"I'm not going to take -"

"You'll do as you're told, young lady!" Diane pulled onions out of the refrigerator. Thunk, into the sink. "And on Saturday I'm taking you to see Dr. Parker. She's a nice lady and she's going to help you in school."

"Okay." Sarah caved, fear of tests having a heavier specific gravity than fear of an angry mother.

"Honey," Corde told her, "you run into the den. I'll be there in a minute." When she left, Corde cocked his head and said to his wife, "Excuse me?"

Diane looked exasperated. "Excuse me what?"

"I thought. I mean, what you just said. I thought you weren't going to take Sarah to see her."

"Meat loaf?" Diane asked.

"Uhm, sure."

"Of course I'm taking her." Diane aimed a bunch of carrots at him and whispered harshly, "That woman is a bitch and she's a fashion plate and if she doesn't help my daughter then heaven help her."

Philip Halpern nervously carried the paper bag as he wound through the cluttered backyard to a greasy stone barbecue pit piled high with cinders and burnt steak and chicken bones. The boy set the bag in a cone of ashes and dug through pockets compressed by his fat body. Finally he took a book of matches from his shirt pocket. He did this with the reverence of someone who's afraid not of the fire itself but of unguessed risks that he's been warned fire holds. The match ignited with a burst of pungent sulfur. He lit the bag. It began to burn. Philip wondered if the smoke would be poisonous. He wished he had asked his friend Jano to do this -

Oh no…

Philip heard the footsteps. He looked up and in the dusk he saw the vague form of his father, a heavy man with a crew cut, wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. The only distinct thing about the lumbering shape was the red dot of his cigarette held between his fingers at his side. Philip felt his heart freeze.

"Whatcha doing, son?" asked the benign voice.

"Nothing."

"You ask me if you could burn something?"

"No, sir."

"You lit the matches yourself?"

"I was just fooling around."

"Fooling around with matches?"

"It's in the barbecue," Philip said, trying to keep his voice steady.

"I can see it's in the barbecue. Did you ask me if you could light a match?"

"No, sir."

"What'd it be?"

"Huh?"

"What'd I say about answering me that way? You forget the rules?"

"I'm sorry," Philip said quickly.

"So what is it? That you're burning?"

"Just some paper I found."

"More of those magazines?"

"No, sir." Please, please, please. Just leave me be. Please. Philip felt tears dribbling down his cheek. He was thankful for the darkness; the surest way to get smacked was to cry. "Just some paper."

"Where d'you get those magazines?"

"It wasn't magazines."

The bag flared suddenly as the contents caught fire. Philip believed he sensed a terrible smell. A human smell. He had an image of a small space creature enveloped in swirls of flames. He swallowed. In the flickering light he saw his father's face, a frown etched into the matte skin.

"You were out Tuesday night," the man said. "I looked in your room and you were out."

Philip's voice clogged. His heart beat like a roaring car engine and shoved all the blood out of his chest and into his face and temples.

"Weren't you?"

Philip nodded.

His father said, "A man answers, a girl nods."

"Yessir, I was out."

"Where?"

"Just went for a walk."

"Uhm," his father said. "All right. Handy man."

"Please, Dad…"

"Don't whine."

"I just… I'm sorry. I was just…"

Just what? Philip didn't know what he could say. He couldn't tell the truth about the bag. He wanted it to burn to silent ash, he wanted his father to die, he wanted to be thin. He wanted to stop thinking about breasts about girls about mud…

"Please."

"Hold out your hand."

"Please." But even as he was saying this, his hand rose. He found that it hurt less when he looked and he now stared at his own knuckles.

"You get one for the matches, one for the magazines, one for lying."

"I'm not -"

"Two for lying."

His father raised his fist and brought down his knuckles hard on the back of Philip's hand. The boy wheezed in pain.

Philip knew how he would kill his father. It wouldn't be strangulation, the way the Honons had killed Princess Nanya. It would be with some kind of gun. He wanted to pierce his father's body. He fantasized on this as the man's thick knuckles rose and fell, bone like iron, bone like xaser torpedoes.

Again, the searing pain. Philip pictured his father lying by the roadside, blood easing from deep wounds.

The flames in the barbecue flickered in the cool breeze. The radiation of heat ceased. His father's hand rose a final time.

Philip pictured his father lying by the roadside.

He pictured his father dying in a bed of blue flowers, dying in a patch of mud.

Bill Corde shudders once and wakes. It is two a.m.

He is a man whose dreams are anchored in logic, a man with a solid belief that images in sleep are replays of the week's events as sensible and sure as spark plugs firing according to the electricity sent to them by a new-scraped distributor. Dreams are not omens from wily gods, they are not inky-dark desires long ago snuffed.

Tonight however Bill Corde lies awake with trembling heart and legs so wet that he wonders for a horrid moment if he let go of his control as did his father every night of the last two months of his life. He reaches down and feels with meager reassurance the sweat along his thigh.

The dream was this:

Corde was sitting on a porch, the one he remembers from childhood. Only he was now an adult full grown and gray as the paint on the split oak of the floorboards.

There had been a terrible mistake, a misunderstanding so shocking that Corde was crying with agony. "I know," he answered the unseen person inside the house who had just told him the news, "I know I know I know… But I thought different all these years. I believed different…"

Oh no, oh no…

How could he have been wrong?

What the bodiless voice had told him and what Corde finally and tragically acknowledged was that although he believed that he had two children, he in fact has but one – the other being just a bundle of cut grass hunched up in the backyard of his house.

In his dream he sobbed and then he woke.

Now, lying in his damp pajamas, listening to the tick of Diane's breath, he feels the slam of his heart. He supposed the dream itself lasted no more than five or ten seconds. Yet he thinks he will carry with him for the rest of his life the memory of those dream tears he cried for his lost child – and for himself, because half his joy all these long years with his family has been false.

The burgundy Cadillac Eldorado pulled into the parking lot and eased into a slot painted in black letters: Mr. Gebben.

The driver of the car looked at the sign for a moment and thought of the parking space he had just left – one at the Stolokowski Funeral Home up the road. The sign there, which read Families and Guests, had been painted not in black but in bright blue. Richard Gebben thought there was sad irony in this; the blue of the sign at the funeral home was the exact shade of his company's corporate logo.

He climbed out of the car and, slouching, walked into the low pebble-walled building. An airliner's roar filled the sky for a moment and a jumbo jet began its takeoff roll at nearby Lambert Field. As the thick glass door swung shut behind him, the sound diminished to a whisper. "Oh," the receptionist said, and looked at him with a surprised stare. Neither spoke as he walked past.