The Ghost Trolley

A Tale for Children and Their Adults

By Christopher Bernard

Chapter 3. A Girl in a Red Jacket Under a Green Sky

As the trolley clanked noisily down the tracks, it suddenly emerged from what looked like a tunnel, but no – it was an old covered bridge, of the kind seen in the woods near Halloway, and that Petey always thought looked “romantic,” like his mother said, to a guffaw from his father – even eerie and haunted, though in a way that wasn’t scary. He had always liked the bridges, with their rumbling, uneven planks as the family car slowed down to drive across them with long shadowy interiors dotted with sunlight peering through cracks and the smell of damp, decaying wood. But this one wasn’t rumbling at all. Nor was there any sign of sunlight.

For the sun was only just now rising through the trees ahead of the trolley.

But Petey noticed something strange. It made his heart skip a beat. The shadows on the other side of the bridge looked all wrong: rather than falling from right to left across the trolley rails, which they should be doing, the shadows now fell from left to right. The trolley had been running north, unless they had made a weird turn when he was asleep. But that was impossible; they would have been back in Halloway by now if that had happened, not in the forest at all. If they were still in the forest, they had to be north of the town. And they were definitely in the forest.

At that moment the trolley moved across a break in the woods – a meadow cut through by a racing stream – before moving back into the forest darkness.

And above the meadow was the sun. And it was blinding him.

Petey had to throw his hand over his eyes. This was crazy – not that he had to cover his eyes against the sun, but because he shouldn’t have had to do that in the first place: the sun shouldn’t have been on that side of the trolley  It was in the wrong position. It was rising in the west, not the east. Petey pushed close to the window and looked up, past the blazing patch where the sun silently roared.

The sun was rising into a sky without a single cloud across its vast and shining expanse.

And the sky was pale green.

And not only that: it wasn’t winter anymore.

Petey pinched himself. Yep, he was awake all right, unless you could pinch yourself in a dream and still stay asleep.

There was no ice or snow anywhere, not on the ground, not in the trees, not in the crevices of the trolley’s windows. The banks along the trolley tracks were covered with a thick blanket of ferns and brush and wild flowers – a blossoming tapestry with a complicated blend of fragrances so strong and lovely he pressed his nose against the window crack so he could smell it better. It looked like, and smelled like, a drowsy, dewy morning in late spring. He pushed the window open as wide as he could.

Not only was the sky green, but some of the vegetation – the long grasses, for example, and some of the weeds – was blue. He could see clover (also blue) on the banks of the trolley cutting, and, on a sudden zephyr, several blew through the open window into the trolley. He picked one up from the seat next to him; it was a four-leaf clover! At first he felt “hella lucky,” as his dad would say, then he picked up two others that had blown in beside it: they were all four-leaf clovers! For some reason, this made him shudder.

He peered more closely at the forest the trolley was passing through. It also was different: the trees had pale gray bark, as he was used to seeing, but the boughs didn’t start till high up, leaving the lower trunks smooth and bare, and the roots started several feet above the ground, forming little, cozy cage-like shelters at the base of each tree. And the leaves looked strange: each tree had leaves with many different shapes, some of them like the wings of birds, others like seashells, others like palm fronds or banana tree leaves, some like oak or maple or sycamore leaves – but they were all on the same tree, which was definitely not how he knew trees grew back home.

Back home! But if this wasn’t “back home,” where in McGillicuddy’s bean patch (another favorite “dad phrase”) was he?

He heard what he thought was birdsong, as it was coming from the trees, but it wasn’t like anything he’d ever heard: there were long sharp hisses, then chattering and ratchety crackles, followed by a little, spiky shrieks. And then he saw the little furry animals that were making the noises; they were flying through the trees, though they were definitely not birds!

They sailed through the treetops like flying squirrels, though these looked more like chipmunks, one of them like a possum, another like a rat, another like a bright red fox; they spread their arms, the skin spreading out from their torsos like little sails or wings as they flew from bough to bough. There was even a monkey or two hanging out in the upper branches, but quite tall and with less fur, and they stopped and watched the trolley intently and seemed to notice Petey and watch him with an especially alert look on their wizened faces. The forest here looked like a jungle!

Petey tried to crouch out of sight when he saw the monkeys watching him, though he was immediately mad at himself: so what if the monkeys saw him, let ’em look! He had nothing to fear from them – did he?

Other mysterious eyes were watching him from the dense foliage of the trees: large round eyes in small round heads, bracketed by curiously stirring wings. One pair of wings took off heavily to follow him as he rode past, followed by another, then another, and another . . .

Not long afterward, the trolley came to the edge of the forest. At first the brightness of the sun dazzled the boy’s vision and Petey held his hand above his eyes like a hat brim until he could focus again. The first thing he saw clearly was something lying on the ground near the tracks just ahead of the trolley. 

It looked like the body of a man. He seemed to be sleeping. He lay with his face in the grass, with one arm stretched forward as though he were trying to hold on to something that was no longer there. Maybe it was one of the homeless people Petey sometimes saw in Halloway, usually from one of the big cities not far away – Portland or Burlington. Petey felt a spasm of pity for the man as his body passed beneath him and to the rear.

The boy, his eyes fully adjusted to the stark morning light, suddenly looked at the landscape surrounding him.

It was partly hidden by what looked like brown fog, that blew away here and there to reveal patches of blackened, in some cases still burning houses, barns, sheds, stables, granaries, silos, whole farmsteads, charred woods, fields pocked with craters like holes punched out by a crazed giant; and villages were burning in the distance, and the waves of smoke moved across the land like ghosts.

