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By Root 498 0

line again, a prayer he repeated each time he dug into the story he was telling himself, “We live on the edge, a shantytown filled with gold-seekers. We are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” He understood now who the fugitives were, a brother and sister, twins. Orphans. Orphans, in this world, were shipped off to terror orphanages as preparation for the next stop, to fight in a pit against other children for the entertainment of the rich and powerful. The brother and sister had escaped, had set up camp along with several other orphans, at the edge of the country, hoping to stay hidden long enough to become adults and therefore undesirable to the people looking for them. Buster had started with the words, his father’s own voice reading it aloud to him from the tape recorder, and he now had nearly ninety pages of something so strange that he had to remind himself to slow down, to let the words arrange themselves on the page, in order to prevent himself from smashing the story into tiny little pieces.

He knew what was happening. He was not stupid. The twins, they were him and Annie. The dead parents who had left them orphans were Caleb and Camille. The pit where the children fought was just a way for Buster to write about the violence that he sensed would be the ultimate end of all things. It would not, Buster understood, end well. But he had nowhere else to go but to the end of the story. He wrote for hours before exhaustion sent him to his bed, and he felt the satisfaction of creation, of making something that, while perhaps not yet successful, was made by his own two hands.

When he found himself unable to continue, the bend in the story obscuring what would come next, Buster would uncover the painting his mother had given him, which he kept hidden under his bed for fear that continued exposure to the image would turn the air he breathed radioactive. The boy in the painting was so intertwined with the tiger he was battling that it sometimes seemed to Buster that the two of them were embracing, were consoling each other for the inevitability of one of their deaths. The boy’s hands, wrapped in barbed wire, the rusted metal digging into his knuckles, were so expertly painted, so detailed, that Buster felt his own hands ache when he stared at the painting for too long. He was not sure, if asked, how he would place himself in the painting. Was he the boy? The tiger? One of the children who watched the struggle unfold? Sometimes he imagined that he was the barbed wire, an instrument used to cut open whatever resisted its touch. Other times, he imagined that he was already inside the tiger’s belly and the boy was fighting to retrieve him. His mother had chosen this particular painting for Buster. She had put it in his hands. And it was at this moment, holding the painting, sitting on the floor, the world still and frozen around him, that Buster felt he had found the thing that would bring his parents back to him and Annie.

He pushed open the door to Annie’s bedroom, the floor creaking beneath him, and Annie quickly snapped upright, her eyes wide open, something spring-loaded and delicately calibrated. There was no hint of sleep in her voice when she said, “What now, Buster?” He held out the painting for her. “This,” he said, offering the painting like a treasure that he could not possibly keep to himself, “is how we find them.”

When Annie returned from the kitchen, a coffee mug filled with vodka, Buster was arranging the rest of the paintings, until now hidden away in Annie’s closet, on the floor of her bedroom. “This will give me nightmares, Buster,” she told him, but Buster continued to lay out each tile, each baffling image of unrest. She took a long sip from the mug and then settled onto the bed. “Just tell me what you’re doing,” she said.

“These paintings,” Buster told her, sweeping his hand over them as if giving a benediction. “If Mom wanted them to be such a secret, why did she keep them in this closet? Why would she make it so easy for us to find them?”

“She wasn’t hiding them from us,” Annie answered.