CHAPTER ONE

  The Miracle

  I

  On a dreary autumn afternoon, a young woman named Ezmeralda Totkins was chopping a carrot at her kitchen table when a whoop from outside caused her to glance up and witness, through the steam-rimmed windowpane, a miracle. Her son, Wilburn, was flying.

  It had been a pretty ordinary day up to that point: cloudy, a bit damp—perfect soup weather, she’d thought. And soup seemed a prudent option since Gramma Fark would be visiting for supper and the older woman never missed a chance to critique Ez’s cooking—nor indeed, any aspect of her homemaking, nor even Ez’s character in general. Nothing brought Gramma to life more than spotlighting her not-daughter-in-law’s every insufficiency. Ez wished she could forgive her for it. The unfortunate fact of the matter, though, was that Gramma’s cooking was the stuff of legend, whereas Ez’s... well...

  But this time Ez was determined not to give Gramma an excuse to feel superior. So soup: because regardless of the weather, soup was difficult to ruin, and nigh on impossible to burn. So Ez had filled her cauldron from the rain barrel and hung it on the pot crane and swiveled it over the fire. Then she’d sent Wilburn outside to dig potatoes in the garden while she buckled down to chopping. And now...

  Her son was turning cartwheels in midair.

  The knife slid from Ez’s fingers with a clatter. She sat frozen, her brain seeming to have jammed. It was just... happening. Her mind tried to reject what her eyes stubbornly refused to quit seeing.

  Ez slapped herself hard across the face. It hurt—enough to blur the miracle with tears, but not erase it. But this couldn’t be real life. It was a dream. It had to be. Ez drew back her hand and slapped herself again as hard as she could, knocking herself out of her chair.

  There was no denying that pain. Even Ez’s palm stung from the blow. Cursing, she dragged herself upright in time to see Wilburn pause, some thirty feet above the garden. For a moment, the boy hung motionless, a small, dark figure in the ashen sky. The way he cocked his head told Ez he’d just had an idea. Suddenly, Wilburn clamped his arms to his sides and shot straight upward like an arrow, vanishing beyond the window frame. Ez blinked once at the empty rectangle. Then with a yelp she bolted for the door, hip-checking the table in her haste and sending vegetables cascading to the floor. She dashed outside without putting her boots on, jumped the garden fence and sprinted to the spot beneath which Wilburn had ascended.

  He was gone. Ez stood there in the cold mud gazing up into the clouds for what felt like a quarter of an hour. It hadn’t happened, she decided at last. What she’d seen out the window had been a large bird, that was all. A very large, perfectly ordinary bird, and somehow, a trick of the light... Perhaps she needed to start getting more rest. As for Wilburn, he had probably wandered off to look for toads down by the creek. Yes, that would be it. The silly boy—Didn’t he know it was too cold out for amphibians?

  The shovel and the gunnysack lay next to the potato patch where Wilburn had abandoned them. When he got back, Ez would have to pretend to be cross with him. Where are my spuds? she’d ask in her stern voice. Oops, he would say, I kind of forgot. Then she would write out a few math problems on the slate board and give Wilburn the chalk, and he would take it as if it were a whip with which to flog himself.

  Ez smiled as she squelched over in her socks to complete the chore her son hadn’t quite gotten around to starting. Wilburn hated math, which was precisely what made it the perfect punishment. After all, the whole point was to teach the boy a lesson; so why not teach two at once? It was a strategy Ez’s own parents had applied to great effect in raising her, and she knew Wilburn would thank her for it one day, just as she’d eventually thanked them. She stooped to grab the shovel.

  “HEY MOM—WATCH THIS!”

  Her neck jerked back. Hundreds of feet above, Wilburn came hurtling out of the clouds head first. He dived so fast that a vortex of mist was sucked into his wake. The sound of his clothing snapping in the wind was like a drumroll. From Ez’s perspective, he went from a distant speck to a full-sized boy in a heartbeat.

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  She reached, instinctively, to catch him: a foolhardy move, for if he had really been falling, she would have been flattened like a shadow at noon. But of course, Wilburn wasn’t falling. He was flying.

  Ez screamed as he pulled out of his dive, inches from smashing into her. For a fraction of a second they came nose to nose, she looking straight up, he straight down, her face contorted in horror, his radiant with joy. Wilburn was soaking wet from flying through the clouds. His cheeks were flushed and his dark hair was plastered flat against his skull with speed—and he was laughing, laughing with the purest, most beautiful delight.