The boy was at first too astonished to be frightened. It looked too awful to be real, and he felt at first a certain detachment, as though none of this was happening to him; it was like being thrust without warning someone else’s nightmare.

A solitary bird was winging slowly above a dead tree. But it was flying upside down.

Then the boy saw something that made him shiver: the driver’s seat had changed – before, it had been on the left-hand side of the trolley, as it always was; but now it was on the right. He still couldn’t see any sign of the driver: just the tall back of his seat, and his coat, now on a hook on the other side of the driver’s cabin, swinging back and forth. The mirror above the driver’s head, in which he could usually see the driver’s face, was blank.

The bell clanged three times, and the trolley moved onward. Petey squeezed his face against the window and stared as they moved across the vast desolation. What had happened? Why had he heard nothing about it? Something like this would surely have been broadcast on the news – wouldn’t it? What was this? Where was he?

Then he saw her. It was a little girl dressed in a red coat, though the coat was covered with black streaks like stains; she was standing in a field next to the trolley tracks, watching the trolley come toward her. She started waving frantically.

The trolley stopped and she got in, mechanically put a coin into the coin box, and walked back with head down toward Petey as the trolley moved forward. Petey watched her intently as she sat in the seat across from him, without apparently noticing him.

She was a small girl, with frizzy hair and honey-brown eyes, from what he could see; her skin was smooth and brown, like cocoa; like the skin of Sambene, the little African American girl in the other fourth grade class, who Petey had a crush on.

The girl heaved a sigh. Her cheeks were stained with tears and ashes.

Petey wasn’t sure what to do. His parents had always warned him against talking to strangers. But, under the circumstances, wouldn’t it have been terribly rude to say nothing at all?

“Hel-lo,” he said shyly, his voice breaking between the syllables.

“Oh, hallo!” the girl said in a small, startled voice, seeming to notice him for the first time. She turned toward him; yes, her eyes were as brown as honey.

Petey’s heart skipped a beat, for the second time that morning.

“What happened out there?” he asked, after hesitating for almost a full minute.

The girl stared at him with large, sad eyes that hardly seemed to see him. They shone with tears.

“They come for us!” she said, in a curious accent Petey had never heard before.

“Who came for you?”

“The Korgan of Ramora! It part of the big battle last night. You must see that!” And bursting forth from having been pent up so long, her words came tumbling out. “They come in middle of night and take me father and me mother and me sister and me brother, and they take me if I not hid under bush at back of our garden, and they set our house on fire, and I have to wait all night, watch our house burn down, and I ken’t believe it so I look at it when it all over, and I slip and fall in the ash, then I run away as sun rise till I see the yellow trolley that cross the middle of Otherwise when there be a blue moon, like there be last night, and here I am . . . ”

Petey tried to take all this in, without quite succeeding.

“Why did they want to take you?”

“It part of the war . . .” The girl looked at Petey closely for the first time. “Don’t you know? Not you from here?”

Petey shrugged uncomfortably.

“No, this is the first time I’ve ever been here. I got in the trolley to go to school and I fell asleep and I missed my stop and I waited for the trolley to take me back but it took me here instead.”

“Oh,” said the young girl, still sadly. “That must mean you from Howtiz.”
            Petey, who had never heard of “Howtiz,” looked doubtful, but felt it would be impolite to contradict someone who looked so upset.

“This be Otherwise,” said the girl, wiping the tears from her eyes (telling her story seemed to have relieved her a little). “You can see the different destination on front of trolley. When it go back from here it say ‘2 Howtiz.’ In Otherwise, things be different from Howtiz, completely different, but not all at once, which why it called Otherwise. Anyway that what me deddy tell me. I only know Otherwise, I never be to Howtiz. I always want to go there, because Otherwise not exist without Howtiz—at least that what me deddy tell me some of our philosopher say, though other philosopher claim otherwise. Me deddy say that so like them. They never make up their mind about anything.”

Petey blinked at that. Philosophers claimed otherwise about Otherwise? The thought gave him a little brain spasm.

“Anyway, I always want to see for meself, by going there on yellow trolley. But me parents never let me go. And a blue moon be rare anyway.” She sighed again. Speaking clearly made her feel calmer, so she continued. “We live, I guess not anymore, in Forest of Paal. Me deddy  a teacher. Me mommy a doctor, and there be three children. We live peaceful before the war and the Korgan from Kingdom of Ramora across Mountain of Sleeping Noor invade we. Everyone force to join one side or other, either Korgan or Paona, who be largest group who live on the plain. It easy for we to choose, cause Paonas gentle and honest, but very poor, and there not be many of them, and Korgan, though they be rich and powerful and strong, and there be many of them, not content with what they have but think they must have ever’thing. They probably not even be content then!” she sighed

The girl paused, as if uncertain whether to tell the boy from Howtiz any more.

“You couldn’t just stay out of the fight between them?”

“No,” said the girl positively. “You do that, everyone turn on you. ‘Whoever not enemy of me enemy, be enemy of me.’” She said the last in a detached singsong voice, as though reciting a school lesson she had become profoundly and bitterly skeptical of.

Petey looked uncertainly at the girl. He was thinking about what he saw altogether too often on the news back home. Back home! Sigh . . .

“Are you sure we are in Otherwise?”

“Yes, of course! Why you ask such a question!”

“Because what you say sounds an awful lot like where I come from.”

“The world Korgan and Paona fight for not just world of Otherwise,” she continued, ignoring Petey’s remark, “it be world of Howtiz, too. Whoever win will take over Howtiz as well. The two world come together then into one world – for better or worse. At least so some of our philosopher say . . .”

