Welcome Home

by Eric Smith

  “We love you, Zeke,” Mrs. Abernathy said, but Zeke said nothing.

  A few minutes later, Mr. Abernathy broke the painful silence with the rustle of his coat sleeve, soaking up a tear from his wife’s cheek before it fell into her cereal.

  Outside: 3/19/19

  “I love you, Zeke,” Mrs. Abernathy said on the drive home from the latest emergency delivery. She always asked to deliver more lobster if the kitchen ran out because it gave her the chance to sneak a few spoonfuls of Chef Mematiane’s lobster chowder while he and the bulk of the staff were busy unloading.

  Zeke, as he had for the last four years, said nothing.

  Mrs. Abernathy didn’t notice the reciprocated glance. A glance so small it could’ve fit within an atom.

  Inside: 3/19/19

  It had been years since the attack started.

  Everything was dying. The buildings were in a progressive decay, crumbling more and more with every pass of the sun. The streets were filled with expanding sinkholes, their foundation attacked by something I couldn’t see.

  “Any news?” I asked Oak.

  “The birds have found nothing and no one. The land around us is empty.”

  I groaned. “What do we do?”

  The oak shook his leaves. “We should consider surrender.”

  Surrender? To an unknown enemy? The whole kingdom? The place where I’ve lived my whole life? The safest place?

  “Most of the citizens have left, Zeke.”

  “This is how it was, you know. Before the king and the citizens. I don’t mind fewer people.”

  From the branches of Oak, I saw another building collapse. I knew that one. It was Mickey Cobbler’s. It toppled with a plume of dust, and before it settled, another earthquake shook the ground. It was like every quake that had come before. Small and sturdy. It was as if the fault line was directly under me.

  Another stone shook from its place in the massive wall surrounding my kingdom. A beam of bright light poured through the hole, punching the ground below with a glow as noticeable as the red flames of a fire.

  Thousands of those thirsty beams existed, rays of sun shimmering through clouds of dust, and their number grew every day. I knew that the shadows I used to travel in wouldn’t last much longer.

  I thought about the danger of surrender, the intense heat of the light coming through the new hole in my wall. I slid down Oak and stood by him, watching the dust of all the lost buildings float through the sea of speckled blazes.

  I slowly walked toward a ray of light, and then, when I was only a few inches away, I reached toward it, curious as to what kind of light could be so bright and pure. So hot. Was it a trick from the Wizard’s Guild? Some casting to find the missing architect of their dying city and enlist his help?

  My finger was swallowed by a brightness I felt in the innermost marrow of my bones. A sear both cold and hot. Tearing and melting.

  I cried and ran back to Oak.

  I settled in his branches. “Nope. We can’t surrender.”

  Outside: 8/9/19

  “Are you ready for your first day of high school?” Mrs. Abernathy asked Zeke as she readied his lunch: a bag of thinly sliced apples and a turkey sandwich on a pretzel bun. She knew this was his favorite lunch ever simply because he looked at her when she made him these things.

  “I bet you are,” she continued. “You get to see Mrs. Bailey again. She moved up from the elementary school to teach English. Stand up.”

  Zeke stood, and Mrs. Abernathy fingered his shirt collar and fidgeted with a tuft of hair sticking toward heaven on the back of his head. “Okay, you look good. Ready to go? All right, let’s go.”

  Inside: 10/2/19

  There was nothing left.

  Nothing but the walls, and even they were filled with holes.

  “They will collapse soon,” Oak said, his leaves the fiery red of fall. “You can either choose surrender or have it forced upon you. There’s no hiding from it anymore.”

  “We can’t. I’m alive here. If I surrender, I’m afraid I’ll die.”

  Oak stayed silent, and his silence confirmed it.

  “It’s safe here,” I added, though it was as obvious as the skin on my body that it wasn’t.

  Oak took a deep breath. I felt his bark expand under my feet. “It has never been safe here, only comfortable. Why do humans always assume that those are the same thing?” He paused. “Answer me something, before I die. Why do humans assume that isolation means safety?”

