I don’t even answer her. I fight to free myself from the cocoon of her hair. At last I uncoil myself, and, tripping over the knot of braid, I race out of the dark room and toward the front door.

  “No, Jack!” cries Zephyr, but I don’t care what she says anymore. I burst out the door to see the twilight sky disappearing behind a flood of obsidian-black wings. I know that if I could reach up and touch each of those wings, my hand would pass through them as well, into darkness. It’s as if they are devouring the sky—and soon I see objects falling from up above. Dead birds. Bluebirds. They fall like hail, littering the fields around us.

  “No!” I cry. “It can’t be! This can’t happen!”

  Zephyr stand in the doorway behind me. She won’t come out. Instead she turns her face up and clicks to the sky. “It’s beautiful,” she says.

  The light around us is fading beneath the great membrane of a million black wings. And soon the bluebird-covered ground becomes speckled with bat droppings, as lightless as the bats themselves. They are like spots of black paint flung at a canvas, obliterating the world beneath it.

  “Don’t stand there, Jack,” says Gaia from the door. “You must come here. You’ll be safe here.”

  I would run to my aunt and uncle’s house—but I know I would never make it. I would be buried under a fall of bluebirds and bat droppings. I can’t even see their house in the distance anymore. Maybe it’s already washed away. I hurry to the doorway, terrified of being struck by black droplets, for fear they might burn right through me. The three of us watch as the sky disappears into darkness and the ground dissolves beneath the rain of black.

  “What about my parents? What about my aunt and uncle?”

  “Everyone you know will be gone,” says Gaia with sympathy and compassion. “When the bats stretch from yonder to yonder, they will be no more. They will fade peacefully with the world of light.” She says it as if it is a wonderful thing. I feel sick to my stomach.

  “Why won’t it take us?” I ask. “Why are we spared?”

  “There must always be a seed for the next world,” she tells me. “You are young, but time will help you understand.”

  And then her words come back to me. Good bone structure. A fine man he’ll grow to be. She said it as if Zephyr and I would be together for a long, long time. Me and that ugly, ugly girl with no eyes.

  “There are only the two of you now,” says Gaia. Earth Mother. Mother Earth. “Only the two of you, and me to pave your way.”

  Outside, the trees and fence posts, the grass and hills crumble to nothing, dissolved by rivers of black. Gaia closes the door, shutting out that world. She comes closer, dragging her endless braid behind her. I back up until I’m against the wall. There’s nowhere for me to run. I can’t get away, and if I screamed, there would be no one to hear me.

  Gaia touches my cheek, feeling my tears. “You are in pain,” she says to me. “If thine eyes offend thee, pluck them out.”

  Then both her hands shoot to my temples, I feel my head pressed between the vise-grip of her palms. She presses her thumbs against my eyes and I feel a fiery pain. I am about to scream out, but suddenly the pain is gone, replaced by a different feeling… a draining feeling, as if my sinuses are clearing. Something opens up deep within my mind. Then she takes her fingers away.

  I reach up to feel my eyes, and find that they are gone. No blood, no holes—it’s as if I never had eyes at all. There is only a faint indentation in the bone of my face where my eyes should be—but no sockets beneath that, only solid bone. Like Zephyr.

  This can’t be happening! I tell myself. You can’t erase a person’s eyes with the touch of a finger. Everything before me now is black. No, not black… absent. Not dark, not light, but simply not there. I have no sense of sight whatsoever, or even a memory of what sight was like.

  Overwhelmed by it all, I have a sudden, uncontrollable urge to clear my throat, and when I do, it comes out in a series of hollow clicks. Echolocation! In a flash of echoes, everything around me becomes clear. It is more than sight, more than sound, but a sense that is completely new. I am blasted by a wave of incredible perception!

  My terror is extinguished like fire drowned in water. I can “see” Zephyr and Gaia, their shapes formed by the echo. Not just their shape, but the density of their flesh, and the exact dimensions of the room around me. I can “see” things not just in front of me, but all around me!

