The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty Read Free Book Online Page A

tries to shift into first, but the gear won’t move. More horns.
    She tugs harder, and again she tries to talk to the Volkswagen like it can hear her. Come on, baby, she says. Cars start to go around us, people yelling out their windows. Finally the gear pops into first, the engine racing. “Okay,” she says, making a sharp turn at the next corner. “We’re going to take a shortcut. No more red lights.”
    We turn onto a gravel road, and soon there are no more buildings, just fields of wheat. We drive and drive, going right over potholes, a dead possum. We are going too fast. Rocks kick up and hit the underside of the Volkswagen, like popcorn popping.
    Suddenly, she slows. She leans forward, looking up. “Evelyn, do you see that? Up ahead?”
    I squint, trying to see. To the left, maybe a quarter of a mile away, there’s a whirling blur of something dark, rolling down from the cloudless twilight, like a column of smoke moving down instead of up.
    “What is that?”
    If there were clouds, it could be a tornado. It’s that big, moving that quickly. But there aren’t any clouds. The day is cooling into night, and already I can see Venus, low on the horizon. The whirling blur is coming from nowhere, like a puff of smoke for something to step out of, a genie or a witch.
    We get closer, and I can see it’s not really a cloud, but a swarm of many small things, moving together. Mrs. Stanley said that one time grasshoppers came down from the sky and ate up all the Mormons’ crops in Utah, and they almost all starved to death. Eileen told me this had also happened to the Egyptians, only they were called locusts back then, and the Egyptians had deserved it.
    My mother stops the car. “Oh my God. Honey, I think they’re birds.”
    I lean my head out my window, pushing up my glasses. She’s right; it’s some kind of small, dark bird, thousands of them, maybe millions. They fall on the field below like rocks, shrieking, covering the still green stalks for as far as I can see, until the field itself looks like it is moving, or like this is the spot where all black birds come from, out of a crack in the earth.
    “Oh my God,” my mother says. She says it again as a shadow passes over us, darkening the car. It’s more birds, an entire cloud of them, blocking out the sun. They form a stripe across the sky that starts out thin and thickens as they spiral downward, on top of the birds already there. My mother rolls her window the rest of the way down, and we sit and watch, silent. It’s like watching lightning. It’s beautiful, the sky full of an energy I can feel in my fingers. But I have an uneasy feeling in my stomach, listening to their shrieks. Anything could happen now. The Earth could spin out of its orbit and crash into the moon.
    We watch. There are too many of them, and I can see now they are fighting, pecking one another out of the way. Some of them, the ones on the bottom maybe, the ones who were there first, are maybe getting killed, smashed flat by the weight of all the birds still falling from the sky.
    Suddenly, they begin to slowly funnel back up, forming thick lines again, moving in the opposite direction from where they came. They fly up in waves, in pulses, and I wonder what makes them do this, how they decide who will go when.
    “Wow,” my mother says, and then she says it again.
    She starts the engine, giving the gearshift a tug. It doesn’t move. “No,” she says. She tugs again. I try to help. “We can’t get stuck here,” she says, slapping the dashboard. “No!”
    But the Volkswagen doesn’t hear her. It doesn’t feel the slap, and it doesn’t care. I look out the window, and there is nothing, not one light on the horizon, and I get the uneasy feeling again. I press my hands together and pray to God to make the Volkswagen move, but this does not work.
    She gives up after a while, turning off the engine so at least Frank Sinatra will quit singing.
    “What should we do?” I ask.
    “I