  “You won’t die, Oak. I planted you.”

  “Answer my question.”

  “If I’m alone, I won’t be hurt.”

  “Then why do you hurt when you are alone?”

  I looked at him, his question coursing through my veins, and that’s when his leaves began to drop. It was fall, but his leaves weren’t dropping because the season commanded it. It was obvious by the way they fell, straight down as if they carried weight instead of a calm flutter, that they were falling like the rest of the kingdom. Was I the only one who refused to believe that falling was the only choice?

  “You’re choosing this. Don’t leave me here,” I begged. “Please, Oak.”

  “I’m confident in my choice. The king will die soon, Zeke, and when he does, will you die with him? He will die paralyzed. His life a hostage to fear. Will you follow him?”

  “I don’t know the king,” I said. Tears streamed down my face, watering the Oak’s dying branches. “I’ve never known the king. You know that!”

  “Of course you have,” Oak said. “It’s you.”

  The last of his leaves fell to the ground, and immediately I felt the spirit of his company fade like the warmth of the sun as it dips below the horizon. For hours after he left me, all I could do was sit in his branches and cry.

  Eventually, I climbed down him, but I didn’t leave. I sat underneath him and watched as his limbs decayed, each one snapping from his trunk and falling to the ground like an earthen icicle. As time passed, all that wasn’t limb and branch—his stump, his roots—turned into dust and blew away.

  In the hours I spent watching Oak die, I realized three things:

  I was alone. I was the king. And I still hurt.

  Outside: 12/29/19

  Mr. Abernathy threw another log on the fire. The rest of his family had abandoned him to the flames hours ago in search of sleep. He sat and stared at the blaze with a heavy mind. He considered picking up the Xbox controller to play a silent game of FIFA, but he was too distracted with processing the “whats,” “whys,” and “hows” that plague most humans when they reach the New Year.

  Would Zeke speak by the time his sister, two years old, began to bring boys home? Why could Zeke hear so well, and do everything asked of him, yet never find words? Would the coming year be the year he spoke? Was he, Mr. Abernathy, hoping where hope didn’t exist?

  Maybe love and time couldn’t fix the most collided of collisions.

  In the midst of his fervent hoping, Zeke came out of his room and sat next to Mr. Abernathy on the couch.

  “Can’t sleep?” Mr. Abernathy asked.

  Zeke didn’t answer.

  “I just put another log on the fire. You can hang here for a while. Maybe that will help.”

  And then, much to Mr. Abernathy’s surprise, Zeke began to cry.

  Inside: 12/29/19

  I was in the center of the kingdom, where it was darkest, but even there the beams of light swallowed most of the space around me.

  I sat in the spent ashes of my oak’s limbs. He’d kept me warm, but I’d just thrown his final limb on the fire. It went up in a quick flare of heat, and just as quickly turned to smoldering coal. The fire was dying, and as the light waned, I knew I’d die there. In that ever-present darkness. I also knew that my wall wouldn’t fall unless I asked it to.

  My
enemy had stopped shaking the stones loose. That way, the decision to surrender would be mine. I knew I’d die either way, in the dark or in the light. I knew because I was the king. I was alone. I hurt. I thought of the kinds of death I’d meet in the darkness, and they all frightened me. Starvation. Slow and painful. Pneumonia. Slow and cold.

  Every death slow.

  As my fire’s coals turned to black and crumbled with one final puff of smoke, I knew what I had to do.

  I stood and walked toward the west section of the wall, but I did not stand in the beams of light. Their brilliant forms rested on burnt grass only inches from my feet.

  In the dark, I’d die forever. In the light, I’d only burn for seconds.

  I wiped my cheeks and took my last breath.

  “Walls, fall,” I said, voice trembling.

  With an ancient rumble, the earth beneath me began to shake. Stones clattered against themselves before falling with heavy thuds to the ground. And then, all at once, the walls fell and what had kept the light at bay was nothing more than a pile of ash. The light screamed through. The burn I’d felt on my finger before wrapped around me hot and fiery.

