Beyond the Laughing Sky Read online

  Nashville looked at the birds in their cages, thinking about how odd it must feel to be able to fly, but not allowed. They looked back up at him and seemed to speak with their eyes. The caged birds seemed to all be asking the same exact question.

  And their question brought up an idea, an answer, in Nashville.

  “It’s a bit crazy,” he said. “But maybe. Just maybe . . .”

  “I think we’re ready,” announced Nashville two hours later, holding the ends of the strings. “Here goes nothing.”

  And with that, he flung open the doors to the pet shop. Attached to strings and held by tight knots, the birds flew and spread out. They were like dogs on leashes, except in the sky.

  “It’s working!” Nashville shouted, dancing below. He looked very much like a salesman holding a colorful bunch of enchanted balloons.

  He turned, made sure to be responsible and lock the door to the shop behind him, then let the birds lead the way.

  And what joy the birds must have felt, the wind once again running through their feathers. For a moment the strings disappeared, and they were free.

  “Now, now,” said Nashville. “Be respectful. No tangling, we’re not trying to make a maypole here.”

  One bluebird closed its eyes and imagined dipping down the meadow, past the nest where he had been hatched, the shells now crushed to powder, over the churchyard, straight up, until like rain into a puddle, the bluebird merged with bluest sky.

  Nashville took a turn onto the main street of Goosepimple. As he walked, the townsfolk began to take notice and emerge, one by one, from their perfect houses.

  “Why I never,” a man said as he stood with a hose watering his garden.

  “I want one,” a little girl said, looking up at her mother.

  “Meow,” cried a cat, looking hungrily at the birds.

  Soon, the entire street was lined with onlookers, and the murmurs and questions danced from freshly cut lawn to freshly cut lawn. Heads started popping out of upstairs windows, and it wasn’t long before a reporter for the Goosepimple Tribune showed up with his camera.

  “Is this some kind of promotional stunt?” he asked, his flashbulbs popping.

  “Oh no,” said Nashville. “I just feel one should take a stroll on such a fine day, don’t you? Even if one happens to be a bird.”

  He continued past the candy shop and the five-and- dime, where children pressed their faces against the glass. He finally reached the town square, where, storming across the grass, was the squat figure of Mrs. Craw.

  “Nashville! What on earth are you doing?”

  “I just thought,” he said quickly, “that it’s such a nice day with such a warm breeze, perhaps the birds would like to go for a stroll. . . .”

  “Have you lost your mind?” Mrs. Craw shouted, trying to untangle the strings. Her face was so red and round, it, too, looked like a balloon ready to pop.

  “You . . . you . . .” she was so busy figuring out what to yell, she barely noticed that the birds were dragging her heels off the ground. Yes, for a moment it seemed the wee woman could float away like the basket beneath a hot-air balloon, never to be seen again.

  “Nashville!” she shouted as the birds dragged her toward the shop. “Nashville you are absolutely, irrefutably, indubitably FIRED!”

  When Nashville’s father picked him up outside the pet shop, Nashville was standing with a police officer, a reporter from the Goosepimple Tribune, and several of the town’s busiest busybodies.

  Nashville’s father didn’t look very happy at all. His brow was furrowed and creased, the way it always became when he didn’t know what to say to his son. They walked quietly up the hill to the house in the pecan tree.

  “Nashville,” he said, finally breaking the silence, “I’m not mad.”

  “You’re not?” asked Nashville.

  “No,” said his father. “I don’t agree with what you did, but I think, on some level, I can understand why you did it.”

  “I was trying to be a good friend,” replied Nashville.

  “And that’s great,” said his father. “A bit ill conceived in this case, but a tip-top quality in anyone. But . . .”

  “But?” asked Nashville.

  “But I think,” said his father, “maybe you could spend less time with your bird friends, and more time with your classmates. Invite them over to play. Go to the field and get some grass stains.”

  “The other kids don’t like me,” Nashville said, nearly whispering. “A boy in my class even plucked one of my feathers.”

  His father stopped walking and knelt down in front of Nashville. He put his hands on his son’s shoulders.

  “They just don’t know you like we do,” he said. “They’d like you if they did. All I’m asking,” he continued, “is that you give it a chance. I think you’ll be surprised how many friends you’d make if you just try to fit in a little bit. Will you do that? For me?”

  “Yes,” said Nashville. “I can do that. And I think I know just what you mean.”

  “You’d like what?” asked the barber, an ancient old man with the posture of a jumbo shrimp. Nashville sat in the chair at the barbershop. Normally when he went there he simply requested a preen—a few feathers off the top—but this time he had a new request.

  “I’d like you to get rid of my feathers,” said Nashville.

  The barber looked nervous. “You sure?”

  “Yes,” said Nashville, who didn’t seem all that sure. “Cut them. Snip them. Buzz them all off. No more feathers. Feathers don’t fit in.”

  And so, reluctantly, the old man went to work. His scissors clipped and snipped away until the air was full of feathers. The barber’s assistant, a young, soundless boy, shuffled around the shop with a broom and dustpan trying to keep up with the storm. Finally, the barber took out his electric razor, and buzzed the last bits of feather from Nashville.