  It is Zephyr’s face that catches my attention. I step closer to her and click again. It’s amazing—the way the bones and flesh of her face echo back my signal. It’s such a pleasing sensation, I want to echolocate her again and again.

  “Zephyr!” I say. “You’re beautiful!” for she truly is. What was hideous to my sense of sight is glorious to this new sense. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything so beautiful—so perfect—as the echo of Zephyr’s face.

  “I’m happy you think so,” she says. I can feel the smile on her face from where I stand.

  “All is in tune for a new beginning, then.” Gaia puts her hands on our shoulders and slowly moves us toward the wooden door at the back of the house.

  Was I frightened a few moments ago? Was I mourning the loss of the world I knew? It’s as if when Gaia took away my sight, she also took away all that sense of loss, leaving behind only excitement, and a feverish desire to go forward into this new unknown. Gaia swings open the door to Bracken Cave. I echolocate through the door and find a breathtaking expanse of caverns, the shape of their echo as pleasing and satisfying as a colorful landscape, although I can’t even recall what color is.

  It is now that I realize that there is light here—immense radiance all around me. It’s not daylight, but the light of spirit, so much easier to see without the burden of eyes.

  I “ping” the caverns once more. The echo shows me winding tunnels that stretch to infinity.

  I want to go down there! I want to explore, to be a part of it, but I sense that something is missing. I raise my hand and feel the empty space beneath my arm. Yes, there is something missing. I turn to Gaia, and she cups her hand gently against my face, knowing what I am thinking. “Some things must be earned, Jack.” Then she lowers my arm to my side. “In time, both you and Zephyr will earn yours. But for now you must go on without them.”

  Understanding, I take Zephyr’s hand. We send our signals ahead of us into the bottomless depths of Bracken Cave; they resound together in perfect harmony, beckoning us downward into this new place. This new world.

  Sometimes change catches us off guard. We fight it with fear and denial. We run from it, hide from it, until it envelops us, only to leave us wondering what there was to be afraid of. I’m ready for what comes now—whatever it is. And, so, together Zephyr and I race off into the endless labyrinth, holding our arms out wide as we run, hoping that soon, very soon, we will earn our wings.

  Ralphy Sherman’s Bag of Wind

  The bag sat innocently on the library table between my sister Roxanne and me. A brown paper bag—the kind of sack you get at the grocery store. The kind you can cover your schoolbooks with. Just a plain brown paper bag. The top of this one was folded over, so you couldn’t see inside.

  Roxy and I had left it unguarded. We hadn’t thought much about it. I mean, who was going to bother it in the library? But I guess when you leave a single brown paper bag alone in the center of a big round table and walk away, some bozo’s bound to wonder what’s inside.

  We were racing stealthily around the aisles, playing one of our favorite games: Psychotic Librarian. The game involved misshelving books in unlikely pairs, while the librarian ripped her hair out, searching for us down the narrow, mazelike aisles. I had just shelved Breakfast at Tiffany’s next to Naked Lunch, when the librarian made an exhausted lunge at me through the stacks, from the next aisle.

  “I’ll get you, Ralphy Sherman,” she growled, “if it’s the last thing I do,” and it might just have been, considering the way she was huffing and puffing.

  I slipped out of her desperate grasp, and took off down the science aisle, where I ran into Roxanne. She held a copy of Moby-Dick in one hand and was searching for a suitable match on the anatomy shelves.

  That was when we caught sight of Marvin McSchultz leaning over our table, his hands slowly trying to open the curled lip of our bag to get a look inside.

  “Can you believe him?” I said. “Somebody oughta call pest control!”

  We stormed out of the aisle to catch him red-handed. He turned to us, his beady little eyes trying to feign innocence.

  “Oh, hi, guys.”

  Marvin McSchultz was what you might call “rodential.” He was ratlike in every possible way. Always tattling on people, always poking around in business that wasn’t his—and anytime there were germs being spread, you could bet Marvin was the vector.

  Roxanne put her hands firmly on her hips. “Have my eyes deceived me, or were you daring to touch our stuff?”

