As soon as Mama left and went on downstairs, I got dressed again, including my shoes, and climbed in under the covers. I’d slept out in the open, so I didn’t mind sleeping in my clothes. What drove me crazy was getting my shoes on the sheets. They would’ve yelled at me so bad at the Children’s Home.

  I laid there in the dark, trying to think what I was going to do. I pretty much knew how to get from this house out to the road, but what good would that do me? I didn’t know where I was or where the road led or how far to go, and you don’t cut cross country in North Carolina—if you don’t trip over something in the dark, you’ll bump into some moonshine or marijuana operation and they’ll blast your head off, not to mention the danger of getting your throat bit out by some tobacco farmer’s mean old dog. So there I’d be running along a road that leads nowhere with them on my tail and if they wanted to run me down, I don’t think fear of cancer would slow down your average four-wheeler.

  I thought about maybe stealing a car, but I don’t have the first idea how to hotwire anything. It wasn’t one of the skills you pick up at the Children’s Home. I knew the idea of it, somewhat, because I’d done some reading on electricity with the books Mr. Kaiser lent me so I could maybe try getting ready for the GED, but there wasn’t a chapter in there on how to get a Lincoln running without a key. Didn’t know how to drive, either. All the stuff you pick up from your dad or from your friends at school, I just never picked up at all.

  Maybe I dozed off, maybe I didn’t. But I suddenly noticed that I could see in the dark. Not see, of course. Feel the people moving around. Not far off at first, except like a blur, but I could feel the near ones, the other ones in the house. It was cause they was sparky, of course, but as I laid there feeling them drifting here and there, in the rhythms of sleep and dreams, or walking around, I began to realize that I’d been feeling people all along, only I didn’t know it. They wasn’t sparky, but I always knew where they were, like shadows drifting in the back of your mind, I didn’t even know that I knew it, but they were there. It’s like when Diz Riddle got him his glasses when he was ten years old and all of a sudden he just went around whooping and yelling about all the stuff he saw. He always used to see it before, but he didn’t rightly know what half the stuff was. Like pictures on coins. He knew the coins was bumpy, but he didn’t know they was pictures with writing and stuff. That’s how it was.

  I laid there and I could make a map in my brain where I could see a whole bunch of different people, and the more I tried, the better I could see. Pretty soon it wasn’t just in that house. I could feel them in other houses, dimmer and fainter. But in my mind I didn’t see no walls so I didn’t know whether somebody was in the kitchen or in the bathroom, I had to think it out, and it was hard, it took all my concentration. The only guide I had was that I could see electrical wires when the current was flowing through them, so wherever a light was on or a clock was running or something, I could feel this thin line, really thin, not like the shadows of people. It wasn’t much, but it gave me some idea of where some of the walls might be.

  If I could’ve just told who was who I might have made some guesses about what they was doing. Who was asleep and who was awake. But I couldn’t even tell who was a kid and who was a grown-up, cause I couldn’t see sizes, just brightness. Brightness was the only way I knew who was close and who was far away.

  I was pure lucky I got so much sleep during the day when that guy was giving me a ride from Roanoke to Eden. Well, that wasn’t lucky, I guess, since I wished I hadn’t gone to Eden at all, but at least having that long nap meant that I had a better shot at staying awake until things quieted down.

  There was a clump of them in the next house. It was hard to sort them out, cause three of them was a lot brighter, so I thought they was closer, and it took a while to realize that it was probably Mama and Daddy and Papa Lem along with some others. Anyway it was a meeting, and it broke up after a while, and all except Papa Lem came over. I didn’t know what the meeting was about, but I knew they was scared and mad. Mostly scared. Well, so was I. But I calmed myself down, the way I’d been practicing, so I didn’t accidentally kill nobody. That kind of practice made it so I could keep myself from getting too lively and sparky, so they’d think I was asleep. They didn’t see as clear as I did, too, so that’d help. I thought maybe they’d all come up and get me, but no, they just all waited downstairs while one of them came up, and he didn’t come in and get me, neither. All he did was go to the other rooms and wake up whoever was sleeping there and get them downstairs and out of the house.

  Well, that scared me worse than ever. That made it plain what they had in mind, all right. Didn’t want me giving off sparks and killing somebody close by when they attacked me. Still, when I thought about it, I realized that it was also a good sign. They was scared of me, and rightly so. I could reach farther and strike harder than any of them. And they saw I could throw off what got tossed at me, when I flung back what Papa Lem’s daughter tried to do to me. They didn’t know how much I could do.

  Neither did I.

  Finally all the people was out of the house except the ones downstairs. There was others outside the house, maybe watching, maybe not, but I figured I better not try to climb out the window.

  Then somebody started walking up the stairs again, alone. There wasn’t nobody else to fetch down, so they could only be coming after me. It was just one person, but that didn’t do me no good—even one grown man who knows how to use a knife is better off than me. I still don’t have my full growth on me, or at least I sure hope I don’t, and the only fights I ever got in were slugging matches in the yard. For a minute I wished I’d took kung fu lessons instead of sitting around reading math and science books to make up for dropping out of school so young. A lot of good math and science was going to do me if I was dead.