“When they aren’t saying otherwise?”

“Exactly right!” She gave a little laugh. “I doubt anyone know, really. But that what me parents tell me.”

The boy felt rather solemn after he heard all of this.

The girl looked straight at the boy.

“But,” she said, leaning in toward him; seeming finally to make up her mind to tell him everything, “there be another reason Korgan invade.”

She stared hard at him with her honey-brown eyes.

“They invade to find Spell.”

Petey gave her a blank look.

“So, what is ‘Spell’?”

“Spell be secret of Otherwise. Or one secret,” she added conscientiously.

The two children looked gravely at each other as the trolley moved quietly onward. The sun was just behind the young girl’s hair, making it glow.

“Me deddy tell me the story. Spell discovered many generation ago by the Paona. At first it make them happy, because it give them power over whole world, me deddy tell me. But it soon come clear such power can also destroy world, and so it too dangerous to keep. It too much for Paona to know. And so they bury it in a distant, hidden place and try to forget it. But my father say fact they once have that power can never be forgotten, never utterly entirely. Every so often someone break down and try, in middle of night, because it against law and every commandment of our religion, to dig up Spell, but no one ever able to find out where it buried.

“Then one day me deddy, who also like to invent things  – mostly toys for childers, but sometime big important things for adults – thought he had worked out – completely by accident, he say, but I think he just modest – what Spell be. Last night he tell me mommy. And I overhear them.” The girl’s face looked almost frightened. “I not sure I hear everything, but I remember everything he say.”

“But what was this ‘spell’ all about?” asked Petey impatiently. “Why was it so dangerous somebody would start a war because of it?”

“First of all, you must know Otherwise only exist because different things happen in all kind of different ways, but by chance,” said the girl. “Anyway, that be what me deddy say though I don’t really understand it. What Spell do be this: it make possible to go back into past and change into future – What Be. Even more: What Is. That why it be so powerful. It possible for you – for anybody – to make another Otherwise, and then another, and then another . . .”

Petey stared at her.

“If you have Spell, you have power over all of time. And therefore over all of world. So.”

And the possibilities this suggested to him swirled through Petey’s mind in a flash of intoxicating wonder.

Chapter 4. The Exploding Trolley

“What be your name?” the girl asked politely.

“Petey,” said Petey, coming back from his momentary trance.

“Me name be Sharlotta.”

For some reason Petey blushed, and the girl lapsed into silence. She seemed a good deal less upset now.

“Our home so beautiful,” the girl said quietly as she stared across the ruined landscape outside the trolley windows. “It not big, like a gookor, it be more like a gimpy, but it be roomy enough, and cozy. We live there long as I remember. Me mommy say I born there, but I think that can’t be so. After all, my little sister born in a gorpal in town.” She was silent for a moment, then continued dreamily, “We have two kerdles, and we have a bumble who think he a kerdle, and we have a goffney out back where we grow cispies and prunables and gerk trees that unleave in the fall and flourish all winter until the kerries turn many colors in sprang, and we have a wintry house where we eat when it not rain, above a custer with a pearly so fresh and cold you can kneel at the bank and cup your hands and drink it whenever you thirsty, it be most delicious beverage in the world, me deddy say.” She stopped, as though the dream had abruptly ended, and her face again crumpled. “Now it all gone . . .”

Petey had hardly understood a thing that Sharlotta had said, but her words sounded so heartfelt he too felt deeply sorry that it was gone, and he sighed.

It was then he heard an angry series of shouts from in front of the trolley, which came to an abrupt halt. The two youngsters were thrown from their seats to the trolley floor.

Petey scrambled up and peered around his seat toward the invisible driver. The jacket had fallen from the hook.

Sharlotta stayed down behind the seat in front of her.

“It be them!” she whispered in a terrified voice.

The trolley’s back door, which was right in front of them, had been thrown open when the trolley halted. Petey took the girl’s hand and, without a word, they scurried down to an embankment thick with tall ferns and other brush, and hunkered down among them out of sight.

Two large males, dressed like soldiers from a bygone era and holding weapons that looked to Petey like a weird blend of crossbow and machine gun, their skin as pale as milk but looking like they hadn’t washed in months, walked up to the trolley’s front door, looked inside and waited.

The driver didn’t emerge. Petey, who had never gotten a good look at the driver, was curious to see more, but Sharlotta tugged his sleeve to keep down.

Petey could hear the Korgans talking in the distance, but could neither see them nor make out what they were saying.

“Maybe we should get away from the trolley,” he whispered, suddenly feeling queasy.

 They crept through the brush quietly up the bank to several curious-looking trees at the top – their canopies of leaves were broad at the bottom and narrow above, twisting up in a shape like a flame. From there Petey could see clearly into the driver’s cabin: there was no one in the driver’s seat! His father had said that driverless trolleys and busses were only a matter of time – but he had never seen one before.

In front of the trolley several Korgans were conferring. Then one of them walked to the trolley’s open front door and threw something inside. The Korgans then ran hell bent for leather for cover behind a stand of tree fifty feet away.

“Hold your ears!” Petey had just enough to say when there was a flash, a rush of air and a boom as the trolley exploded.

Dust and gravel and shattered fragments of metal and glass, shreds of plastic, rubber, straps, handles, fixtures, stuffing from the seats, bits of wire, lights, piping – all rained down as the two children sat with their hands over their ears. Papers and fragments from Petey’s backpack and the things inside it scattered in the air, which was suffused with the smell of burnt gasoline and oil.

