Beyond the Laughing Sky Read online

  Most evenings Nashville and junebug baked a cake.

  “What’s the occasion?” their mother would ask. And of course, they always had an answer; they baked cakes to welcome the first firefly of the season, and cakes to commiserate incurable hiccups. Cakes for well-shaped clouds, cakes for bad hair days, and cakes only to be eaten barefoot in the grass.

  “And of course,” Nashville explained, “when all else fails, there are three hundred and sixty-four days of non-birthdays to celebrate each year.”

  And why was Nashville so interested in cakes? Well, a cake had played an instrumental role in his fate. It’s where his life story started. Well, sort of, for it most likely started when the eggs fell to the ground. Or when they were laid. Or, for that matter, when the nest was built in the first place.

  Ten years earlier Nashville’s mother and father had just been married, and moved into a house with a dazzling, oversized window in a small village called Goosepimple.

  It was agreed by all who lived there that Goosepimple was quite simple and quite perfect. The old men sat on the porches drinking sweet tea, the dewy glasses dripping polka dots onto their trousers. Roosters perched on the fence with the red sails on their heads waving in the wind, their eyes dreaming of the sea-blue sky. Pollen-drunk bees hovered around the honeysuckle bushes. The small town held few surprises, and nothing ever changed; time circled like a bug on a glass rim, always returning to where it began.

  Then one morning, surprisingly, something did change.

  A bird—a Nashville warbler to be exact—had started to build a nest in the tree outside Nashville’s parents’ window. Every few minutes it flew away and returned with a new building block: moss, grass, a twist tie off a bread bag, a long strand of hair. Nashville’s mother secretly hoped the hair was hers.

  When the bird laid her two eggs, Nashville’s mother used paint samples to identify their colors. “Pale cornflower blue,” she said, holding up the paint swatch, “with a hint of mint and moss green. And the blotchy spots were a mix of rust and mahogany.” She sang to the eggs as well. Nashville’s mother had a voice like footsteps in new winter snow. Some say the birds in Goosepimple sang differently after they heard her. Some say they were never the same.

  The Goosepimple Library had four books about Nashville warblers, and Nashville’s mother checked them all out. She learned that the eggs would hatch two weeks after being laid. When two weeks passed and there were no chicks, she decided to throw them a welcome party. Perhaps it would coax them out.

  “Excuse me?” her husband asked. “You’re throwing a party for whom?”

  “The birds,” his wife clucked, wiping flour onto her apron. “The birds will be born any day now.”

  She worked extra hard on the cake. When the two large sheets of chocolate were ready, she gently removed them from the pans and used a sharp knife to cut them into the shape of a bird’s profile. Her fingers turned blue mashing berries to color the whipped cream. She spent over thirty minutes drawing the feathers, eyes, and beak with the frosting bag. The cake was perfect.

  “Warblers aren’t blue, dear,” said her husband.

  “I know that,” said his wife. “But I don’t know how to make gray frosting.”

  Nashville’s mother smiled. She smiled the smile of someone who believes a cake can change your fate. She smiled that smile until the morning the eggs disappeared.

  “Oh my, oh no!” she cried. She stuck her head out the window and looked at the branches. The eggs and bird were gone. “The eggs,” she wept. “What happened to the eggs?”

  Her husband did not know. The only thing left in the tree was the nest, surrounded by small white flowers. This made his wife unbearably sad. She went into the kitchen and slid the giant bird-shaped cake into the garbage pail.

  A cake. What else has the magic to turn eggs, flour, and sugar into a wish? And a cake never shows up on a bad day; never rings on a humdrum Tuesday to say, “Tough luck. You didn’t make the team.” No, a cake is there when things are super, when they’re better-than-great—always the guest of honor at a birthday or a wedding, always dressed in frosting and wearing its boogie shoes.

  Which is why it made her husband heartsick to see the cake his wife had worked so hard to make smeared down the trash bag. Is there anything sadder than untouched joy in the garbage? Her husband did not think so, which is why he immediately took the trash out to the curb.