  The worst thing was I couldn’t see him. Maybe they just moved all the children out of the house so they wouldn’t make noise in the morning and wake me. Maybe they was just being nice. And this guy coming up the stairs might just be checking on me or bringing me clean clothes or something—I couldn’t tell. So how could I twist him up, when I didn’t know if they was trying to kill me or what? But if he was trying to kill me, I’d wish I’d twisted him before he ever came into the room with me.

  Well, that was one decision that got made for me. I laid there wondering what to do for so long that he got to the top of the stairs and came to my room and turned the knob and came in.

  I tried to breathed slow and regular, like somebody asleep. Tried to keep from getting too sparky. If it was somebody checking on me, they’d go away.

  He didn’t go away. And he walked soft, too, so as not to wake me up. He was real scared. So scared that I finally knew there was no way he was there to tuck me in and kiss me good night.

  So I tried to twist him, to send sparks at him. But I didn’t have any sparks to send! I mean I wasn’t mad or anything. I’d never tried to kill somebody on purpose before, it was always because I was already mad and I just lost control and it happened. Now I’d been calming myself down so much that I couldn’t lose control. I had no sparks at all to send, just my normal shining shadow, and he was right there and I didn’t have a second to lose so I rolled over. Toward him, which was maybe dumb, cause I might have run into his knife, but I didn’t know yet for sure that he had a knife. All I was thinking was that I had to knock him down or push him or something.

  The only person I knocked down was me. I bumped him and hit the floor. He also cut me with the knife. Not much of a cut, he mostly just snagged my shirt, but if I was scared before, I was terrified now cause I knew he had a knife and I knew even more that I didn’t. I scrambled back away form him. There was almost no light from the window, it was like being in a big closet, I couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see me. Except of course that I could see him, or at least sense where he was, and now I was giving off sparks like crazy so unless he was weaker than I thought, he could see him too.

  Well, he was weaker than I thought. He just kind of drifted, and I could hear him swishing the knife through the air in front of him. He had no idea where I was.

  And all the time I was trying to get madder and madder, and it wasn’t working. You can’t get mad by trying. Maybe an actor can, but I’m no actor. So I was scared and sparking but I couldn’t get that pulse to mess him up. The more I thought about it, the calmer I got.

  It’s like you’ve been carrying around a machine gun all your life, accidentally blasting people you didn’t really want to hurt and then the first time you really want to lay into somebody, it jams.

  So I stopped trying to get mad. I just sat there realizing I was going to die, that after I finally got myself under control so I didn’t kill people all the time anymore, now that I didn’t really want to commit suicide, now I was going to get wasted. And they didn’t even have the guts to come at me openly. Sneaking in the dark to cut my throat while I was asleep. And in the meeting where they decided to do it, my long lost but loving mama and daddy were right there. Heck, my dear sweet daddy was downstairs right now, waiting for this assassin to come down and tell him that I was dead. Would he cry for me then? Boo hoo my sweet little boy’s all gone? Mick is in the cold cold ground?

  I was mad. As simple as that. Stop thinking about being mad, and start thinking about things that if you think about them, they’ll make you mad. I was so sparky with fear that when I got mad, too, it was worse than it ever was before, built up worse, you know. Only when I let it fly, it didn’t go for the guy up there swishing his knife back and forth in the dark. That pulse of fire in me went right down through the floor and straight to dear old Dad. I could hear him scream. He felt it, just like that. He felt it. And so did I. Because that wasn’t what I meant to do. I only met him that day, but he was my father, and I did him worse than I ever did anybody before in my life. I didn’t plan to do it. You don’t plan to kill your father.

  All of a sudden I was blinded by light. For a second I thought it was the other kind of light, sparks, them retaliating, twisting me. Then I realized it was my eyes being blinded, and it was the overhead light in the room that was on. The guy with the knife had finally realized that the only reason not to have the light on was so I wouldn’t wake up, but now that I was awake he might as well see what he’s doing. Lucky for me the light blinded him just as much as it blinded me, or I’d have been poked before I saw what hit me. Instead I had time to scramble on back to the far corner of the room.

  I wasn’t no hero. But I was seriously thinking about running at him, attacking a guy with a knife. I would have been killed, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  Then I thought of something else to do. I got the idea from the way I could feel the electric current in the wires running from the lightswitch through the wall. That was electricity, and the lady in Roanoke called my sparkiness bio-electricity. I ought to be able to do something with it, shouldn’t I?

  I thought first that maybe I could short-circuit something, but I didn’t think I had that much electricity in me. I thought of maybe tapping into the house current to add to my own juice, but then I remembered that connecting up your body to house current is the same thing other folks call electrocution. I mean, maybe I can tap into house wiring, but if I was wrong, I’d be real dead.

  But I could still do something. There was a table lamp right next to me. I pulled off the shade and threw it at the guy, who was still standing by the door, thinking about what the scream downstairs meant. Then I grabbed the lamp and turned it on, and then smashed the lightbulb on the nightstand. Sparks. Then it was out.