They sat paralyzed as the noise from the explosion echoed away in the distance.

How will I get home now! Petey thought. His backpack and notebooks and homework and lunchbox, and – gee whillickers! – his new smartphone, his very first one, which sure would have been useful to have right now – were all gone in a blast of smoke and noise that made his ears ring.

After a moment, Sharlotta brushed away a large piece of plastic seating that had fallen lightly on top of her, and whispered to Petey, “If I follow them, they lead me to me family.”

Petey didn’t need to ask who she meant by “them.”

“Aren’t you scared they’ll catch you?”

“Of course I be. But how else I find them?”

The girl raised herself a little.

“Are you going by yourself?” Petey asked.

“Yes. Unless you want come with me.”

“You know, it’s too bad you’re wearing a red jacket,” he said, after a moment, still in a whisper. “They’ll see you a mile away. Like,” he added, shyly, “my hair.” Fortunately, he was wearing a little, dark blue watch cap, as it was still winter in Howtiz; his orange hair peeped through in a narrow halo around the edge.

Sharlotta nodded ruefully.

She couldn’t just take her jacket off. She had only a thin nightie on underneath.

“But if you wear it inside out . . .” Petey said.

The girl’s face brightened. Then she whispered, “Don’t look!” took off the red jacket, turned it inside out, and put it back on. The lining was a blue-green and would blend in with the landscape quite satisfactorily, at least from a distance.

“There!” said Sharlotta. “Now you can look.”

“Who talking up there?” called out a voice from below.

They heard sounds of climbing and took the plastic seat cover Sharlotta had brushed aside and, curling up together into a little ball, covered themselves up.

A pair of muddy boots moved through the grass toward Petey, stopping a few inches from his nose.

There was silence except for the sound of the wind and the shrieks of flying animals in the trees.

“Strong smell of Paona!” The voice came from behind Petey’s head; it took a deep breath. “Some find it repulsive, but I find it likes me. I smell it can here.”

Petey felt something touch the seat covering himself and Sharlotta. It felt as if one of the Korgans had raised his foot and was resting it casually on the seat.

“Humph. No doubt explosion scaring them off.”

The voice above the boots spoke. “I need interrogate the leader Laghdin dragged in last night. I have word he knows more than he has a right to. Laghdin found paper before they burned house that tells he may have it. Or part of.”

“Hm! That be a lucky find indeed!”

“Or not . . . ”

 “It mean quick end to war,” the other said, almost ruefully.

“Or not! We keep it to ourselves till we have more fun with Paonas. Why spoil the game when our boys just start to enjoy themselves?”

“Ah, now you thinking like true Korgan!” said the other.

And the two laughed and ambled away down the embankment.

“He be talking about me deddy!” whispered the girl.

Petey met Sharlotta’s eyes in the shadow of the cover.

“Well,” said the boy, “I guess we’ll have to follow them now.”

He saw in the shadows a complicated look on the girl’s face: a knotting together of fear and sorrow and determination and gratefulness.

They quietly pushed the plastic off and peeped above the grass. A half-dozen Korgans were walking down alongside the trolley tracks, their strange weapons cocked over their shoulders. Petey and Sharlotta followed at a distance, through the trees above the tracks.

“One thing I don’t get,” said Petey quietly. “You said your family joined the Paonas, but the Korgans said your father is a ‘big shot.’”

“We not Paona,” said Sharlotta, “we be Creel, related to Paona going back many a generation. Me deddy become a Paona leader after we join them in the war, so they consider him Paona too. They consider anyone who join the Paona Paona. It just one more way they be coarse and stupid.”

“And the Paonas don’t do that?”

“No, of course not. They not lump everybody together the way Korgan do. Everyone be different, be treated differently. Anyway, that what Paona believe. And we Creel believe that too. But we should not talk. The wind blowing from us to them. They might hear.”

The two children followed the Korgans until the latter walked past the tracks, down a twisting stream, then turned out of the woods to the edge of a wide plain. Petey gasped a little at what  he saw: an immense encampment going for miles and made up almost entirely of tentlike structures, spread across the landscape like a living quilt, swarming with thousands of living beings – “Korgans,” said Sharlotta to Petey’s unasked question.

Pocked with open spaces, parade grounds and sturdier constructions of wood and even stone, and divided up by a network of roads and pathways, and surrounded by a belt of fencing punctuated with bannered towers, it was the main camp, as Sharlotta explained to Petey, of the invading Korgans. Far in the distance, a range of mountains crowned with snow seemed to float above the horizon in the image of a sleeping woman, and a blue moon hung in the eastern sky.

“That,” said Sharlotta, gesturing toward the mountains, “be land of Korgans. From there they come to conquer us, to seize Spell, and conquer world.”

The Ghost Trolley

By Christopher Bernard

Chapter 1. A Town and a Boy

The town was called Halloway. More than a century ago it was a fishing village, and the fishermen went out each morning for cod and menhaden and lobsters and the streets were full of shrieking children and the sour smells of the harbor. There were mysteries about its past: rumors about an eccentric old woman being burned alive in the town during the Salem witch trials. Another rumor had it that, a generation later, after he was killed in an ambush by the Puritans, the head of a rebellious Indian chieftain was stuck on a pole outside the town’s palisade and left there as a warning for any other ambitious young natives.

A pleasanter rumor was that Halloway had been the last stop on the underground railroad for slaves trying to escape to Canada before the Civil War. But like the other rumors, there was no certain evidence to prove it one way or the other.