  “Who, me?” blurted Marvin. “No, I was just going to move your bag over. Yeah, that’s it, I was gonna move it to the other side of the table—to keep other people from touching it.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t open it,” I advised him. “It could have been disastrous.”

  Marvin’s ears pricked up. “Whaddaya mean, ‘disastrous’?”

  “Don’t tell him,” warned Roxy. “If you do, he’ll blab to everyone, and we’ll never keep it to ourselves.”

  “C’mon, please,” said Marvin, taking the bait like a mouse at a trap. “Please, I promise not to tell.”

  I checked the aisles behind us. The librarian had not yet emerged, obviously still wandering the maze in search of us. I sat Marvin down, while Roxy began to read her copy of Moby-Dick.

  “This isn’t any old bag,” I whispered to Marvin. “It’s a receptacle for a supercell mesocyclone vortex.”

  “Huh?”

  Roxy sighed, but kept her eye on her book. “I knew he’d be too dense to understand.”

  Marvin looked from me to her, and then to me again for further explanation.

  “Okay… in layman’s terms,” I said, running my finger gently down the edge of the sack. “There’s a tornado in this bag.”

  Marvin stared at me with uncomprehending reptilian eyes. “Whaddaya mean, a tornado? You mean one of those science kit things, where you can make a twister in a bottle? I seen those. It’s just water pouring from one soda bottle to another.”

  “No, Einstein,” said Roxy. “We don’t go for cheap imitations. This is the real thing.”

  Then Marvin quirked his lips in disbelief. “Yeah, right,” he said, “and I’m a green space alien in disguise.”

  Unruffled, Roxy tossed her hair. “If you are, then please tell your people to bring back our mother. It hasn’t been the same at home since your people abducted her.”

  “You’re just a couple of losers,” he said. “You two can’t even come up with something clever to say—like telling me there’s a rat inside, or a tarantula, or some animal you found runt over in the road that your mom says you gotta bury or else you can’t come home for dinner—” Marvin grimaced, recalling some unpleasant memory.

  “Actually, Marvin, all those things might be in the bag, too,” I offered. “You never know what gets swept up inside a tornado.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” added Roxanne, “if there were a few farm animals swirling around in there.”

  “Ha, ha,” said Marvin. “I don’t believe a word you say!”

  Roxanne raised an eyebrow, and turned a page. “Nobody believed Ahab when he first told people about the great white whale.” She slammed the heavy cover of the book with an ominous thud and pushed it across the table toward him. “But he had the last laugh. Even as he died in agony.” The book caught the very edge of the big brown bag, and it rocked slightly back and forth.

  “And then again, maybe there’s nothing inside the bag,” I told Marvin. “Nothing… but air.”

  Marvin slowly turned his eyes to the sack, watching it closely until it stopped rocking.

  “If you don’t believe us, why don’t you peek inside?” I suggested.

  He called my bluff and began to reach for the bag.

  “Of course,” Roxanne added, “you might end up like something ‘runt over’ in the road—but don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

  Still Marvin refused to listen to us, and he poked his finger in the bag’s folded edge, beginning to pull it up… and a breeze blew across the little hairs on the back of our necks.

  “Did you feel that?” I whispered.

  Instantly, Roxanne and I both dove off our seats, taking cover under the table. Marvin was a microsecond behind us.

  “It was just the air conditioner,” he insisted, his head beneath the table, and his butt sticking up into the air like an ostrich. “It was just the air conditioner, right?… Right?!”

  “Are you certain of that, Marvin?”

  By the tone of his voice, we could tell he wasn’t certain of anything anymore. “It’s… it’s impossible,” he blathered. “Wind can’t stay in a bag!”

  “It can if it’s charmed,” I said.

  “Charmed?”

  Roxy picked up where I’d left off. “Yeah. You know, like a snake?” She pulled on his collar until the rest of his body fell under the table to join his weaselly face. “You can control it, if you know the secret incantation.”

  “Incantation?” echoed Marvin. “It sounds spooky.”