  “Ta-da,” said the barber, brushing Nashville’s neck and shoulders. “You are feather free, my young friend.”

  When he turned the chair around Nashville gasped—he had never seen himself without a crown of feathers on his head, and the sight of his own baldness was alarming. He ran his hands over the smoothness, and it reminded him of the way a baby’s head looks. It reminded him of an egg. It reminded him of something he hardly recognized at all.

  “How do you like it?” asked the barber.

  “Perfect,” said Nashville in a small, cracking voice. “Now I’ll fit right in.”

  That night in the village of goosepimple it began to rain.

  It rained sideways and backward, down, and sometimes it seemed to rain up as well. It rained so long and so hard that after three days the news began reporting there was a chance there would be a flood, the likes of which Goosepimple had not seen in over ten years. It rained and rained while Nashville and Junebug stared out the foggy windows, their board games lying exhausted on the carpet, their markers dried up from all work and all play.

  Nashville slipped away a few times, opening his toy chest, where he’d stashed the nearly finished wings. He’d worked night after night sewing on each individual feather, and he’d finished attaching the straps that would fit them to his body. He’d finished them except for one thing—one thing was missing, and he wasn’t quite sure what it was.

  “When will it stop?” Junebug asked, staring out the window.

  “I don’t know,” said Nashville. “But it will.”

  He was right, of course. One day, after a week of storming, the rain stopped falling just as suddenly as it had started.

  “See,” said Nashville. “No weather lasts forever.”

  And so Nashville and Junebug put on their galoshes and went out into the world. After so many days of rain, it was cool and cleansed and damp under the pecan tree. Fat water drops fell branch-to-branch, leaf-to-leaf, onto the ground. They fell on N
ashville and Junebug, who lay on the ground under the tree, too happy to be outside to care about the wet grass, too excited to see and touch everything as only two children can be after a solid week of rain.

  “Hey, Nashville?” said Junebug.

  “Yeah?” said her brother.

  “Mom and Dad told me not to say anything about it, because you’re going through something called ‘growing pains.’ But I have to tell you . . .” She seemed reluctant to continue in a very un-Junebug-like way. “Well, I preferred you with feathers,”

  “Yeah,” said Nashville, laughing, the drops from the tree falling on his bare head. “It’s been too rainy out for all this fitting in.”

  They stayed there, watching the raindrops fall down to the ground where they disappeared. But not really, of course, they only vanished to the naked eye. The rain had come, and it had gone, but it would still be there around them; under the ground the roots of the pecan tree would have their share, and the pale threads of the grasses, and the feet of moss. A few drops would enter the mole’s tunnel, and eventually, some would even find their way down to stones that, after being buried for thousands of years, would finally be able to feel the sky.

  Nashville wore a hat to school, but as soon as the bell rang, Miss Starling asked him to please take it off. He heard murmers and whispers around the room, but it wasn’t until recess, sitting in his tree, that someone said anything to him about his featherless head.

  “Hey.” It was, to Nashville’s surprise and dismay, Finnes Fowl standing below the tree.

  The large boy wrapped his large hands around a low branch. After three tries he finally hoisted one leg up as well, then pulled and grunted himself onto the branch. Nashville scooted aside to avoid being pushed out of the tree, or worse.

  “So why’d you do it?” asked Finnes. “It looked less stupid before.” He pointed to Nashville’s featherless head.

  Nashville was shocked. Finnes seemed to be giving him some sort of . . . compliment? Well, almost.

  “That’s what my sister said, too,” replied Nashville. He could hardly believe he was having an actual conversation with Finnes Fowl. He tried to keep it going. “You really liked the feathers better? I thought you thought they were gross or something.”

  In response the boy pointed to his own leg.

  “Wanna see something gross?” he asked.

  Nashville looked down to see Finnes’s leg, covered in vicious, red spots. It reminded Nashville of the pictures in their science book of the supernova, the dots meshed together in the center, then spreading over his whole leg.

  “I’ve had it since I was born,” explained Finnes. “I’ve never worn short pants before. But then you came to school, looking like you do, and I thought heck, if that pip-squeak can come to school with feathers, maybe I can show my legs. So I asked Ma to take me shopping.”

  “And you got yourself some shorts?” asked Nashville.

  “Yup,” said Finnes smiling. “I got myself some shorts. You should have seen it. Ma tried to act like it was no big deal, but then when she thought I wasn’t looking, I saw her wipe her eyes.”

  Finnes swung his legs. He let the bare skin brush against the cool, green leaves on the tree.

  “That’s good,” said Nashville. “This is a nice time of year for shorts.”

  “Right,” laughed Finnes. He rubbed Nashville’s head and jumped from the tree with a thud.

  “You’re all right, little guy.” And with that, Finnes Fowl marched away to his friends, leaving Nashville alone and smiling in his tree.

  Soon, it was time for the students in Miss Starling’s class to present the answers to the questions they had placed in the box like buzzing bees.

  The girl with a freckle on every spare bit of skin made her way to the front of the room.