  And there, on the sidewalk in front of the house, was a broken egg.

  The egg was open with chipped, white edges. Was there anything sadder than an unhatched egg? Her husband did not think so.

  But where was the other egg?

  “There you are,” said the husband. The egg had rolled off the sidewalk and under the honeysuckle bush. This egg, much like the other, was cracked open. However, what spilled out was not a bird and it was not dead. The man lifted the creature into his hands and pulled the chips of white and blue shell from its face and eyelids. He smoothed the yellow fluid from its hair and across the crease of its mouth.

  “Dear,” said her husband when he re-entered the house. “I found the eggs. They were cracked on the sidewalk.”

  “Oh no, no, no,” the wife cried. “Are they dead?”

  “Not this one,” said the man, handing her the creature.

  “Why,” she whispered. “This is a baby.”

  And it was. Inside the cracked egg the man had found a perfect human baby. It was small—as small as a baby chick—but healthy and peach-colored and perfect.

  “We’ll name him Nashville,” said the new mother, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to find a baby in a cornflower blue egg on the sidewalk. “I just wish,” she sighed, “that I hadn’t thrown out his welcome cake.”

  Each night, once the cake was out of the oven, the bakers both covered in flour and frosting, Nashville and Junebug were sent to take their baths.

  “I want to take my bath like Nashville,” Junebug pouted. For while Junebug took her nightly bath in a claw-foot tub, Nashville bathed each evening by moonlight in a birdbath in the yard.

  Nashville slipped on his striped bathrobe, tied the belt around his waist, and walked to the yard carrying his soap and shampoo and comb. The yard was dark, but Nashville’s father had thoughtfully installed a lamp for the evenings when the moon was new. This night, however, the moon was full to the brim, and washed the yard in light.

  The birdbath was shaped like any other, only person-size, and to get inside Nashville had to climb a ladder. Once he reached the top, he would take his toiletries from his pocket, lay them out on the edge of the bath, and step into the water. Fed by a hose and heated all day by the sun, the water now reflected the moon.

  “Scrubbing behind my ears with moonlight and sunlight in the water, both at once,” Nashville liked to say.

  After he cleaned his face and feathers with a washcloth, Nashville enjoyed the warm breeze and listened to the odes of insects and the limericks of frogs.

  At first Nashville’s father had been against the birdbath.

  “He can take a bath in the tub like a normal boy,” he’d said.

  “But he’s not a normal boy,” his mother had replied. “He’s special. Let’s just do this one thing,” she continued, “to make him feel at home.”

  Of course, making someone feel at home means making where they live feel like their real home. Which was hard, because his parents didn’t really know what kind of home Nashville would have lived in had they not found him beneath the honeysuckle bush.

  And neither did Nashville. Though sometimes, especially during his baths in the sky, he thought he knew. He thought he could remember coming from a place where everything could fly. A place where a clock’s minute and hour hands spread away from its face, flapping like wings. A place where he’d pluck a daisy and watch the petals whirl like the propellers of a helicopter. Where he’d throw a
handful of sand, and the grains would buzz away like a swarm of gnats. Where colorful fruits on a tree would burst into flight, and new ones would perch in their place.

  “Anything can fly, I think,” said Nashville to the pecan tree. “Dandelion seeds can fly. So can whirligig seeds. Why, just yesterday I saw a group of dead leaves fly from a tree and land on a pond. They floated away across the surface like a fleet of ships, the wind tearing at their sails.”

  Nashville spent a lot of time alone in the fort, since it was where he did some of his best thinking. Sometimes he’d do it lying inside, the spot of light from the door like a full moon on the floor. And sometimes he’d think while sitting on the wooden peg, the rope above creaking like a weather vane changing direction.

