Matt Murphy meets you out at Mr. Fieldham’s Pond. Mr. Fieldham owns the woods across from your house and you often make up stories as you wander through the thick cluster of trees. In the winter, the woods thin and sans foliage, the entire area looks like magnified hair follicles.

Deep in the wood is a stocked fishing lake. You and Matt trespass often to get out to this lake. In the summer you sometimes swim in it. In the winter, you slide around on it in your stocking feet.

The two of you sit on a long hollow log. It sounds like Matt’s mom was pretty upset about the story you told to his brother. It contained all sorts of things that you shouldn’t have said, I guess.

Matt tells you that he doesn’t get it because his brother told him a ghost story about a boy that was trapped under a lake in Chicago when he cracked through the ice. He said that the boy still beats against the bottom of the ice on cold nights down near Navy Pier.

You tell Matt that he shouldn’t believe anything that his brother says. Anyone that is too scared of your story would probably make another story much simpler so they could understand it. Probably even if there was the ghost of a dead boy in Lake Michigan, it wouldn’t be able to make any sound, it would just have to stare up from its bed, the surface if the water seeming as impenetrable as ice.

Matt’s pretty quiet for a bit. “Do you still feel like sliding around on the ice?” he asks.

Not really, you say.

Matt gets up and walks away. Between the story you told his brother and the French girl project, you get the feeling you aren’t going to see him much anymore. You plod back to your house where you microwave a cup hot chocolate and heat up some leftover macaroni and cheese. Was it last year that you broke your arm? Really a year ago? There were so many things you couldn’t do, then, like pick up each macaroni and slide it over each tine of your fork.

Fevers break often in the middle of your dreams. You know when it happens. The very nature of everything changes, as if you’ve been sleeping with your toes balled up and someone comes into the room and straightens them.

Take this dream. There’s a man wearing very dirty clothes. It’s quite possible that the man has never changed his clothes. You know he must have because you can’t be born in clothes that will fit you your whole life. Some time a long time ago, though, he put on these clothes. These are probably it for him.

You look down in your hands and see that you have a set of clothes that are neatly folded and pressed that look exactly like his. When clean, this man wears a white jumpsuit with a little patch over the front pocket. Why not give him the new clothes? He has no reason to turn them down. He must like these workman’s clothes.

You walk up to him. He hasn’t seen you. He’s been fiddling with a ball of something so dirty that it’s probably at best a dirty ball and maybe something worse. The smell of the man is overwhelming. You feel yourself choke and sweat as you get closer to him.

“Here,” you shout the words at him as if his stench is so terrible that it’s muffling sound, “take these clothes.”

He takes the clothes and immediately, somehow, he has them on. The smell is gone. His beard is gone. His hair is cut and combed. He gives you a big smile of white teeth and good intention. “Thank you,” he says. “As a reward for your good deed, I bless you with the following: You will soon understand your father’s love of bad soft jazz. You will no longer see the woman with the baby carriage. You will soon find out what your mom does all day. You will get a receive a set of these clothes that fit so well that you won’t want to change them.”

You wake and your fever is gone as if it were a song that ended abruptly.

The French Girl has brought a pile of pamphlets from her father’s workplace for you to cut up for the project. You excitedly start to look through them, then feel disappointment. The robots that her dad builds are not like the ones on Buck Rodgers. These robots are car-sized wedges with single arms sticking out of them. These robots don’t have necks or eyes or even legs. Where are their mouths? They probably can’t even speak. How could they ever be good at communicating with aliens? What if you needed one of them to guard the door while you rerouted power from auxiliary resources to life support? What would a box with an arm do then?

“These robots build the cars, and then these robots,” she points at other blocks with single arms, “package Mars bars.”

You never liked Mars bars. A candy bar from Mars should be made of fantastic food items not found on earth. The texture of a Mars bar should be squirmy. The flavor of a Mars bar should change depending on what color the person is looking at while they chew. A Mars bar should be deadly unless eaten at a certain temperature and in a certain position to aid digestion. Mars bars should require special gloves and only be available in government institutions.

The French Girl says that she disagrees and that she likes Mars bars just the way that they are.

You tell her that you like pirates the way that they are, but if they had springs on their feet and could jump twice as high as normal men and rode around on laser sharks that would make them better.

The French Girl busies herself cutting out some pictures of the robots. You flip back through the catalogs and imagine these robots moving in perfect rhythm with a kind of waltz. You saw a bunch of robots like this once on 3,2,1 Contact. The robots were building kitchen appliances. There were still people standing around helping them. It reminded you of all the old people getting wheeled into and out of church during Sunday service.

You get bored and look out the window. The sky is the dusky amber color of another day in the dead of slurkan. Sometimes you wish you lived on a planet with less than seven seasons. The ice and cold of winter are depressing enough, but this following season when all of the fungi and decisiptible plants molt their falious skin membranes feels especially burdensome this year. Not a single person nor their loyal reghaudi servants are allowed outside the travel-chamber tubes during the variable seven-week ordeal. Of course it’s all in your best interest. The air during slurkan becomes thick and course like Antellian soup. To inhale the seed of nearly any plant on the planet Neaftipi is certain death. It’s only becomes a case of how slow that death will come.

“What do you think about now?” asks the French Girl. You have to reorder her words to figure out what she’s asking. She’s glued the robot to the poster. It looks kind of cool.

It’s hard to explain, you say.

Your father rubs his fingers along a reflective decal that he’s affixing to the window of your bedroom. The bubbles slowly work their way out from underneath it. The picture on the sticker is reversed, but you can see the firefighter and that it says “Baby In This Room.”

“I’m not a baby,” you say.

Your dad looks at you and says, “Well, yes, but son, we want the firefighters to know that, if there ever is a fire – which there will probably never be and you have nothing to be scared of – that they should break this window and save you no matter how hard this window is to get in to.”

Then he pulls a nail out of his pocket and starts nailing your window shut.Maybe you shouldn’t have slid down the roof last winter …

… nah. It was worth it. Next time you just need to know how to land.

Mom seems more intense than usual this morning. She leans against the wheel as she drives, her eyes scanning every bundled pedestrian. A cold autumn rain pelts against the windshield, each droplet intent on destroying itself throughly against the glass.

“Mom,” you say, “I have an art project and I have to do it with a girl from France and ..”

“Where in France?”

“Knowned.”

“Nantes.”

“Yeah! She’s from Knowned. And we have to work on a project together about our families. Her dad works in a robot factory and her mom teaches therapy and I told her that my dad works at a radio station but … what do you do?”

“I love you, and worry about you, and try to protect you,” she keeps her hands on the wheel. “That’s what I do.”

“I love you, too, mom. I know that, but what is your job? I mean what picture can I cut …”

“What do I do?”

The Ford Kuga glides to a halt at a stop sign. Your mom looks both ways then looks down at you in the seat next to her. You feel her eyes evaluating you through her dark glasses. Her thin pale lips form a twitching dask mark, but you don’t what words they are joining together.

“Do you want to know exactly what I do? Are ready to know?” she asks.

She pulls her sunglasses off, and you expect to see her motherly eyes, but instead you encounter harsh dark irises. You see the nighttime over the ice of Lake Michigan and cold nights waiting for her father to come home from ice fishing. She sizes you up. She wants to know your being. Answer her.

“Um … yes. I’m ready. Tell me! What do you do?”

She puts her sunglasses back on, released the brake and turns the corner without saying anything. You ride in silence. When the car stops in the front of the school, she grabs your arm before you leave.

“Next week,” she says, “I’m gonna have you walk the final two blocks to the school by yourself. Then you’ll find out what I do.”