  In the light of my last moments, I saw buildings past the crumbled line of what was my wall. It was a new kingdom bright and burning, and the more of myself died in the light, the bigger the kingdom became. And right before there was nothing left of me, I knew the burning kingdom hadn’t come to end my reign.

  It had come to bring me home.

  Outside: 12/29/19

  Mr. Abernathy held his son and cried with him too, even though he knew they weren’t crying for the same reasons. Despite these reasons, he knew that moment meant something. The last four years of Zeke’s silence had been broken not by words, but by sobs, and though Mr. Abernathy was sad that the silence wasn’t put to death with audible verse, he was aware of humanity enough to know that tears were just as complex and loud.

  “Ezekiel,” Mr. Abernathy said, his tears seeping into the couch cushions. He asked the question he’d asked every day for the last four years. “Do you hear me?”

  The fire crackled. Mrs. Abernathy snored in the bedroom. The clock ticked as it always had. Mr. Abernathy loved like he always had.

  It was the most normal of evenings.

  “Yes.”

  Dave Connis writes words you can sing and words you can read. He is the author of The Temptation of Adam and Suggested Reading. He lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with his wife, Clara, and a dog that barks at nonexistent threats. When he’s not writing YA or MG, he’s probably working really strange part-time jobs and doing other things that actually give his family the ability to eat food.

  “For some, love takes a long time to hear.”

  “Even for people who’ve had one, ‘home’ takes a lot of time to parse out. Putting roots to the concept, physical and emotional, is never easy and rarely as obvious and simple as just a structure with four walls. Adoption attacks the complexity and baggage of what ‘home’ means with pure love, in all its forms: ornery, unconditional, hard, easy, and chosen. Adoption invites all involved to love and be loved, to fight to be a home outside of ourselves, whether or not we know what that means. I hope to join that fight someday.”

  The Inexplicable Weight of Mountains

  by Helene Dunbar

  It began with Joey’s mother asking Mom how much she paid for me.

  It began with Aunt Susie whispering behind her hand that four “in-country” families would have had to reject my file before Mom and Dad could have seen it.

  It began in middle school with Jordan Lee asking where my parents got me, since I obviously wasn’t “theirs.”

  No, really, it began with the family tree project in art class. That collection of construction paper and photos and glue that was just one more deadline to meet for the rest of the kids, but which kept me up for two straight nights trying to remember who my parents’ great-great-whatevers were.

  And it didn’t matter anyhow, because all I saw when I closed my eyes were mountains from a grimy second-floor window. Mountains I’ve never visited, would never visit, but mountains I stared at every single day for six years. European snowcapped mountains. I didn’t know why their image came back to me so often. I wasn’t even sure that they were memories and not something from a book. It felt like cheating.

  My parents never hid the fact that I was adopted. I mean, they couldn’t have. My mom is a pale redhead who burns every time she looks out the window. My dad has brown hair that gets pastel in the sun. Next to them, I look like a cookie left too long in the oven.

  When I was little we even talked about how I was from Eastern Europe. I loved to hear about how my parents brought me home. And then, just like the story of Santa Claus, I outgrew it and was more interested in Star Wars.

  And then I didn’t think about it again.

  Until I did.

  To: Yuri.Guryev@birthsearch.ru

  From: MountainBoy@me.com

  Mr. Guryev: I read on the Internet that you can search for people’s birth families. Can you tell me how that works?

  Thanks!

  “You’ll be careful, right?” Mama whispered from bed. She held the car keys out with a shaky arm. Migraines always hit her hard.

  I raised my eyes and tried to look confident.

  “Marin?” she whispered.

  “Yes, Mama, of course.”