  “Go on,” prompted Miss Starling. “What was your question?”

  The girl turned red, her freckles merging with the rest of her blushing skin.

  “My . . . my question was . . .” She stopped. “I don’t really think I should read it.”

  “Why not?” asked Miss Starling.

  “Because,” the girl said quietly, “it’s about someone in our class.”

  A look of shock swept over Miss Starling’s face, but only for the briefest moment. She took a deep breath.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “It was about Nashville,” explained the girl. “But that was at the beginning of school, and I’d never seen anyone like him. But now I don’t wonder my question anymore. So I picked a new question, one about how flowers grow.”

  The girl went on to tell the class about water and sunshine and how the plants could grow.

  “The earth laughs in flowers,” she said, quoting from her paper.

  The next to present was a boy with teeth like loose shutters. He explained about gas and matter and hydrogen and space

  “When it is dark enough,” he finished, “you can finally see the stars.”

  Miss Starling smiled. “You can take your seat now.”

  But the boy kept standing.

  “That wasn’t my real question,” he said, looking down at his shoes.

  “Oh?” asked Miss Starling.

  “Mine was actually about Nashville, too.”

  “What was it?” asked Nashville. Everyone turned to look at him.

  “I wanted to know if you were, like, a mutant. Like a superhero, I mean,” the boy quickly continued. The class laughed at this.

  “And?” asked Miss Starling.

  “I guess he is, kind of,” said the boy. “But not in the usual way.”

  The boy sat down. One by one the rest of the class stood and read their questions from the beginning of the school year. Braver now, they looked at Nashville as they read.

  What is he?

  Why is he?

  Was he a mistake?

  Almost all the questions, it seemed, had been about Nashville. But his classmate’s answers, Nashville realized, were not really about him at all.

  “I hate how tall I am,” said a girl taller than the boys. “But it’s not that big of a deal.”

  “It’s like, who cares if you have a stupid stutter, or feathers, or whatever,” said another boy, hardly stuttering at all. “None of that really matters.”

  “Actually,” said the prettiest girl in school, as she focused her eyes right on Nashville, “I wish we all had feathers,” she continued. “I think they’re beautiful.”

  Now it was Nashville’s turn to blush.

  “Nashville,” said Miss Starling, interrupting his thoughts. “I believe it’s your turn.”

  Nashville nodded, stood, and slowly made his way to the front of the class. It was the end of the school day, the air warm. But everyone in Miss Starling’s room was wide-awake.

  Nashville cleared his throat. He did not have a paper to read from, and instead spoke while looking out at the class.

  “My question,” he said, “is why can’t I fly?”

  “And?” said Miss Starling. “What is your answer?”

  “I don’t have one,” answered Nashville.

  “Why not?” asked Miss Starling.

  “Because,” said Nashville. He stopped then, looked at his class, the one he’d found so scary at the beginning of the year. The ones that now made him brave with their kind words.

  “Because,” he said, “I think I can.”

  The class sat very still after nashVille’s statement, and for what seemed like an eternity, didn’t make a sound. And then, finally, the silence was broken by none other than Finnes Fowl.

  “Prove it,” said Finnes, with more joy than mocking in his voice. “If you can fly, then prove it.”

  “Okay,” replied Nashville. “I will.”

  And with that statement, Nashville smiled a giant-sized smile, turned, and ran out the
door of the schoolhouse.

  “Nashville!” yelled Miss Starling. “Stop! Come back here! Where are you going?”

  But Nashville did not stop.

  He hooted. He hollered. He sounded what could only be called a barbaric yawp.

  Nashville ran and ran and ran all the way into the village of Goosepimple. He ran through his favorite park, and around his favorite tree; he waved to the puppets in the puppet shop, the old men gossiping on their porches, and several barking dogs.

  He was, in his own way, saying good-bye to Goosepimple.

  The last place he stopped was the pet shop. A closed sign hung on the door—likely due to Miss Craw playing canasta—but through the windows he could see the cages hanging around the store, birds hopping from perch to perch, or tossing around seeds, or staring at themselves in the mirror thinking they had a friend.

  And then, all of a sudden, he knew exactly what to do. He found himself doing something that, until that day, he would have thought impossible.

  Nashville broke into the pet shop.

  It wasn’t very hard actually. Nobody in Goosepimple locked their doors, and even when they did, they hid the key somewhere close. Nashville knew the key to the pet shop was under a stone turtle by the door.

  The birds started squawking their alarm the minute he walked inside.

  “Keep it down,” he said. “You can yell all you want once you’re out.”

  First Nashville propped the front door wide open. Next he flung open the large windows to the shop. And then, one by one, he unlocked every birdcage in the store. He stood back, waiting for them all to burst forward, but to his astonishment, not one of them moved.

  “Haven’t you ever heard the saying free as a bird?” he asked. “What are you waiting for?”

  Finally, a small lovebird hopped onto the edge of her cage door.

  “That’s it. Go on,” Nashville whispered. “Be brave. Be bold.”

  The lovebird puffed her chest once as if making a final decision, then flew out of her cage and out the door of the shop.