Then the fishing failed and the town fell on hard times. Many businesses closed, much of the younger generation moved out, and the town gradually shrank into itself, like an old man. Over several decades the small harbor silted up.

Then the war struck. Even this remote place was traumatized with the country at large for four long years, tragic telegrams coming even to this small community, until, like a gigantic Roman candle, the war burned out. Once it was over, young couples living in the big cities were eager to forget the war’s privations, and, like many another quaint seaside place, the town was discovered and for a time became a fashionable resort for the summer, with a trolley service and new streets planned and sewer lines and new telephone posts riding out far into the surrounding countryside like threads from an enterprising spider’s web.

But those times were ever a roller-coaster ride: the state was hit by another economic slump, the summer trade petered out, and the town was once again forgotten; two motels shut down, unfinished houses crumbled away with no one to occupy them, and to top it off, the local pastor murdered his wife and ran away with the church funds. The new roads ended in the middle of the surrounding woods, and the sewer lines stayed empty and waterless, hollow and echoey to the young local boys who stuck in their heads to explore their mysterious, fusty darkness.

It had finally been almost forgotten when elderly New Englanders discovered the little forgotten town near the sea, filled with untouched architecture going back half a dozen generations: a sweet little place, they thought, to retire to (the darker historical rumors were effectively suppressed by the local chamber of commerce). One of the retirees, a mailman from Burlington, Vermont, posted on the internet photographs of the town in its autumn splendor, though locals knew the deepest beauty in the region always came in the depths of winter, when the sun was disappearing like molten bronze through the stark, leafless woodlands.

A computer worker in far away California saw the photographs and promised himself to visit the lovely town next time he was back east. And when he did, he found himself not only in a pocket of natural loveliness, but also in an oasis in time, where people kept up old “analog” traditions on the verge of vanishing from the rest of the twenty-first century—scrimshaw, sampler weaving, knitting bees, building matchstick sailboats inside old whisky bottles, writing the entire U.S. Constitution on a kernel of dry yellow corn . . .

And, since he could work offsite wherever he wanted to, he decided to stay. And started posting his own pictures.

            His friends in high tech soon learned how happy he seemed to be, and how perfect the peace and quiet, far away from the rat race of commuting, bad traffic and punishingly high housing costs where they were trying, with mixed success, to make a living. And, naturally, they grew envious . . . So, over the next few years, late into the night, the dark streets became increasingly lit by prim New England house windows behind which diligent techies worked, coding, testing, recoding, retesting, sending ghostly communications all over the world from this place which could be anywhere and so, in a sense, was nowhere. 

Halloway had an Episcopal church with a white spire pointing heavenward and a small library with statues of John and Abigail Adams out front. Regularly you could hear, in the distance, the clang-clang of one of the trolleys from the service built long ago during the resort’s glory days. 

Hickories, oaks, sycamores lined the streets, and deer were often found standing in the early morning on the front lawns, sniffing the dawn air as if listening to a far off call.

One day a young computer game programmer and his wife (who sold fashions on the internet and had a passion for Russian writers) moved to the curious old New England town.

As techies, neither was tethered to an office, so they had taken a deep breath and decided to move away from the “tent city of billionaires” (as the young woman called San Francisco, where they had been sharing an apartment with six other techies for an egregiously high rent—and where “never in the next millennium” would they ever be able to buy a home). But where to go? Then they had seen the idyllic little New England town and its many pictures on Instagram.

It offered an ideal combination of rustic seclusion and the stimulation and conveniences of the digital age—Netflix, Amazon, Skype chats! They would be able to live and work there comfortably while paying off their astronomical student loans. And it appealed to the earnest romantics in them.

A year after they moved to Halloway, they had a child. They named him Peter Myshkin Stephenson, after the hero of a famous Russian novel. 

He was a curious little boy—in both senses of the term (as his great Aunt Marguerite noted on one of her visits from the city a hundred miles to the south): an “odd creecher,” full of wonder at this peculiar planet he had fallen to as if from outer space, full of doubt at people’s glib responses to his questions about why things were done the curious way they were in this world, full of objections to many things that seemed to strike many people as reasonable but struck him as ridiculous, and full of what he considered stupendously great ideas, a number of which, rather notoriously, backfired, such as his invention of a self-administering bathtub for their cat Max, or the self-propelling slingshot that turned rather too quickly into a boomerang and almost knocked the inventor’s eye out, or his revenge on Chace Fusillade, the son of their wealthy neighbor, for Chace’s burning of Petey’s homework assignment about Paul Revere, which paradoxically made Chace one of Petey’s best friends but made their parents enemies for life.

“Is Peter a complete idiot?  The boy is impossible!” his mother lamented to his father, adding accusingly, “And where did he get that orange hair? We’re all blond in our family!”

The father—a quick, irritable man with a beard as thick as a hedgerow, and who looked older than his years and often acted younger—would roll his eyes and twist his mouth and say nothing, or smirk to himself, which made his witty, willowy wife hopping mad when she caught him. (His attitude was, what was the point in even trying to answer questions like that? There was no conceivable app!)

But the mother could never leave unanswerable questions alone. And soon they would be in the middle of one of their rows, which were becoming harsher over the years, as they blamed each other for their unhappiness in the old town far from the world they had tried to escape but had brought with them like an invisible monkey on their back: they had expected too much from Halloway, and Halloway, through perhaps no fault of its own, had let them down.

The Stephensons, it seems, still believed in happiness, and they blamed each other for not finding it.

