot of the tree, his tree.
“Hi.” She waves up at him, one hand holding a camera spitting out snap shots onto the manicured grass, her finger still working the trigger. Lowering the black contraption, its long and well-used life apparent even from his vantage, Dee smiled. “You looked so beautiful.”
“Oh,” he replied after a moment, not knowing what else he could say.
“Her name is Lucy,” she said, nodding at the camera, now suspended from her neck on a strap.
He shifted, branches whispering around him. “Why Lucy?”
The girl thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I just like it. It makes me think of a very nice person.”
“Who?”
She shook her head, red curls tendriling into ever-deeper tangles. “I mean that anyone who’s called Lucy sounds like they should just be kind and good and lovely. That’s the kind of person the name makes me think of.”
“Even if it’s a guy? A man named Lucy?” he called down, thinking. He couldn’t conjure up a real person for the name, but liked the possibility. What kind of a person is named Nat? he wondered. Am I what someone would think of, or am I all wrong for the name? Or would that make the name wrong for me?
She laughed, broad and full and from her belly. Nat couldn’t help but smile back, and feel somehow pleased that he was responsible for her mirth. He could make the red-haired girl laugh.