  Given my lack of an official driver’s license, I understood her concern. I had my birth certificate—two certificates, actually—the European one that listed Marin Avelin as the son of Kirill and Darya and the American one that listed Marin Simon Frazier as the son of Frank and Melissa—, but somehow my citizenship certificate had gone missing. We’d reapplied, but the letter we got back said it was going to take six months. That meant that while I’d passed Driver’s Ed, the state wouldn’t give me a license or even a permit until we had all the paperwork.

  Mama sighed. If she didn’t need her meds, if Dad weren’t traveling for business, if there was anyone she could call to pick up her prescription, she wouldn’t let me drive on my own. I got it.

  “It’s okay. I’ll just go to the drugstore and come right back.” I looked away. Mama was uncanny about reading a lie in my eyes, and I didn’t want her to see the other plan lurking behind them.

  I took the keys and jingled them, not noticing I was doing it until Mama winced. I shoved them in my pocket.

  The room grew cold with the chill of the snow covering the tops of mountains so far away. It felt as though a part of me was trapped there in the orphanage, staring out the window, and I didn’t know how to get that part back.

  “Marin? Are you sure?” Mama asked. I usually told my mother everything.

  But not about the mountains. And not about stealing time that I was supposed to be using to finish my summer reading list in order to see Lisa.

  I leaned over the bed. “Of course, Mama,” I whispered, and kissed her before heading to the door.

  “Take care, polar bear,” she croaked.

  “Must disembark, aardvark,” I replied as I had hundreds of times.

  I drove slowly. Sticking to side streets. Thirty miles an hour tops. I didn’t even turn on the radio.

  Lisa Kilkenney’s house was in the subdivision next to ours. Her door was pale green like the color of her eyes, and her mom’s old car that sat dusty with end-of-summer pollen in the driveway.

  She was just finishing washing the wheel wells when I drove up. I rolled down my window and called out, “I can ask Mom to let me help you with that after we get back.”

  She shook her head and said, “It’s okay. I got it,” just like I knew she would. She loved old cars and caring for old cars, and, though we hadn’t said it yet, I kind of hoped she loved me.

  She dried her hands and got in the car, and then all was right with the world.


  They don’t teach you how to drive one-handed in Driver’s Ed. They don’t teach you how to focus on the road when the girl you’re falling in love with is sitting right next to you and her perfume is making your head spin back to mountains and mountains and mountains.

  “I only have an hour,” I reminded her out loud, but really I was reminding myself. “That’s fifteen minutes there, and fifteen back. And I can say there was a line.”

  “It’s better than not an hour.” Lisa squeezed my hand. My stomach, or maybe it was my heart, lurched as if I’d eaten something that was looking for escape.

  Morris Grocery was out on Smithton Road. There were closer pharmacies, but I was lucky that Mom had been using this one since it was closest to her office.

  When I thought about it later, I didn’t know if I had seen the family that was begging at the edge of the parking lot when we pulled in. I think maybe I saw the streetlights, the kids riding their bikes on the grass median, the way it looked like it might rain but then again like it might not.

  All I know is that my attention was on the heat of Lisa’s skin, the way my heart was beating frantically out of time, the too-fast tick of the watch on my wrist—a present from Dad on my sixteenth.

  In the store, I dropped off Mama’s new prescription.

  In the produce aisle, we tried grapes that tasted like cotton candy and apples that tasted like grapes, and I took a small toothpick of sample cheesecake and placed it in Lisa’s mouth like a sacred offering.

  We talked about school. An upcoming dance. The latest episode of our mutually favorite TV show.

  I looked at our hands, hers so light in mine, and wondered: if we had kids, what color would their skin be? Would they have her green eyes, or was it only possible that my darker features would take over? We’d talked about dominant and recessive genes in bio, but I didn’t remember how it worked.

  Too soon, my name came over the intercom. Too soon, we paid for Mama’s prescription and wandered back to the car. Too soon, we were leaving.

  “That’s so sad,” Lisa said, pointing out the window at a family of beggars hanging out near the side of the parking lot. A woman sitting cross-legged under a tree with a baby on the ground propped up against the trunk.