Petey, alone in his room, exploring something in his home-made lab—the wing of a late summer moth, a crystal of purple mineral he had found in the garden, the mysterious result of mixing unknown chemicals in his little glass retort—would overhear these exchanges, which would build in intensity until the whole house seemed to shake with their fury – even when that fury was silent – and then, feeling frightened and ashamed, the young boy would sneak to a distant corner of the house where he didn’t have to know what was happening.

This place was often the bathroom, and he would look at himself, with alarm and scorn, in the mirror. What he saw was a moonlike, pudgy face, with two questioning eyebrows above blinky eyes and a pug nose covered with freckles and a small chin and two large, shapeless ears.

Was he stupid? Was he ugly?

The mirror stared back at him silently. “Well, what do you think?” it seemed to ask.

So: was it maybe true that it was entirely his fault that his parents were fighting like two mad dogs?

Maybe he really was an idiot. They valued above all things cleverness, good grades, cunning. His father made a big deal about outsmarting his rivals in the company, and both parents loved to play verbal one-upmanship games, sparring over dinner until his father, who was always a little behind his mother in the quick, blunt verbal rejoinders department, grew red in the face.

Petey’s grades in school were not bad. But then everybody’s grades were not bad. Even a true, genuine dope (everybody agreed on this one) like Charley Dunkin didn’t get really bad grades—just not bad enough.

On the other hand, if Petey truly were an idiot, how would he possibly even know it? This was a conundrum that gave him much food for thought, until his brain ached.

And then there was the other question: why was his face so round? Neither his mother nor his father had a round face. Even his grandparents had high cheekbones and long faces, like horses.

And where had his orange hair come from? He used to be quite proud of it, it was unique, no one else he knew had orange hair—but now he hated it.

And he hated himself. The mirror didn’t lie: he was fat, and he was ugly, and he was stupid . . .

He had been a mistake. He was sure of it. (The other day he had overheard Kelly in homeroom whispering to Melissa that Gretchen had been a mistake. No wonder nobody liked Gretchen, Kelly had whispered! Even her parents had never wanted her!)

The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became. It explained everything. Why had he been born so soon after they arrived in Halloway?  Had they perhaps moved here so they could hide him from their families, so they would never even know he existed? He had never even seen his grandparents, except on Skype, and he sometimes darkly suspected they were in fact CGI . . .

He grew quieter around the house, and started saving his pestering questions for his teachers at school, and his reveries for the privacy of his room at the end of the corridor off the dining room, where he had a bed and a desk and a bookcase and his stuffed toys (Andy, Lionel, Monkey, and Lucile) and his telescope and chemistry set and his laptop and his charger, and a window that overlooked the backyard with the swing set and a great casement of sky speckled and sandy with stars on a cloudless winter night for as far as the eye could see (like last night, after the snow stopped and the moon rose like a face brooding over a stark, white world), and a door he could shut, turning his room into a place where he could dream up entire universes, inventing any possibility, worlds on worlds upon worlds, far from all perplexities and shame . . .

Chapter 2. To Otherwise

The trolley turned the corner, clanking through the freezing predawn, and, with its single headlight blinding bright, glaring like the head in the raised hand of the headless horseman, directed straight out of the fog toward Petey where he had been waiting, alone and half-frozen, under the old flickering streetlight.

It was a brand new trolley he had never seen before, shiny as if it had just been washed, which was of course impossible in this cold, or it would have been covered with a film of ice, and with a new route number and destination Petey had never seen before displayed above the windshield.

The bell clanged twice. The trolley squealed and groaned on the rails gleaming with ice and snow melt. There was no other traffic on the street and the night was pitch dark just before dawn.

The new trolley was painted bright yellow, and the new route number and destination appeared above the windshield in glowing capitals: “2 OTHERWISE.”

Petey had never heard of any place with the weird name of “Otherwise” – huh! It must be out near the ocean, or far in the other direction, where the old unfinished roads died out and the woods began. Someday, he would go to the end of the line and find out. But there was no time to do anything like exploring right now.

He hugged himself, his breath steaming in a shapeless white cloud in front of his face, and frowned ruefully. He has been waiting here for almost half an hour. Why was it so late? He mustn’t be late for school – not today!

The front, like that of most of the trolleys, looked very much like a face that was trying to hide a joke and doing a poor job of it.

Petey jumped in and clambered up the steps as soon as the trolley stopped. He asked the driver, who he could barely see where he sat in the dark cabin, whether this trolley went past his school.

“Yes, young man,” said the driver’s voice. “It does.”

Not entirely convinced, Petey slipped a school token into the coin box, trudged to a seat near the back and sat himself down.

There was no one on the trolley he knew, so he sat by himself and stared glumly out the window.

He had been late too often recently, so much that he’d been threatened with suspension if it ever happened again.

It was unfair; it wasn’t as though he was lazy. He’d had good reasons for being late. Once it had been because his mother had overslept after a particularly nasty late night quarrel with his father. Another time it had been because he’d had to make his own breakfast and prepare his own lunch. And the last time it had been because the cat had run away after the failed bathing invention and he’d gone looking for it. They never did find Max. He never came home again.

Now school was threatening him with suspension. He’d been suspended once, for breaking the principal’s window with a paintball gun while playing with Chace Fusillade. It had been an accident, he hadn’t meant it. But his father had beaten his bottom with a broken surge protector when he got home that night, shouting at him to “apologize! Apologize! Otherwise I’ll . . . !” And maybe for that very reason, he had clammed up.

When he was grown up, he sometimes thought, he would run away. Then they’d see. . . .

