The Boy Who Could Draw Tomorrow (16 page)

The boy likes to think about it sometimes, times when he and his mother are just sitting around being quiet, her knitting or sewing or doing something sort of very gentle like that.

He watches her from where he sits on the floor, his eyes swimming in her light brown hair, and he thinks how it's really a backward miracle how a thing vanishes the second it appears. Oh, not real things—like people and dogs and stuff. And not even fuzzy things—like wanting and hurting and love. But another kind of thing, a thing deeper and truer than anything else.

It's just that there's no word that says exactly what it is. But that doesn't mean it's not there. Or, anyhow, that it really once was.