  I peered out from under the table to make sure we were unobserved, then I leaned closer and whispered into Marvin’s ear. “The twister was charmed into the bag a hundred years ago by some wizard, and as long as you say the incantation right, it will never harm the person who opens the bag.”

  “We got it last year from an old lady in a trailer park,” Roxanne continued. “She told us that she spent the last forty years moving from one mobile home to another, and when she got tired of living in one, she opened up the bag, wiped the whole place out, and collected the insurance.”

  “Trailer parks!” shouted Marvin. “Is that why tornadoes always seem to hit trailer parks?”

  “We took the bag on vacation with us,” I told him. “We used it for skydiving.”

  “No way!”

  “Have you ever skydived down the mouth of a tornado funnel?”

  “It’s a real trip!” said Roxy.

  Marvin just shook his head as if trying to make it all go away. “No,” he said. “No, no, no!” He crawled out from under the table, bumping his head on the way up. We followed. Around us, the library seemed even quieter than before. No one had noticed our little foray under the table, and no one noticed us come out.

  “Forget you guys!” he said, dismissing us with a wave of his hand. He tried to leave but couldn’t, for although his feet kept walking away, his eyes kept staring at the bag, pulling him into a weird elliptical orbit around the table. “Okay,” he said, pushing forth his last question. “If it’s in there, how come I can’t hear nothing inside?”

  I just shook my head. “Don’t you know, Marvin? It’s always dead quiet before a tornado.”

  “Before it comes roaring in like a freight train,” added Roxy.

  At last we broke through his thin wall of resistance, and he finally looked at the bag with fearful respect, and a flesh-searing curiosity. Curiosity enough to kill the largest of cats. We knew we had him.

  “We’ve grown tired of it lately,” I told him.

  “Yeah, too much responsibility,” said Roxanne.

  “And too much to clean up.”

  “And it eats us out of house and home—literally.”

  “We were hoping we could get rid of it.”

  “For the right price, of course.”

  Then Marvin, eyes locked on the silent paper bag, shoved both his hands deep into his stuffed pockets and jingled them around.

  “How much you askin’?”

  I smiled. “How much you got?”

  * * *

  Five minutes later and twelve dollars poorer, Marvin left the library a happy man, with one extremely light brown paper bag in his hands.

  “Remember,” Roxy reminded him as he pedaled away, “don’t open it until you’re out in a field far away from here.”

  “Far, far away,” I emphasized. “And don’t forget to swing your Hula-Hoop while repeating the magic incantation.”

  “And if it doesn’t work the first time,” added Roxanne, “try it again in your underwear. That usually does the trick.”

  “I’ll remember!” shouted Marvin, as he hurried off, steering his bike with one hand and holding the bag gingerly in the other as if it contained a small nuclear device.

  We watched until he disappeared over the hill.

  * * *

  We thought we’d heard the last of it until dawn the next day. That was when the storm came. No one predicted it. It wasn’t on any weather map. It just showed up on the doorstep of our town like an uninvited guest. I awoke to the sound of rattling windows, and Roxy frantically calling my name.

  I stumbled out into the hall, where Roxy was standing in her nightgown. “Where’s Dad? Where’s Whatserface?” Whatserface was our new nanny. As we went through nannies too quickly to count, we rarely bothered to learn their names.

  We heard the front door open as Whatserface went out to retrieve the morning paper. With umbrella held high, she stepped out onto the porch and was promptly pulled up into the skies by the wind, and we haven’t seen her since.

  “Ralphy, I think it’s a tornado!”

  “Here? We never have tornadoes here!”

  And in response, the wind growled and hurled a minivan through the living room window. Well, that was enough to wake up Dad. He shuffled out of his bedroom and took a long, hard look at the beached car, its upturned wheels still spinning.

  “Is that ours?” he asked.

  “No,” I told him.

  “Oh. Good,” he said, and returned to his bedroom, hit the snooze button, and vanished beneath the covers.

  Then, as quickly as the storm had begun, the raging, roaring winds fell silent, and we heard a loud thump on our roof, followed by what sounded like sheets flapping in the wind.