He listened to the trolley as it moved over the rails, seeming to say, in endless repetition, “Apo-lo-gize, apo-lo-gize, apo-lo-gize, oth-er-wise . . . ” and stared sleepily up at the winter sky.

It was a blue so dark it was almost black above the snowy ground, with the stars going out one after another like distant candles in a huge cathedral (he had been inside a cathedral once, in New York City), and there was a pasty pallor just above the horizon where the sun would soon be rising, and he felt his eyelids grow heavier and heavier as the trolley clanked in a lulling rhythm on the tracks. The sky just before dawn always seemed to be beckoning . . . “Must-not-be-late-for-school, must-not-be-late-for-school,” the tracks seemed now to be saying, over and over, “must-not-be-. . .” He felt his eyes becoming heavier and heavier. Whatever he did . . . he must not . . . miss . . . his school . . . stop. . . . 

Soon he was fast asleep.

“Otherwise!” the trolley driver suddenly called out. “Last stop!”

Petey started awake—Oh no!—and rushed to the open door.

He halted.

If he got out now, how long would it take him to get the next trolley back?

On the other hand, if he just stayed on this trolley, it would have to go back eventually – wouldn’t it?

He looked around him. There was nobody in the trolley car but himself and the driver.

Suddenly the door closed.

Overcome with despair, the boy returned and plopped back down in his seat and stared into the blackness outside, imagining the principal’s face twisted in wrath as she suspended him and the reaction of his angry and “disappointed” (that awful word saved for only the most unforgivable humiliations) parents.

After a small torturous eternity that was in fact only ten minutes as the driver took his break, the trolley jolted awake and started moving again.

But something strange happened: instead of turning around, it continued going straight ahead.

The boy felt a little spike of panic, craning his neck toward the driver, though all he could see was the tall back of the seat inside the little cabin, and a jacket swinging from side to side on a hook near the front door. Then he turned back to the window and the darkness outside. He would never make it to school on time.

Then something happened to him. Oddly, now that there was nothing whatever he could do about being late for school (the sound of the trolley’s wheels on the track seemed to say, over and over again, “nothing you can do about it, nothing you can do about it”), the despair collapsed over him like a great wave and almost immediately washed away, leaving behind it the strangest tingling feeling – a curious combination of helplessness and a feeling of resignation, a sense of irresponsibility, and a peculiar feeling that he recognized, after a moment, was—yes!—relief.

He even felt a little thrill.

What would happen next?

Where were they going?

What would he find there, in this place with the strange name “Otherwise”?

And the yellow trolley carried him ahead into the darkness.

 

 Late Flowers
 By Christopher Bernard

 Only now have they started to fade.
 They had just begun to open
 the afternoon I bought them
 right before your birthday:
 white lilies, red carnations,
 clematis that clings to the eaves,
 small pink roses,
 little daisies,
 against a deep green backdrop 
 of shadowy ferns and leaves.
  
 Over the days that followed
 they blossomed like a flourish
 from a garden on your little table
 in your lovely room
 bright and warm and gentle,
 the windows opening to the bay
 and the northern reach of sunlight
 gathering the day.
 
 They opened like young loving,
 they opened like the spring,
 they opened like your smile
 at the sweetness of all beauty:
 a simple and artless bouquet.
  
 Only now do they begin
 to fade. Who could have known
 they opened only for one
 who would no longer see them,
 in a room where you, in sleep,
 the afternoon that followed
 the day that you were born
 (or so it seems, to the living),
 fading long before the flowers,
 were gone even as they flowered
 beautiful as the day?
  
 For K.
   

Christopher Bernard’s latest book of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, has received a stellar review from Kirkus and will be included as a May feature (Best Indie Books of the Month).

The Socialist’s Garden of Verses
 
By Christopher Bernard
 
is not of poems made
alone. In man and woman
are hearts of earth and water
where roots of roses tangle
with carrot, yam, potato,
the veins of peach and apple
and the red sweet plump tomato,
the fruits of earth from which all
humanity is made:
faith and hope and charity,
and love of truth and kindness,
belief in good and beauty:
these are the pleasing verses
from which is made the garden
of hope you will engender
after you have closed
this book and put it away.
 
The dragonfly awaits you,
the beetle, ant, and butterfly,
the sun is high over the garden,
the fragrant grasses call to you.
Our work is just beginning,
the earth and sky are waiting.
Take my singing with you
out into the day.
 
_____
Christopher Bernard is founder and co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).
“The Socialist’s Garden of Verses” comes from the collection of the same name, which will be published in December 2020 through Regent Press. 

My Children

By Christopher Bernard

I have given my children the kindest gift I could possibly have found for them: the warm security of nonexistence. They will never suffer from disappointment, discouragement, frustration, from failed hope and betrayed love, from the brutality of humanity and the indifference of nature, from the cruel gods of reality. And they will never do evil in their turn—and now we know, without the faintest doubt, that the human species is the most evil of all species—indeed, it is the species through which evil came into the world.

My children, however, will never do the evil they would have been unable to resist had they lived. They will never lie or cheat, steal or offend, wound or kill. The world will not be destroyed from the satisfying of their appetites. No animal will be killed to satisfy one of their whims. No human being’s life will destroyed to satisfy their desire for revenge. They will not leave behind them a path of waste and destruction. They will not grow old or bitter. They will not see the destruction of much they have admired and loved. They will not see their friends and family die, and yet have to live on. They will not live fearing poverty, shame, failure, being found out. They will not fear old age, senility, death. They will not die.

