What Dies in Summer by Tom Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

corner of my eye that her hair was sticking almost straight out from her head. Even the fuzz on the backs of her arms had begun to stand up. Feeling a tickle on my
own skin, I looked at my arms and at Gram and saw the same thing happening to us. Jazzy’s head came up.
    “Well, my land,” Gram said, trying to smooth down her hair. I noticed a smell in the air that reminded me of a hot radio, and then the entire world seemed to explode with something
completely beyond sound—like a gigantic fist somehow slamming into me from all directions at once. The accompanying flash half blinded me. The lights went out and the dishes went on rattling
for a couple of seconds.
    “Good heavens!” said Gram. “I think it must have struck the old sycamore.”
    I guess Jazzy had jumped into L.A.’s lap, because now she was peeking up at me over the edge of the table between L.A.’s arms, trembling and making small cooing noises, like maybe
the explosion was my doing and she was begging for mercy. You could see the whites of her eyes. I shook my head and put my hands over my ears. I had a problem with loud noises anyway, and this one
had started millions of little bells ringing in my head.
    L.A., who was damn sure wide awake now, said, “Is there gonna be a fire?” She had a death grip on her spoon, her knuckles white.
    “I don’t think so, honey,” said Gram. “Not in this much rain.”
    We sat in the semidark for what seemed like a long time, the noise of the rain wrapped around us like a weightless blanket. You never seem to notice how much a house is doing until it stops, and
it felt a little strange with nothing running inside. But after a while we began to hear something different out there, not just the rain anymore but something else falling, something solider than
water but not as hard as hail. We all looked at each other.
    “I guess we’d better just make sure it didn’t actually hit the house,” said Gram, pushing her cup away. She patted Jazzy’s head and gave L.A. a reassuring smile as
she got up, then went over to the window and bent to look out and up at the tree.
    I went and looked too. Outside the window just a few feet away we could see that the big speckled trunk of the sycamore had a steaming rip down its side, with long jagged splinters sticking out
and lying around on the ground. And along with the splinters there were also hundreds of fish, little silver ones, all the same size, quivering and flipping on the grass everywhere I looked.
    For once in her life, Gram was speechless.
    “Hey, L.A.,” I yelled. “Look at this!”
    As I said this the lights and the fan on the counter came back on. The toaster was upside down and thoroughly dead, and the stove clock stayed locked on 8:04 from then on, but otherwise the
workings of the house seemed to take up again exactly where they’d left off.
    L.A. got up from her chair and put Jazzy down into her box at the end of the counter. She looked out the window next to Gram and me, then ran to the cabinet under the sink and got an empty
mayonnaise jar. She banged out the front door about half a second later, and I ran out behind her.
    The fish were everywhere, all over the street, in flower beds, even on the roofs of the cars and houses. The rain had almost stopped, but a few fish were still plopping down from the trees.
    “This is crazy, Biscuit!” said L.A., looking around the yard and up at the sky. “Where’d they come from?”
    I couldn’t think of anything to say. I tried to imagine how far the fish could fall and still be undamaged like this. L.A. knelt down and touched one that was still twitching on the grass,
then sniffed the tip of her finger and licked it. “It’s salty,” she said.
    She began picking up fish from the lawn and dropping them into the jar. When she had five or six, she went to the spigot and filled the jar with water. The fish seemed perfectly normal to me,
darting around behind the glass like magnified eyes.
    Gram was