  Then he slingshotted upward, gusting Ez with wind and pelting her with droplets of water. He whipped around in a gigantic loop-the-loop, one, two, three times. It was impossible. It was obscene. The laws of physics... wadded up and tossed over God’s shoulder like a bad sketch.

  Ez fell to her knees in the mud. All her life she’d had a feeling, deep down, that she’d never fully been aware of before, a sense of confidence that although she didn’t and obviously couldn’t know everything, she at least basically grasped the situation—the situation being life... the world... reality. Her every belief depended on that fundamental confidence, which she now noticed for the first time, as it buckled beneath the weight of mounting evidence—and gave. It was like a pane of glass shattering in her mind.

  Ez burst out laughing. It was just too perfect. The punchline to the cosmic joke. She threw back her head and opened her arms in surrender, helplessly laughing to the sky—getting it. Everything she’d thought she’d known was wrong. It was a miracle. It was the funniest prank every ever pulled. She laughed herself hoarse, kneeling in the mud, because—what else was there to do?

  After a while, the effects of her epiphany began to fade, leaving her wracked by a severe case of the hiccups. At least she was able to think normally again. Well, almost normally.

  She clapped for Wilburn as he showed off every stunt that he could think of, zigging, zagging, corkscrewing, somersaulting, stopping on a dime and changing course as effortlessly as Ez could wave her hand. He made it look so easy. And... all bets were off at this point... so... Why not? Ez leapt into the air.

  She landed. Well, it had been worth a try. For half a second she had honestly believed she was about to soar up to join Wilburn in the sky. The longer she watched him, the more she found herself growing accustomed to the spectacle. Once she had gotten over the initial existential shock and satisfied herself that Wilburn was not in any immediate danger, she began to wonder if she might not as well go ahead and dig the potatoes. Unless such things as soup and supper didn’t matter anymore...? She wasn’t sure. But she was getting restless simply standing there, miracle or no, so she picked up the shovel and began to dig.

  Every other second, she glanced up to check on Wilburn, which her neck did not appreciate. Before long, it hurt nastily, as if a bigger and bigger snake was biting her at the base of her skull. But she kept doing it, for the same reason that she didn’t go back to put her boots on: as sole witness to the miracle, Ez felt it was her duty to, well, witness—and she had a funny feeling that if she turned her back for more than a second, something horrible would happen.

  But when she’d dug ten times more potatoes than she needed for the soup and the gunnysack was full to the point of bursting, Ez was forced to consider the possibility that the miracle might last for days or weeks on end—or forever. There was but one way to find out, and in the meantime, they would surely need to eat... wouldn’t they?

  The only thing Ez knew for certain was that she didn’t know anything anymore. But on the other hand, apart from the fact that Wilburn was flying, the world seemed to be behaving itself normally. And, she mused, it would take more than a miracle to alter Gramma Fark’s plans. That settled the matter.

  Ez began to wrestle the sack of spuds across the garden. It was so heavy she could barely pick it up and had to transport it in lurches, hoisting and swinging it a few feet at a time to avoid blowing her back out. The process took her several minutes, during which she barely kept track of her son’s location out of the corner of her eye.

  It wasn’t until she got to the gate and straightened up to catch her breath that she noticed something was amiss. Wilburn was flying sluggishly, as if the air around him had turned thick as syrup. Ez mistook it for another game at first. Wilburn would launch himself upward and slowly coast to a halt, then drift back downward and do it again. She grew concerned, however, as his coordination began to deteriorate. Wilburn had flown a ways beyond the garden, out over the valley that separated the hill on which the cottage sat from the next one. He was too far off for Ez to see his face, but his slumped posture was plainly that of a boy exhausted, yet unwilling to give up his fun. Cupping her hands around her mouth, Ez shouted, “Hey! Come take a break!”

  Wilburn heard, and reluctantly turned back, beginning to descend on a diagonal trajectory. But his head was bobbing woozily, his shoulders sagging; and his limbs were dangling slackly. Fear spiked through Ez as he drew near enough for her to make out his expression: it was the one he always got when she let him stay up past his bedtime. How could the boy feel drowsy with a hundred feet of nothing between him and the ground? Yet that clearly was the case. Wilburn’s descent was growing clumsier by the second.

  Then without warning he plummeted five dozen feet, caught himself with a jolt, and floated, swaying like a drunkard, still much, much too high for comfort. Then he went limp. And just like that, the miracle turned into a catastrophe. A scream that could have drawn blood tore from Ez’s throat as her son dropped out of the sky.