I see their eyes glimmer in the shadows. Are they glimmering from tears? I cannot tell, and they are silent. Perhaps they are tears of sorrow, perhaps they are tears of gratefulness. Or perhaps they are my tears, as I reach my hand out toward them, half regretting my life’s single virtuous deed. But then, parents can be unforgivably selfish.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s next book, a collection of poems called The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will be published in the fall of 2020.

Inside the Locket Is the Face That Loves You

By Christopher Bernard

They started appearing here and there in the city

a few years ago.

Now there are many more.

Like ghosts made of candles in glass

and posies of daisies, peonies, poppies,

the height of a child’s knee.

Some cover half a sidewalk

like scattered baskets of roses

and flicker and stare with a dozen flames in the night,

but most are small, no wider than a bended knee.

Sometimes they include a photo, a drawing,

of the person who died there—

a young black man, an old black woman—

or only a scrawled name.

“We miss you, Darryl!”

“Jimmy: Luv U 4 Eva!”

You can almost hear Jimmy laugh

reading that,

or see Darryl’s cool eyes.

I stop at a woman’s:

among the few flowers and three lit candles

there is a small lace handkerchief,

kept from being blown away

by a heart-shaped locket on a thin chain.

Pedestrians in masks hurry uneasily by.

The traffic passes without incident.

A shred of cloud disperses into thin air.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s latest book of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will appear in the fall of 2020.

 
 The Hammer and the Dance 
  
 The hammer and the dance
 in this atlas of the world,
 in the season of pandemic,
 like two stanchions on a court;
 between, a tightening line
 like the imaginary line
 on the cartographer’s expedient chart,
 on one side, the dutiful girls,
 on the other, boys in masks;
 around them hung a wall of distance
 that surrounds them like a fort;
 at their feet, forgotten tasks.
  
 And the hammer beats the time
 for the young ones as they dance.
  
 What of the future? What of the past?
 What of the present? You may well ask.
 There was something to be done
 now forever left undone.
 Where there once appeared a mask,
 now a flawed map hides its face
 in a hand scarred by this place;
 now there is a face of ash.
  
 And the hammer beats the time
 for the young ones as they dance.
  
 Deep inside the twisting globe
 opens up a burning robe.
 And tonight the silence hurls
 into darkness its moot sign
 like a banner never furled,
 like the alchemist’s alembic
 charred with his defeated gold,
 like the future’s gathering dark
 and the iron in the heart.
  
 And the hammer beats the time
 for the young ones as they dance.
  
 Spiritus
  
 When you see it, you will know.
 The shaky camera, the kneeling
 men in midnight blue:
 they look at first as though
 they are praying, pious
 as three altar boys,
 caught in an innocuous crime, perhaps
 stealing holy wafers or consecrated wine.
 But they are not.
  
 The shaking camera stops,
 and you hold in your breath,
 like clutching at a hand,
 not quite believing that you see
 what it is you think you see.
  
 Underneath their knees,
 in the brutal sun,
 a dark form. And a voice from the feed:
 "I can't breathe, I can't
 breathe! I can't breathe! I
 can't breathe!" For four minutes and
 forty-six seconds,
 as the altar boys pray
 in the shouting glare.
 Then it stops. The video
 stops. The voice stops. The praying 
 stops. The breathing 
 stops  And you breathe, 
 too late. But you seethe, you seethe.
  
 _____
  
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new collection of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will appear in the fall of 2020.
   

Two Poems

by Christopher Bernard

 Urbi et orbi
 
Myself, I prefer a city with no one in it,
or, if not exactly no one, only a few.
 
It’s like being in an enormous sculpture garden,
immense minimalist slabs
of glass and concrete throwing shadows
dark as poetry across streets grown modest
with stillness and opening trustingly as a child’s hand.
The few people there look less grotesque
when teased out of the crowd –
the way a solitary farmer turning his field,
a pair of friends or lovers, a daydreaming
hiker, seen in a summer countryscape
between bays of woods and folds
of pastureland and field, under
an ingenuously immense sky
make the dignity of humankind,
its vulnerable nobility,
palpable, and not the poorly spun joke
it seems so often
in a city hysterical, delirious, and crammed.
 
No: our monuments, our things,
the traces of care in the woodwork,
the shadow of a mind molded from a sun –
tools and toys and trinkets, engines and edifices,
the shape of a hand on a prehistoric cave wall,
a flute played shyly on a Sunday morning –
make me less ashamed of being human.
 
I wander the empty city like a hunter
in a wilderness, except that I have found
the object of my hunt, and hold it close
inside my coat, where I can feel its heart
beating, and its warmth, and its wings.


*****
 
The Coyotes of North Beach
 
Sunset, spring: a strange wailing
rises from the gorge under our house
cautiously balanced on a cliff edge
as on a knife
above a valley where coyotes are gathering.
Strange indeed for a city
(our neighborhood, part declivity, part escarpment,
is strange enough for any city).
But maybe not strange for a city
largely emptied from a malady
emptying much of the world –
and giving meaning to the "pan" 
in panache, panama, pancake, panjandrum,
Panglossion, Pandragon, pandemic –
and so giving way to wilderness
seeping back into the streets,
crows appraising the roof tops,
mountain sheep strolling about in Wales,
curious spiders measuring bus shelters
with their delicate silks,
coyotes gathering at cross streets
and dancing in the glimmering streetlights
as they flicker on in the dusk
and making their coyote-like noisings,
as sweet as they are uncanny,
in the city's deepening twilight.
 
Why are they wailing so?
Is it from fear, or loneliness, or need for love?
 
How did the coyotes know
that they are speaking for us? 

*

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.