  On a morning in September, Nashville thought about the fact that it was autumn, and that meant he was starting middle school. Which meant a new building, with new students and new teachers. Nashville was no fool. He knew the kids at his old school didn’t refrain from calling him a beast or a monster because they liked him; they had just become accustomed over time to the way he looked. He also understood that it’s a rare child who wants to go to school, but it was perhaps equally rare to dread the event as much as the tender hearts, old souls, and uniquely shaped of the world.

  He was not afraid of the classes or the teachers—adults had a way of ignoring his looks in an effort to appear bravely polite. But children were not always so timid. From what he’d seen in the town of Goosepimple, one child might be a little taller, one a little plumper, but really, they looked just like one another. The same freckles, the same grass-stained knees, and the same chewed nails. What exactly, wondered Nashville when he saw them, went so very wrong with me?

  As he pondered this, he heard the tin can scrape across the floor of the fort, and then the tiny voice of Junebug.

  “Earth to Bird. Do you read me?” Nashville picked up the can and pulled the string tight.

  “I read you, Little Bug.”

  Junebug spoke into her can in the house. “I have a telegram from kitchen headquarters. Breakfast is ready. Over and out.”

  By the time Nashville reached the table, everyone was already seated in their perch swings. The swings hung from the ceiling at the perfect height for the table, and made the whole family look like the Toast & Jam Trapeze Troupe. Nashville imagined his family in spandex and sequins, juggling muffins, balancing glasses of fresh-squeezed juice on their noses. He saw his family doing somersault flips, catching one another by gripping on to outstretched cereal spoons.

  “Please pass the sugar,” said Junebug, taking her seat, pouring milk on her cereal. Nashville climbed up onto his perch as well. The seats had, of course, been his mother’s idea, installed to make Nashville more comfortable, and everyone—even Nashville’s father, who had fallen out a few times trying to read the paper—had learned to live with, and even like, the arrangement.

  “Big day tomorrow,” said Nashville’s mother. Nashville tried to ignore this, and concentrated on scooping some seeds out of a bird feeder and onto his plate.

  “Are you excited?” she asked.

  “I am,” said Junebug. “I want to get new pencils and notebooks and erasers and a lunch box . . .”

  “You know,” Nashville interrupted. “I’ve been thinking. I’m not sure I need any more education.”

  His father peered over the morning newspaper at his son.

  “Maybe I could set up shop and be a traveling balloon salesman,” said Nashville. “Or a skywriting poet.”

  His father resumed reading the paper.

  “A one-man band?” continued Nashville. “A flea circus trainer?”

  “Very funny,” said his mother, ruffling Nashville’s feathers. “Now hurry up and get dressed. We’ve got a busy day of errands to run before you start school.”

  “A cootie cleaner?” Nashville continued, his voice fading as his mother pushed him toward his room. “A star counter? A palm reader? A decoder of alphabet soup?”

  Nashville, dressed in his summer suit and hat, set out for town accompanied by his mother, Junebug, and a warm breeze. The family marched together down the winding road, the one that circled the hill like a long, twisted strand of a peeled apple.

  “Good morning, Goosepimple,” greeted Nashville when they reached the village. Goosepimple was so tiny it was often forgotten on maps, so overlooked that people only seemed to end up there by accident. The village reminded Nashville of an old neighbor forever napping on their porch. But sometimes the neighbor would startle awake, almost knocking over their rocking chair. Sometimes, that is, someone new would catch sight of Nashville for the first time.

  Once it had been an out-of-town aunt on a visit. She’d nearly fainted when she saw Nashville, and promptly called the police.

  “We’re sorry, ma’am,” replied dispatch. “But we don’t respond to cases of bizarre-feathered boys. Nor do we show up for curiously beaked youngsters or peculiar-shaped lads.”

  Nashville had made babies cry and dogs bark. He’d made at least two elderly in-laws on a visit get their glasses checked. And to top it all off, there was the issue of the ice-cream truck.

  “But why?” Protested Junebug on the hottest days each summer, days when the sidewalk sizzled and the pecan tree tried to hunch over into its own shade. “Why does the ice-cream truck go up every street but ours?”

