A small boy walked along a dirt road in a poor neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Old lawnmowers sputtered and bogged in the yards and airplanes droned in the morning sky. The boy walked alone and inhaled the warm smell of cut grass. The breeze carried puffs of heat from the east and the sky appeared happy to be free of the overcast of the rainy season, but the boy didn't expect the summer to continue. He knew the true weather of this place was rain, and so sunlight was like a lie. But he walked and the muddy streets were baked by the sun and they were beginning to take on the new, hard shapes of summer.
         The boy didn't stop to look for bugs in the vacant lots, as he usually did, and soon he was five blocks from home. It was the farthest he’d ever dared to venture alone. He walked with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his stained, hand-me-down trousers. He held his head high and took deep, lung-straining breaths of the summer air. He was stripped to the waist and the sun's warmth felt like a pair of adult hands held close to the skin of his shoulders. He watched a jet airliner chalk a white line across the sky and he chewed a stick of Juicyfruit gum he'd taken from his mother’s purse. He staggered carelessly up the ridges and down into the valleys of the rutted road. He craned his neck up at the airliner and at the fresh blue sky and then he puckered up his seven-year-old lips to practice his new, tuneless whistle, but the chewing gum kept plugging up his works and no sound came out.
         A dog barked. A car backfired. The boy began to sing an old hymn he'd heard during the rainy months. When morning gilds the skies, My heart awaking cries. He wasn't sure what all the words meant, but he liked the heavy feel of them in his mouth. He smelled the fresh-baked smell of hardening mud and he heard the happy, twinkling sound of a cheap transistor radio. He decided to walk all the way to the railroad tracks.
         But as he walked, he wasn't watching where he was going and he fell into a deep pothole. One moment his foot was poised to step to earth, and then he was falling through the air and sucking in his breath at the suddenness of it. He landed hard, and his knees hit rocks, and he felt a sharp pain. He realized, curiously, that he couldn't breathe—that the chewing gum had lodged itself in his throat and he couldn't exhale the air in his lungs or draw another breath.
         Tears came to his eyes and he bore down hard against the blockage in his windpipe. The panic built higher and higher and there seemed to be no end to it. For a long, real time he tried with all his strength to cry out, to tell his mother and father what was happening to him, but no sound escaped his bluing lips. A darkness spread beneath the skin of his face. He heard the wet sloshing of his heart. He curled into a ball. The sunlight beat against his closed eyelids, the color red.
         He was on the verge of surrender, but then he fought against the blockage one last time and the gum moved a tiny fraction of an inch. He found the strength to push again and finally it slipped free and fell from his mouth. He exhaled his stale last-breath and then he gulped in a fresh new one, and then another and another. He coughed until he was certain his throat was clear. He rose to his feet carefully, with a bright adrenaline clarity. His knees bled through the holes in his trousers. His throat burned, his nose was dripping, fat tears streamed from his eyes—but he couldn't help but laugh. He walked and bled, and all the while he laughed in a high, pure voice. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and he could hear the bumblebees chugging and buzzing through the sweet air.
         When he arrived home, he refused to tell his parents what had happened to him. They looked frightened when they saw his torn clothes and bloody knees, and then they were angry and threatening—but he only told them that he’d fallen. He didn't have the words to fully describe what happened, and he didn't think he ever would.
         And then just as suddenly and surely as it had left, the rainy season returned. During the first night, the wind hissed and the monster-trees scratched at his window. The rain pounded hard against the thin roof but the boy resisted the urge to run to the safety of his parents' bed. Instead he rose and put on his Superman pajamas. He opened the curtains and stood at the window and watched until the water rose in the unpaved streets and made the world smooth again.

;

;{text}