  I held the lamp in my hand, like a weapon, so he’d think I was going to beat off his knife with my lamp. And if my plan was a bust, I guess that’s what I would’ve done. But while he was looking at me, getting ready to fight me knife against lamp, I kind of let the jagged end of the lamp rest on the bedspread. And then I used my sparkiness, the anger that was still in me. I couldn’t fling it at the guy, or well I could have, but it would’ve been like the bus driver, a six-month case of lung cancer. By the time he died of that, I’d be six months worth of dead from multiple stab wounds to the neck and chest.

  So I let my sparkiness build up and flow out along my arm, out along the lamp, like I was making my shadow grow. And it worked. The sparks just went right on down the lamp to the tip, and built up and built up, and all the time I was thinking about how Papa Lem was trying to kill me cause I thought his daughter was ugly and how he made me kill my daddy before I even knew him half a day and that charge built up.

  It built up enough. Sparks started jumping across inside the broken light bulb, right there against bedspread. Real sparks, the kind I could see, not just feel. And in two seconds that bedspread was on fire. Then I yanked the lamp so the cord shot right out of the wall, and I threw it at the guy, and while he was dodging I scooped up the bedspread and ran at him. I wasn’t sure whether I’d catch on fire or he would, but I figured he’d be too panicked and surprised to think of stabbing me through the bedspread, and sure enough he didn’t, he dropped the knife and tried to get off the bedspread. Which he didn’t do too good, because I was still pushing it at him. Then he tried to get through the door, but I kicked his ankle with my shoe, and he fell down, still fighting off the blanket.

  I got the knife and sliced right across the back of his thigh with it. Geez it was sharp. Or maybe I was so mad and scared that I cut him stronger than I ever thought I could, but it went clear to the bone. He was screaming from the fire and his leg was gushing blood and the fire was catching on the wallpaper and it occurred to me that they couldn’t chase me too good if they was trying to put out a real dandy house fire.

  It also occurred to me that I couldn’t run away too good if I was dead inside that house fire. And thinking of maybe dying in the fire made me realize that the guy was burning to death and I did it to him, something every bit as terrible as cancer, and I didn’t care, because I’d killed so many people that it was nothing to me now, when a guy like that was trying to kill me, I wasn’t even sorry for his pain, cause he wasn’t feeling nothing worse than Old Peleg felt, and in fact that even made me feel pretty good; because it was like getting even for Old Peleg’s death, even though it was me killed them both. I mean how could I get even for Peleg dying by killing somebody else? Okay, maybe it makes sense in a way, cause it was their fault I was in the orphanage instead of growing up here. Or maybe it made sense because this guy deserved to die, and Peleg didn’t, so maybe somebody who deserved it had to die a death as bad as Peleg’s, or something. I don’t know. I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about that then. I just knew that I was hearing a guy scream himself to death and I didn’t even want to help him or even try to help him or nothing. I wasn’t enjoying it, either. I wasn’t thinking, Burn you sucker! Or anything like that, but I knew right then that I wasn’t even human, I was just a monster, like I always thought, like in the slasher movies. This was straight from the slasher movies, somebody burning up and screaming, and there’s the monster just standing there in the flames and he isn’t burning.

  And that’s the truth. I wasn’t burning. There was flames all around me, but it kind of shied back from me, because I was so full of sparking from hating myself so bad that it was like the flames couldn’t get through to me. I’ve thought about that a lot since then. I mean, even that Swedish scientist doesn’t know all about this bio-electrical stuff. Maybe when I get real sparky it makes it so other stuff can’t hit me. Maybe that’s how some generals in the Civil War used to ride around in the open—or maybe that was that general in World War II, I can’t remember—and bullets didn’t hit them or anything. Maybe if you’re charged up enough, things just can’t get to you. I don’t know. I just know that by the time I finally decided to open the door and actually opened it, the whole room was burning and the door was burning and I just opened it and walked through. Course now I got a bandage on my hand to prove that I couldn’t grab a hot doorknob without hurting myself a little, but I shouldn’t’ve been able to stay alive in that room and I came out without even my hair singed.

  I started down the hall, not knowing who was still in the house. I wasn’t used to being able to see people by their sparkiness yet, so I didn’t think of checking, I just ran down the stairs carrying that bloody knife. But it didn’t matter. They all ran away before I got there, all except Daddy. He was lying in the middle of the floor in the living room, doubled up, lying with his head in a pool of vomit and his butt in a pool of blood, shaking like he was dying of cold. I really done him. I really tore him up inside. I don’t think he even saw me. But he was my daddy, and even a monster don’t leave his daddy for the fire to get him. So I grabbed his arms to try to pull him out.

  I forgot how sparky I was, worse than ever. The second I touched him the sparkiness just rushed out of me and all over him. It never went that way before, just completely surrounded him like he was a part of me, like he was completely drowning in my light. It wasn’t what I meant to do at all. I just forgot. I was trying to save him and instead I gave him a hit like I never gave nobody before, and I couldn’t stand it, I just screamed.

  Then I dragged him out. He was all limp, but even if I killed him, even if I turned him to jelly inside, he wasn’t going to burn, that’s all I could think of, that and how I ought to walk back into that house myself and up the stairs and catch myself on fire and die.