Beyond the Laughing Sky (10 page)

T
he house was quieter without Nashville.

Well, not
quieter
really, but there seemed to be less of
something
. Junebug felt it, but couldn't put it into words. It was as if some magic had been peeled away like wallpaper.

Perhaps it was because when she looked out the window, Junebug still saw Nashville's birdbath covered in green moss and crawling ivy. Perhaps it was the dust gathering on his bureau and his tin soldier toys. And perhaps, just maybe, it seemed something was missing because someone was; Nashville had been gone for most of the spring, the world turning green, smelling of rainstorms and frogs.

Junebug grew accustomed to this new, quieter house, though odd thoughts did sneak up on her from time to time, the main one being just this: How could she have known? How was she to have known that the last time she saw her brother come downstairs for breakfast with his feathers a mess would be the
last
time? The last card game, the last adventure, the last thumb-fight over the first slice of cake. You rarely know, in the moment, when it's the last time you'll do something. Most of the time, the whole thing just sneaks away in the night, never to be seen or heard from again, not even sending back so much as a postcard to say hello.

Oh, there were stories of course, about where Nashville had gone. People claimed to see him just about everywhere, doing just about anything. Some said he'd joined the circus, made friends with the man with webbed feet and the yak girl with horns. Some said they saw him hopping trains like a hobo. Some said he'd never existed at all.

But who would ever
really
know what had become of Nashville?

Junebug would, that's who.

It happened at the end of spring, when the trees had turned from newborn lime to emerald and bottle green. The blossoms were in full bloom. Junebug awoke as always—tangled in her sheets, rubbing sleep from her eyes, rolling over to look out the window and see if there was anything new in the world. There never was. Until, that is, the day the honeysuckle arrived.

It was just a small yellow-orange blossom, nothing too exciting or unusual. What was strange was
how
it was placed, ever so carefully on the edge of her sill. It hadn't blown there, hadn't crept up the wall on its own. The closest honeysuckle bush was at the bottom of the hill, behind the high, high fence.

It could only, she thought, have been flown here.

“Nashville?”
she said, though she already knew the answer.

Junebug never told anyone about that honeysuckle that appeared many times at her window that spring. She never told anyone about the bird she would catch glimpses of from time to time, the one that felt so familiar, the one that would appear at the edge of her vision, but be gone by the time she turned her head. She never told anyone that she knew it was Nashville—knew without a doubt that it was her brother,
her brother
, who had been granted the power to transform into what he was always meant to be.

T
here is a house. it sits perched in the branches of the largest pecan tree in the village of Goosepimple. The tree grows on the top of a high hill, and the hill overlooks a small, perfect village, where the sun always shines, the grass is always mowed, and nobody ever, ever,
ever
uses the word impossible
.

It's not a law. It's not patrolled or policed. It's just that everyone in Goosepimple remembers that day, much like any other, when the old men gossiping on their porch looked up, up, up to the sky.

“Why, it looks like an angel in an updraft.”

“Naw, it looks like some sort of giant bird.”

“Naw,” said the third old man. “It looks like . . .
Nashville
.”

Oh, there were tourists just passing through of course, those who stopped in to ask the old widow who worked in the visitor center.

“Is it true?” they asked. “Did a boy in this town grow wings? Did he really fly?”

“Oh, yes,” the widow would say. “Nashville grew wings. Nashville could fly.”

“Fiddlesticks,” a Southern gentleman would say to the widow. “Folks can't fly. That's impossible.”

“What an absurd little word,” the widow would reply.

“Pardon?”

“You said impossible,” the widow would point out. “There ain't no such thing. There's things you've seen and things you may not have, but there ain't nothing that's impossible, sugar.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Brenda Bowen for believing first; Jake Currie for always reading; Nathan Winstanley for always listening; Zach Robbins for laughing with me; Lola Cuevas, Ray Cuevas, Sheryl Bercier, and Rita DeVarennes for cheering; Sarah Wartell for reminding me to see things more beautifully; Carlyle Massey for
promising it would get better; Mary and Edward Rossi for a room with a writing desk; Massachusetts Audubon for allowing me to hold a bird to my ear and listen to its heart. And to Nancy Conescu: You believed in Nashville from the very first day he was hatched.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michelle Cuevas graduated from Williams College and holds a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Virginia, where she received the Henry Hoyns Fellowship. She has worked in the youth education department at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and is now a full-time writer living in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.