The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [0]
Also by Lisa Rowe Fraustino
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Copyright Page
Also by Lisa Rowe Fraustino
Picture Books
The Hickory Chair
Novels
Ash
Grass and Sky
I Walk in Dread:
The Diary of Deliverance Trembley,
Witness to the Salem Witch Trials
Anthologies
Don’t Cramp My Style:
Stories About That Time of the Month
Dirty Laundry:
Stories About Family Secrets
Soul Searching:
Thirteen Stories About Faith and Belief
for my son,
Dan
“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil
set off a tornado in Texas?”
—Edward Lorenz
Prologue
When he got the idea that would change his life, the boy was lying on his back in the cave near his home. He was staring up with his eyes crossed and waiting for the stone colors to show themselves again.
Months ago he had seen them for the first time. He was playing with his toy soldiers, and as he twisted his head to survey the dramatic battlefield, the colors blinked at the edges of his vision. When he tried to look straight at the bursts of color, they disappeared. It was maddening. He wanted to see them again.
Day after day he returned to the cave, hoping to glimpse the colors. He found that when he read there and his mind was involved in the world of the book, the colors sometimes flickered in the corner of one eye. If he stayed perfectly still at that moment, the colors would linger briefly, bright and pulsing in beautiful shapes that looked like ferns, or maps, or fields of broccoli.
One day he fell asleep in the cave, and as he awoke, before he remembered where he was, he thought he saw the colors everywhere in the walls, every color imaginable, swirling in three dimensions, making patterns like his mother’s crocheted blankets. He thought he saw threads of color crocheted down to the middle of the earth.
After that he found he could best call up the colors when he let his eyes float out of focus and turned his mind to daydreams. Today his mind wandered to a story he’d just read about dragons, and he imagined himself inside a dragon’s lair, trying to rob its hoard of jewels while the beast slept. As he reached for a ruby that had fallen away from the pile, the bold colors whirled in the rock overhead like wings flapping. For an instant he thought he could hear something—a musical ringing. The air suddenly smelled sweet.
“Beautiful,” he said in awe, though nobody else was near. He sometimes allowed a neighbor friend to join him in the cave, but only to play games or read joke books. He never told his friend about the colors he saw and his friend never saw them. That was his secret pleasure.
And now they were gone again, the dragon’s wings buried in lumpy gray stone. The colors always disappeared as soon as he became aware of them, and he was never able to revive the same vision. Each sighting felt like a gift and a loss at once. If he could only make the colors stay longer and hold their beautiful shapes.
While he lay wishing he could conjure up the dragon again, he decided that the next time he’d try to get the memory down on paper, perhaps make a painting. But where could he ever find colors like that? None of his pencils, markers, or paints would be the same. The colors in the rocks had depth, dimension, and motion. How could he capture that spirit on a flat sheet of paper with his schoolboy art supplies?
And then he realized. The colors existed in the rocks. Well, he could get them out! Yes, he’d chip away some stone exactly where the dragon wings had flapped, and he’d grind it down to find the pigments. Surely he could figure out how to turn the pigments into paint.
The boy ran straight home to find a chisel.
1
The first strange thing I noticed that cloudy Thursday morning was my brother’s cat jumping up on me