  “Who can say,” replied her mother, who suspected the snub had more than a little to do with her bizarrely feathered, curiously beaked, peculiarly shaped son.

  When they reached the center of the village, Nashville and his family went to the doctor’s office for Junebug’s yearly checkup. In the waiting room a curious girl stared wide-eyed at Nashville. She looked at his feathers, and she looked at his beak. She looked until she finally had the courage to ask.

  “So,” she said. “Whatta you got?”

  Nashville looked around. He put down the Audubon magazine he’d been reading.

  “Pardon?” he replied to the girl.

  “I mean,” continued the girl. “What’s the matter with you? Why do you look like that?”

  “Nothing’s the matter with him,” interrupted Junebug. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Fell off my bike,” said the girl, holding up her arm in a cast. She turned back to Nashville. “You think the doctor will be able to fix whatever you’ve got?”

  “I told you,” said Junebug. “There’s nothing to be fixed.” She had just balled her tiny hand into a fist when the nurse emerged and called out her name. The girl’s mother pulled her daughter a few seats closer, in the opposite direction from Nashville.

  Nashville had been a patient at this same office for exactly one day of his life. Ten years earlier, the day he hatched from an egg, his parents had attempted to take him to this regular doctor.

  “I . . . I’m not sure I’m the right doctor for this, er, specific case,” the physician had stuttered. He tapped at the newborn’s feathers, shined his headlamp at Nashville’s beak.

  “Well, where exactly do you recommend we go?” asked Nashville’s mother.

  And that’s how Nashville ended up at Dr. Larkin’s office, the veterinarian down the street—a veterinarian who, as luck would have it, specialized in ornithology and the general care of birds.

  The day of his birth, Dr. Larkin put Nashville’s baby X-ray up on the wall and flipped on the light. He studied it, the bones white in the dark like a bleached shipwreck beneath the sea.

  “Seems healthy to me,” the doctor had said that day.

  “But he has feathers,” replied Nashville’s father. “Can it be fixed?”

  “Nothing to be fixed,” said the doctor. “Some children have freckles. Some have interesting birthmarks. Nashville happens to have feathers.”

  “Feathers . . .” said Nashville’s father shaking his head, his face still wearing a trou
bled look.

  “So he’s healthy?” asked his mother.

  “Well, there is this one thing,” said the doctor. “Nothing to be alarmed about.” He pointed to newborn Nashville’s X-ray on the wall.

  “See here,” said the doctor, pointing to Nashville’s shoulders. There seems to be a little extra something.” The doctor picked up another X-ray and put it against the light. This X-ray had the unmistakable shape of a bird’s wing.

  “A wing?” asked Nashville’s father.

  “Where a bird’s wing attaches to the body, it attaches by the same joint that we see here in Nashville.” Nashville’s mother and father stared in silence, and soon the quiet filled up every part of the room. Why, all the cotton balls in the doctor’s glass jar were simply puffed to the poof with silence.

  “Are you saying,” sputtered his father, “that our son is going to grow wings? That’s impossible.”

  Dr. Larkin smiled and clicked off the light to the X-rays. “Oh, no, no, I think not. But that would be something wouldn’t it? Hoo-ee. A boy with wings.” He paused in thought, breathed on his stethoscope, and then wiped it like he was shining an apple. “But in the end,” he said, smiling, “who can say? I know I for one try my best to never use the word impossible.”

  And so, after junebug’s checkup at the doctor, the family made their way down the street for Nashville’s checkup with Dr. Larkin, Goosepimple’s finest veterinarian.

  “Well hello, Nashville,” said Dr. Larkin when he walked into the checkup room. “You’re growing like a weed.”

  “Speaking of growing,” said Nashville. “Will you be taking an X-ray today, like you did last time I was here?”

  “Yes, yes, first let me have a look at you,” said the doctor. He turned on his light and looked in Nashville’s ears and eyes and beak. He breathed on his stethoscope and directed Nashville to take several deep breaths. He tapped Nashville’s knees and watched his legs kick forward.