The Glitter Cannon

In Finn's defense: the cannon works.

It works tremendously. Rolled to the meadow's edge at midnight on a borrowed wheelbarrow, aimed at the heart of the grey patch, and fired with a lanyard, a war cry, and every ounce of the Brigade's remaining glitter budget, it delivers what Finn's design notebook calls Payload: Joy (approx. 40 lbs) across an area his notebook does not call the entire eastern half of town, but should.

The grey does not care. Glitter, it turns out, is exactly the kind of brightness the grey drinks for breakfast: made at nobody, meant for nothing, sparkling with all its might on behalf of no one at all. The patch glitters grey by morning, which is somehow worse.

Everything else cares a great deal. Glitter is discovered: on the church roof, in the school's rain gutters, throughout Mrs. Patel's reseeded marigolds, on every car on Elm Street, and — with special intensity — on Finn, who greets the assembled and extremely awake neighborhood at one a.m. looking like a small astonished disco ball. The Brigade is grounded for a week, collectively, by a coalition of parents; the wheelbarrow is impounded; and Maple Hollow will be finding glitter in flowerbeds for eleven years.

“Adjustments are needed,” Finn concedes, sparkling, as you're both marched home. Perhaps the plan you already had — the one about giving — deserved a steadier hand on the lanyard.